Looking to extract itself from the "tyrant's financial system," ISIS announced on Thursday it’s planning to mint its own currency. The Islamist terrorist group says the move, like all good forex transactions, is "purely dedicated to God." The proposed currency will be made up of a series of gold, silver, and copper coins.

While saying you’re going to mint a new currency is not the same as actually doing it, the Financial Times ran the numbers and found a couple of potential stumbling blocks. First, “despite seeking to distance itself from the international economy, the new currency’s underpinnings may make Isis’s economy even more heavily dependent on global fluctuations than most, specifically on precious metal and commodity prices,” according to the FT. “The highest-denominated 5 dinar coin is set to contain 21.25 grams of 21 carat gold, worth about $694, while its lowest-denominated 10 flous coin would contain 10 grams of copper and be worth about 7 cents. The proposed silver dirham coins would range in value from 45 cents to $4.50 at current rates.”

There is no word as of yet from ISIS on the deflationary pressure preemptively being placed on the group’s hypothetical currency by current commodity prices in the jilted “tyrant’s financial system.”

A series of security threats and high-profile blunders have forced the Secret Service to do some serious soul-searching. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security helped out with the latest round of introspection, submitting a review to Congress on how the Secret Service has been performing of late. Technically speaking, the performance review found the Secret Service guilty of “performance, organizational and technical” failures.

But that doesn’t really tell the whole story. After all, an armed intruder—Omar Gonzalez—was able to jump the fence and sprint across the lawn and into the White House in September. Here’s more from the New York Times on the Secret Service’s comedy of errors trying to respond to that particular security breach:

[A]t 7:19 p.m., officers on Pennsylvania Avenue spotted [Gonzalez] climbing over the fence at a point where one of the ornamental spikes was missing... The review found that the Secret Service’s alarm systems and radios failed to function properly, and that many of the responding officers did not see the intruder as he climbed over the fence, delaying their response.. One of the officers followed Mr. Gonzalez into the bushes in front of the North Portico but lost sight of him. The summary said that the officers “were surprised that Gonzalez was able to get through the bushes” because “prior to that evening, the officers believed the bushes” were too thick to pass through...

[T]he review found that Omar Gonzalez, the man charged in the incident, could have been stopped by a Secret Service officer who was stationed on the North Lawn with an attack dog. But the officer did not realize that an intruder had made it over the fence because he was sitting in his van talking on his personal cellphone. The officer did not have his radio earpiece in, and had left the second radio he was supposed to have in his locker. It was only after he saw another officer running toward Mr. Gonzalez that he was alerted to the incident.

First, the good news coming from FIFA’s release of its internal corruption investigation into the World Cup bidding process: FIFA is not in charge of the global Ebola response. The not-so-good news is the global soccer authority remains in charge of the world’s most popular sport.

On Thursday, FIFA released its findings from a corruption investigation, giving a clean bill of health to the winning bids of Russia and Qatar to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. That’s according to FIFA ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, who released a 42-page statement saying the integrity of the winning bids in the competition to play host—which took place four years ago—was sound, and the games would go on as planned. Case closed, Eckert says. Sort of.

“Former United States Attorney Michael Garcia, who spent more than a year investigating allegations of corruption before turning his findings over to Eckert, complained that the final version contained ‘numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts,’ ” Reuters reports. The 42-page summary produced by FIFA was only a fraction of the 430-page report into the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing within the organization. Garcia said he would appeal the closing of the case—that he investigated—and wants the full report to be made public.

Here’s a snapshot of how murky the bidding process is via the New York Times:

One soccer official asked a potential World Cup host for personal favors, such as a job for a relative, and found them readily granted. Other executives were more circumspect, requesting million-dollar investments in their home countries rather than direct payments. Still others simply traded in cold cash.

