Argentina will intensify control over price limits on food products after the fastest inflation in two years sparked police strikes and looting.

The government will widen controls to include food producers as well as vendors and monitor prices in real time by tracking bar codes in a pact with companies that will be voluntary, Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich told reporters in Buenos Aires today. The agreement will span more than 180 goods including meat, cooking oil and bread, he said.

The government in June froze the price of 500 goods on supermarket shelves in a bid to rein in the region's second-fastest inflation. Speculation by businessmen, not government spending and money printing, is causing prices to rise, Capitanich said. At least eight people have died this month in looting across the country sparked by police strikes demanding higher wages to cope with the surging cost of living.

"There's a contagious effect on prices - if the price of milk rises, so does the price of a haircut," Capitanich said. "We are going to be rigorous with price controls on basic products. We want to protect consumers' pockets."

Inflation in November quickened to 26.8 percent in November from a year earlier, according to a monthly survey of economists published by opposition lawmakers. That's the fastest pace since lawmakers began distributing the report in May 2011 to protect the identity of the analysts who were fined by the government for reporting data that differed from official figures.

Economists admire Americans for many traits: our profound respect for property rights, our tendency to forgo vacation days, our ingenious methods of mass-producing "food." Another important attribute is our willingness to move, between houses, between states and across the country. Some economists believe our inborn rootlessness makes the country's work force more dynamic and strengthens our economy's growth. Imagine how much worse off the country might be if the 49ers had decided against making the trek to California or the sharecroppers chose to stay in the South.

Economic mobility and geographic mobility have been closely linked for much of American history, so economists find it troubling that migration rates have been in decline lately. The proportion of Americans moving has fallen to new postwar lows in the past few years. According to Census Bureau data from 2013, about 4.8 million Americans moved across state lines in the previous year. That is down from 5.7 million in 2006 and 7.5 million in 1999. All in all, the percentage of Americans moving across state lines has fallen by about half since the 1990s.

The slowdown represents a tectonic shift in our economy and labor market: It has affected a huge swath of Americans across all industries and of all incomes and ages. Even immigrants to the United States are more likely to stay put where they first settle than they were 30 years ago. But economists are divided on why that is and on what it all means - and especially on whether a less-mobile labor force will mean a more sluggish economy.

It wouldn't be a week in America without another slew of children being punished for childish behavior under the regime of zero tolerance which plagues our nation's schools. Here are some of the latest incidents.

In Pennsylvania, a ten-year-old boy was suspended for shooting an imaginary "arrow" at a fellow classmate, using nothing more than his hands and his imagination. Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School, was suspended for a day and threatened with expulsion under the school's weapons policy after playfully using his hands to draw the bowstrings on a pretend "bow" and "shoot" an arrow at a classmate who had held his folder like an imaginary gun and "shot" at Johnny.

Principal John Horton characterized Johnny's transgression as "making a threat" to another student using a "replica or representation of a firearm" through the use of an imaginary bow and arrow.

In Utah, a seven-year-old boy was arrested and berated by police because he ran away from school. The boy showed up at his mother's house late in the afternoon, at which point he explained that he had left the school of his own accord. The mother called the school and explained what happened, at which point the principal decided to call the police, despite knowing the boy was in the protection of his mother. An officer arrived at the house, told the boy to "straighten up," took him outside, handcuffed him, and yelled at him saying, "Is this the life you want?"

In Colorado, a six-year-old boy was suspended and accused of sexual harassment for kissing the hand of a girl in his class whom he had a crush on. Child psychologist Sandy Wurtele commented on the case noting that for first graders like Hunter Yelton things like kissing are a normal part of development, and that the school's reaction sends mixed messages to developing minds. After a good deal of negative publicity, Canon City Schools Superintendent Robin Gooldy decided to alter the offense from "sexual harassment" to "misconduct."

The British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline will no longer pay doctors to promote its products and will stop tying compensation of sales representatives to the number of prescriptions doctors write, its chief executive said Monday, effectively ending two common industry practices that critics have long assailed as troublesome conflicts of interest.

Andrew Witty, Glaxo's chief executive, said the changes are part of an effort to "to try and make sure we stay in step with how the world is changing." The announcement appears to be a first for a major drug company - although others may be considering similar moves - and it comes at a particularly sensitive time for Glaxo. It is the subject of a bribery investigation in China, where authorities contend the company funneled illegal payments to doctors and government officials in an effort to lift drug sales.

Andrew Witty, Glaxo's chief executive, said in a telephone interview Monday that its proposed changes were unrelated to the investigation in China, and were part of a yearslong effort "to try and make sure we stay in step with how the world is changing," he said. "We keep asking ourselves, are there different ways, more effective ways of operating than perhaps the ways we as an industry have been operating over the last 30, 40 years?"

