The drug war in Mexico is taking a terrible toll in Central America. The region now has the highest homicide rate in the world, according to a new UN report, as traffickers move more and more U.S.-bound cocaine through Central America's struggling, weak states. Nick Miroff reports with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

A group of human rights activists in Mexico has asked the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate President Felipe Calderon in connection with the deadly war on drug cartels. The complaint, spearheaded by human rights lawyer Netzai Sandoval, claims war crimes have occurred. The complaint was filed a day after two dozen bodies were found dumped in Guadalajara. NPR's Jason Beaubien has more.

The Congressional supercommittee, charged with coming up with a plan to cut the national deficit, had been invested with handling so many unrelated tasks that its failure last week has left Congress with a sizeable workload in its remaining weeks this year. Among them: possible extensions of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, and a continuation of the entire federal budget. NPR congressional correspondent David Welna joins us to set the stage for December.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the conditions in California's overcrowded prisons violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Court ordered the state to reduce its prison population by a third. Host Audie Cornish hears more from Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman, who says the popular "tough on crime" mantra helps explain why so many American prisons are over-capacity.

Protestors in Egypt's Tahrir Square have called for another massive demonstration in advance of Monday's parliamentary elections, bringing on fears of renewed violence on election day. As turmoil continues, sexual violence and paranoia are on the rise. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from Cairo.

When FBI agents arrive at the scene of a shooting or a terrorist attack, there's often someone else standing in the background. It's a representative from the FBI's Office for Victim Assistance, there to help people suffering in the aftermath of a disaster.

The planning for those unfortunate days starts here, in a windowless conference room in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building, where seven serious-looking people are sitting around a table.

The typical college student today isn't "typical" anymore: Only 1 in 4 lives on campus and studies full time.

But part-timers and commuter students are much less likely to finish — most part-time students are still without a degree or a certificate after eight years. Higher education is desperately looking for strategies that improve those numbers. There might be one in Tennessee.

In this presidential cycle, as in the last, there is no question which Republican candidate has the most ardent supporters: Ron Paul, the 76-year-old Texas congressman whose brand of libertarianism often puts him at odds with all of his rivals. But with less than seven weeks to go for the nation's first primary, there are signs that Paul could surprise people.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is sitting pretty in New Hampshire, where he has been the front-runner all year, so whoever comes in second in the Granite State isn't doing too shabbily.