“Eckert refused to identify any FIFA voters placed under suspicion by Garcia and praised FIFA President Sepp Blatter, while omitting pointed criticisms in the investigation files,” the Associated Press reports. “What wrongdoing had occurred, Eckert said, did not impair the integrity of voting in 2010 by an often-discredited FIFA executive committee.” Here’s more on FIFA’s response to the big allegations facing Russia and Qatar via the AP:

Eckert played down previously reported Qatari payments which raised suspicion: Buying exclusive campaigning rights to an African football meeting in Angola, and a wealthy individual who lured Argentina and Brazil to play a match in Doha. Russia's bid conduct was barely criticized, though Garcia's team had little material to work with. Computers leased for use by Russia staffers were later destroyed, and bid officials said email accounts could not be accessed despite requests to Google.

Seems pretty airtight.

An NPR and Mine Safety and Health News investigation that examined 20 years of federal data found that 2,700 American mining companies collectively owe almost $70 million in delinquent penalties. That’s an average of more than $25,000 each; nine owe more than $1 million. Delinquent mines have injury rates 50 percent higher than nondelinquent mines, NPR found, but are often still allowed to stay open:

Even after major disasters with multiple deaths, the owners of delinquent mines can continue to operate. MSHA [Mine Safety and Health Administration] does not shut them down even if they continue to commit violations, even when there are more injuries.

Even mine owners with considerable resources have delinquent mines. Jim Justice is a billionaire and philanthropist who owns the historic Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. As of March 31, mining companies owned by Justice owed nearly $2 million in delinquent penalties. His delinquent mines have an injury rate more than twice the national rate. Those same mines committed more than 4,000 violations while fines went unpaid. Since NPR contacted Justice, the company has begun paying the fines at a rate of $100,000 a month.

A number of factors—from lack of enforcement resources to legal loopholes to paperwork that can disguise the real operators of mining operations—make it hard to get operators to pay up. NPR looked at 34 cases in which the government brought delinquent mine operators to court or negotiated settlements, but of the settlements and judgements ordered to be paid through that process, only $783,000 out of $5.8 million has actually been collected.

While legislation has been introduced in both the House and the Senate to give MSHA the power to close mines if they fail to pay penalties after six months, such bills have no political traction and are often seen as a threat to the economy. The most egregious company investigated by NPR owes more than $4.3 million in fines and has had 1,498 violations since 2007; some have fines going back decades.

Mining has the third highest rate of fatal occupational injuries of any industry in America, behind "Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting" and "Transportation and Warehousing," according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Rayburn House office building on Capitol Hill was unusually warm and fuzzy on Wednesday. Representatives from the Heritage Foundation and the ACLU happily co-mingled in a panel on reforming the often-onerous mandatory minimum prison sentences that nonviolent drug offenders face. The panel was dubbed “Reaching the Tipping Point: The Future of Bipartisan Sentencing and Prison Reform,” and it was standing room only.

There are two important things you need to know about mandatory minimum drug sentencing reform: First, it has bipartisan and pan-ideological backing. Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who gives Ted Cruz a run for his money in the contest for most conservative senator, and Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democrat’s Majority (soon-to-be Minority) Whip joined forces to introduce a bill that would make modest changes to current federal mandatory minimums. That bill got more than 30 co-sponsors, including Rand Paul, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Ted Cruz. When Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz both think the same bill is a good idea, you might think it would have legs.

That brings us to the second important thing: Even though mandatory minimum sentencing reform has backing from some of the most powerful voices on both sides of the aisle, and even though it gave Congress a chance to have a rare camera-friendly kumbaya moment, and even though most of the Republican party’s 2016 presidential contenders publicly back this kind of reform, it hasn’t gone anywhere.

And its prospects in a Republican-helmed Senate might be even gloomier. That’s because the fate of this legislation would probably be in the hands of Chuck Grassley, who is on deck to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee. If he doesn’t want mandatory minimum sentencing reform to happen, it probably won’t. And Grassley hasn’t been shy about his stance on the issue. Unlike his younger conservative colleagues, Grassley is a big booster of mandatory minimum sentencing laws. (You can read a floor speech he gave praising them here.)

When asked about the possibility of the Judiciary Committee considering legislation like Lee and Durbin’s on Grassley’s watch, the Iowa senator was extremely bearish.

