Congressional Research Service

Violence is an inherent feature of the trade in illicit drugs, but the violence generated by Mexico's drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in recent years has been unprecedented and remarkably brutal. The tactics-including mass killings, the use of torture and dismemberment, and the phenomena of car bombs-have led some analysts to speculate whether the violence has been transformed into something new, perhaps requiring a different set of policy responses. Most analysts estimate there have been at least 60,000 homicides related to organized crime since 2006. Some analysts see evidence that the number of organized crime-style homicides in Mexico may have reached a plateau in 2012, while other observers maintain there was a decline in the number of killings. It is widely believed that the steep increase in organized crime-related homicides during the six-year administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) is likely to trend down far more slowly than it rose.

The "Great Recession" and the ensuing weak recovery have led the Federal Reserve (Fed) to expand its monetary policy tools. Since December 2008, overnight interest rates have been near zero; at this "zero bound," they cannot be lowered further to stimulate the economy. As a result, the Fed has taken unprecedented policy steps to try to fulfill its statutory mandate of maximum employment and price stability. Congress has oversight responsibilities for ensuring that the Fed's actions are consistent with its mandate. The Fed has made large-scale asset purchases, popularly referred to as "quantitative easing" (QE), that have increased the size of its balance sheet from $0.9 trillion in 2007 to about $4 trillion at the end of 2013. In September 2012, the Fed began a third round of monthly purchases of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), referred to as "quantitative easing three" or QEIII.

The development of unconventional oil and natural gas resources using horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing has created new demand for wastewater disposal wells that inject waste fluids into deep geologic strata. Deep-well injection has long been the environmentally preferred method for managing produced brine and other wastewater associated with oil and gas production. However, an increasing concern in the United States is that injection of these fluids may be responsible for increasing rates of seismic activity. The number of earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater in the central and eastern United States has increased dramatically since about 2009 from an average of approximately 20 per year between 1970 and 2000 to over 100 per year in the period 2010-2013. Some of these earthquakes may be felt at the surface.

"Public housing" is often used as a generic term to refer to all publicly assisted housing, but the term "public housing" actually refers to a specific federal program. Created in 1937, the low-rent public housing program was the first major federal rental housing assistance program. The program initially subsidized the construction, and later the ongoing operation and maintenance, of multifamily rental housing properties for low-income families. While public housing is a federally created and funded program, the properties are owned and managed at the local level by quasi-governmental public housing authorities (PHAs) under contract with the federal government. Given this unique federal-local relationship, the program is governed in part by federal rules and regulations and in part by policies set at the local level.