For decades, pharmaceutical companies have paid doctors to speak on their behalf at conferences and other meetings of medical professionals, on the assumption that the doctors are most likely to value the advice of trusted peers.

Crew members in their mid-20's from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan are coming down with all sorts of radiation-related illnesses after being deployed less than 3 years ago to assist with earthquake rescue operations off the coast of Japan in 2011.
It looks as though the on-board desalinization systems that take salt out of seawater to make it drinkable, were taking-in radioactive water from the ocean for the crew to drink, cook with and bath-in, before anyone realized there was a massive radiation spill into the ocean.

Charles Bonner, attorney representing sailors from the USS Ronald Reagan said "the crew members were not only going to the rescue by jumping into the water and rescuing people out of the water, but they were drinking desalinated sea water, bathing in it, until finally the captain of the USS Ronald Reagan alarmed people that they were encountering high levels of radiation."

Bonner says that as a result of this exposure, the 51 sailors have come down with a host of medical problems, "They have testicular cancer, they have thyroid cancers, they have leukemias, they have rectal and gynecological bleeding, a host of problems that they did not have before ... people are going blind, pilots who had perfect eyesight but now have tumors on the brain. And it's only been 3 years since they went in."

Bonner pointed out that these service men and women are young people, ages 21, 22, 23 years old and no one in their family had ever suffered any of these kinds of illnesses before.

At what point did we lose all common sense? Aren't there actual, you know, criminals who we should be spending our resources on?

The stats at the beginning are absolutely jarring. The story that unfolds is sad and wrong. If smoking a cigarette on a street corner can ruin your entire life, we've got problems.

After stringing along Russia, the EU and the Ukrainian people, President Viktor Yanukovich has inked an agreement worth $15 billion in securities and from January 1, can start buying Russian gas for $268 instead of $400 per 100 cubic meters.

The Russian government will essentially buy $15 billion in Ukrainian debt by buying Ukrainian securities using money from Russia's Welfare Fund, President Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday at a meeting with Yanukovich in Moscow.

"For the purpose of supporting the Ukrainian budget the Russian government has made a decision to invest part of the National Welfare Fund, to the tune of $15 billion, in Ukrainian government securities," Putin said.

Russia will invest roughly 17 percent of its $88 billion National Welfare Fund, which, together with Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund is used as a sort of buffer for the country's oil-dependent budget.

Ukraine and Russia need to learn lessons and avoid mistakes in future bilateral cooperation, Yanukovich said.

"We have this need to draw lessons for the future and not to repeat such mistakes," Yanukovich said at the conclusion of the bilateral talks held in Moscow on Tuesday.

Ukraine "is our fully-fledged strategic partner beyond any doubt," Putin said at the meeting, where the two presidents signed 14 separate agreements on space, engineering, defense and trade.

Three men were convicted Tuesday in the gang rape of an American tourist in India.

All Nepali men in their 20s, they were convicted of sexual assault and robbery, police said. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison. Officially, they were sentenced to 20 years each for sexual assault and five years for robbery, but the sentences will run concurrently.

The men will also have to pay about $250 each in fines.
Fighting sexual harassment in India.The incident took place in June in the Indian mountain state of Himachal Pradesh.

The men were accused of raping and robbing the American woman, who had sought a lift from them in their small truck, Vinod Kumar Dhawan, the state's police superintendent, told CNN.

Amazing Johnson, 6, severed the top of her finger when it was accidentally caught in a door at school. Instead of calling 911, school officials only called her parents.

Latesha Coleman, Amazing's mother, received a call from Hughes Road Elementary administrators about her daughter's injury, but tells KRIV Fox 26 they downplayed just how severe the injury was. Coleman was told the "nurse was working with Amazing, that Amazing was fine...She's being loved on by the nurse."

Emergency medical help was not called, even as it became clear that Amazing was missing a piece of her finger.

Swiss banks are quietly warning wealthy U.S. clients with secret accounts to come clean with the tax man in the next two weeks - or risk jail time, according to several letters obtained by POLITICO.

The letters come ahead of a New Year's Eve deadline the U.S. government set for about 300 Swiss banks to take deals protecting them from prosecution. In exchange for confessing and shelling out mountains of Americans' account information, they'll get immunity. It is a new twist to the traditional bank-client relationship.

"The banks have every incentive right now to shove their American clients into compliance in order to reduce the penalties," said tax attorney Jeff Neiman, who prosecuted Swiss banking giant UBS for the U.S. government.

The effort is part of a U.S. crackdown on American tax evaders and the banks that help them, which ramped up when Swiss banking giant UBS admitted as much with a $780 million settlement in 2009. The Justice Department is currently probing 14 major Swiss financial institutions - including Credit Suisse, Julius Baer and the Swiss arm of HSBC - for shielding U.S. tax cheats.