“I’ve raised concerns about people pushing importing heroin into the country, of having their sentence reduced, I think you gotta’ be very careful what sort of a signal you’re sending,” Grassley said before bustling off.

So here’s the central question for opponents of stringent mandatory minimums: Can all the bipartisanship in the world move Chuck Grassley? 

A 75-year-old British businessman imprisoned for a 1986 Miami double murder says he was framed for the crime by Pablo Escobar—and has provided at least some evidence for that outlandish claim in court. A former cartel member testified in Florida this week that the crime for which Krishna Maharaj was convicted—killing a Jamaican-Chinese father-son pair named Derrick and Duane Moo Young—was in fact ordered by Escobar. From the Guardian:

Testifying anonymously for fear of reprisals, the pilot recalled a poolside meeting at Escobar’s Colombian ranch soon after the murders at which the so-called king of cocaine confessed to having Derrick Moo Young and his son Duane “whacked” because they had double-crossed him ...

“He was discussing several people that had stolen from him that he had whacked. He said something about ‘los Chinos’ [the Chinese]. He said one Chino had stolen from him. He said he had killed him across from the hotel that I was staying in. There were several hotels there but the major hotel across from me was the Dupont Plaza.”

Per the Daily Beast, Maharaj claims that he was tricked into visiting Miami's DuPont Plaza Hotel for a nonexistent business meeting so that there would be evidence of his presence at the hotel when the Moo Youngs were killed there. Maharaj, at the time, was running an import-export business and suing the Moo Youngs over transactions involving bananas. Prosecutors said this gave him a motive, while he argues it made him an easy target for a frame-up.

Maharaj is being represented by Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of a London-based human rights group called Reprieve, which also represents several inmates at Guantánamo Bay. Stafford Smith says a number of connections between Escobar and the murders—including the presence at the DuPont Plaza of a man named Jaime Vallejo Mejia who was under investigation for laundering cocaine proceeds—were ignored by corrupt police officers. Prosecutors say Stafford Smith and Maharaj's evidence is unreliable hearsay. Testimony in the hearing finished today, and a judge will now decide whether to overturn Maharaj's sentence, order a new trial, or let his conviction stand.

Turkey's English-language Hürriyet Daily reports that some sixth-grade science and technology textbooks in the country have been revised to replace anatomical diagrams of penises and vaginas in a chapter on reproduction with pictures of mother/baby pairings of humans, polar bears, ducks, and dolphins. The new edition of the textbook also apparently omits apparently risqué words like virginity and breast.

The story comes in the context of a wider culture war being fought over education and intellectual freedom in a country whose conservative religious leaders are steering it away from its secular past. The country's newly elected President and former Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has wide support among observant Muslims, and in September, his government lifted a ban on headscarves in middle and high schools; a ban on headscarves in universities was lifted in 2011. In 2012, the Ministry of Education began to allow high school students to take elective courses on the Quran and the life of the Prophet Mohammed. Erdogan has criticized co-ed university dorms, while a government-imposed dress code bans tattoos, body piercings, makeup, dyed hair, moustaches and beards in schools.

Censorship is on the rise in Turkey in recent years, in schools and elsewhere. Last year a teachers' group pushed to censor John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men for immorality, and in 2012 a TV network was fined $30,000 over an episode of The Simpsons said to insult religious values. This September, legislation was passed tightening government control over the Internet, building on a law from February that makes it easier for authorities to block sites without a court order. On that front—and on the subject of biology—an anti-evolution movement has succeeded in getting prominent atheist Richard Dawkins' web site banned by court order, while than 30 percent of the Turkish population and fewer than half the science and biology teachers surveyed in the capital of Ankara accept the theory of evolution.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) just got the worst job in Washington. OK, maybe not the worst-worst—it’s not like he’s doing public relations for WMATA—but on Thursday morning his fellow Republican Senators voted to put him in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for this coming election cycle, which means he’ll oversee the committee responsible for consolidating and growing the GOP’s Senate majority.

That may not sound terrible, but the 2016 contests have a chance to be to Senate Republicans what the 2014 contests were to Senate Democrats; in other words, carnage and mayhem. That’s because, as Wicker said in a short conversation after winning the gig, there are 24 Republican-held seats up for election that year and just nine seats held by Democrats. So Republicans will be playing a lot of defense. On top of that, presidential electorates are much kinder to Democratic candidates than midterm electorates, as my colleague Jamelle Bouie discussed at length earlier this month.

On top of that, the Republican senators up for re-election in 2016 will have to defend seats they won in the GOP wave election of 2010. That year, under enormously favorable conditions, a number of Republican candidates won seats that could be tough to keep in a more Democrat-friendly climate. A host of blue- and purple-state Republicans—including Sens. Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mark Kirk (Illinois), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), and even Marco Rubio (Florida)—could face tough, expensive reelection slogs.

And now, all of that is Roger Wicker’s problem.

“This was nice,” he said of Senate Republicans’ midterm success, “but we need to prove that we can sustain it.”

The immediate plan: Get as big a head start as possible on fundraising.

“We’re going to start trying to raise money early,” he said. “We’re determined not to be outspent as we were this time. We did a magnificent job this year, and still Thom Tillis was outspent two-to-one. Amazing that he did as well as he did.” 

The New York Times has the scoop on President Obama's long-expected overhaul of immigration enforcement policy and, to paraphrase Vice President Joseph Biden, it sounds like it's going to be a big deal:

Asserting his authority as president to enforce the nation’s laws with discretion, Mr. Obama intends to order changes that will significantly refocus the activities of the government’s 12,000 immigration agents. One key piece of the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away...

Mr. Obama’s actions will also expand opportunities for immigrants who have high-tech skills, shift extra security resources to the nation’s southern border, revamp a controversial immigration enforcement program called Secure Communities, and provide clearer guidance to the agencies that enforce immigration laws about who should be a low priority for deportation, especially those with strong family ties and no serious criminal history.

(Click here for some background on Secure Communities, a deportation program that's been criticized for punishing undocumented immigrants who are gainfully employed and law-abiding.)

As many as 5 million undocumented immigrants could be protected by the moves, though that number is still up in the air as the plan is finalized.

Republicans are expected to denounce Obama's actions as an inappropriate overextension of executive power that rewards unlawfulness. The president plans some political cover on those fronts:

Immigration agents are to instead focus on gang members, narcotics traffickers and potential terrorists.

And:

The White House expects a chorus of outside legal experts to back it up once Mr. Obama makes the plan official.

If Obama's plans are in fact carried out, they will fit in with America's long history of treating immigration in seemingly contradictory fashion—in which the act of crossing the border without official permission is considered illegal, but punishment for the act becomes less severe or even nonexistent the longer an immigrant is able to stay in the country as a contributing member of society. Click here to read an informative piece on the subject in the Boston Review by Columbia University history professor Mae Ngai. "As long as we have had restrictions on immigration," Ngai writes, "we have had provisions for both deportation and legalization." And click here to read about the United States' last major amnesty initiative, spearheaded in 1986 by none other than Ronald Reagan.

Doctors Without Borders says it will begin clinical trials of Ebola drugs next month at three treatment sites in West Africa. The trials will use "experimental drugs that haven't been through the usual lengthy process of study with animals and healthy people," Al-Jazeera says. Each trial will be operated with a different partner and test different remedies:

Oxford's trial will test the antiviral drug brincidofovir in Liberia.

France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research will conduct a trial using the antiviral drug favipiravir in Gueckedou, Guinea, and the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine will test convalescent whole blood and plasma therapy in Guinea.

Results "are expected by February or March."

New York doctor and Ebola patient Craig Spencer was given brincidofovir, as was freelance cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, who was treated in Nebraska; both recovered. Dallas patient Thomas Eric Duncan also received the drug but still succumbed to the disease. A French nurse who was treated with favipiravir recovered successfully.

Read more of Slate’s Ebola coverage.