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5/21/2013
Karl Ritter / AP
PETARE, Venezuela: Stern-looking soldiers clutching assault rifles wave down the beat-up Chevy Caprice entering this sprawling slum on the outskirts of Caracas.
Flashlights in his face, the driver steps out and places his hands on the roof while the soldiers frisk him for drugs and weapons.
He’s clean, and a hand gesture from the commanding officer sends him off into the maze of ramshackle homes that is Petare, one of the most dangerous parts of Venezuela’s notoriously crime-infested capital.
Since Monday, this scene is playing out day and night at dozens of military [...]
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5/20/2013
By Matt Canham / The Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON – Somewhere in the remote wilderness of southern Utah on land controlled by the federal government, members of a Mexican cartel are putting marijuana plants in the earth in hopes of reaping a multi-million dollar harvest this fall.
And it eats at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Sue Thomas.
“They have taken over our public lands. They have no stake in Utah,’ she said. “They are here to use and abuse our public lands for their own profit,’ she said.
These illegal flash farms are a pervasive problem in [...]
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5/20/2013
By Christopher Sherman / AP
MATAMOROS, Mexico – Just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, stands a dormitory-style shelter filled with people recently deported from the U.S. and other migrants waiting to cross the border.
The long rows of bunk beds offer immigrants a place to rest on their long journey. But the shelter is no safe haven in a town controlled by the Gulf cartel. Armed men once showed up and took away 15 men, who were probably put to work as gunmen, lookouts or human mules hauling bales of marijuana into the United States.
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Police Officers Kicks Down Door, No Warrant, No Probable Cause,Tazes Occupant Filming
5/19/2013
This happened in Cotati, California. Watch how the police break down this mans door and taser him nearly to death.
Police State America. What can be done about these actions by the police?
It is clear the man filming was not a threat, yet he is still abused by these officers.
How did America come to be a police state where citizens have no rights?
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But the AP affair pales next to the IRS and Benghazi
5/19/2013
by Jack Kelly / Post Gazette
Though arguably the least significant of three burgeoning scandals that have made this the worst fortnight ever for the presidency of Barack Obama, the Justice Department’s covert seizure of the telephone records of Associated Press reporters may cause him the most grief. Journalists unmoved by evidence his Justice Department ran guns to Mexican drug cartels and promoted vote fraud are very, very upset.
Some Democrats who parroted administration talking points on Benghazi jumped ship after the Internal Revenue Service admitted [...]
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By Tristan Dessert / France 24
In recent years, the ‘Ndrangheta has become the largest and most feared of the four criminal organizations in Italy, alongside the Camorra in the Naples area, Cosa Nostra in Sicily and Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia. Specializing in drug trafficking, the ‘Ndrangheta has globalized in recent years. Our reporter investigates in Calabria, the organization’s heartland.
The ‘Ndrangheta controls the majority of international cocaine traffic, with an estimated 80 percent monopoly on European imports of the white powder. The organisation pulls in 44 billion euros a year; that’s almost three percent of Italy’s [...]
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5/17/2013
The allegations were exposed in several chapters of a television program, ‘Journalism for all’ produced, directed and conducted by a well known Argentine investigative reporter Jorge Lanata.
The Sunday night program which has had record ratings is aired in a channel belonging to the powerful Clarin media group that has been targeted by President Cristina Fernandez for dismembering under a new Media Law. However the Clarin group has managed to contain the attack so far with a raft of delaying injunctions but the Argentine president is pushing through Congress a judiciary reform that could finally speed her [...]
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5/17/2013
By Rory Carroll / The Guardian
The author of a pioneering blog about Mexico’s drug war has said that she has fled the country and that her blog partner has gone missing.
The young woman, using her pseudonym Lucy, said her colleague phoned her last week to say a single word – “run” – and then vanished, prompting her to flee to the United States and then Spain.
“I’m trying to think positively but I’m scared something terrible has happened. ‘Run’ was our codeword for when something was very wrong. We had never used it before.”
Blog [...]
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5/16/2013
By Sibylla Brodzinsky / The Guardian
No matter the time of day or night, morticians stand guard by the gate of the city morgue, waiting for the next body to be released so they can offer their services to grieving families. In the most violent city in the most violent country in the world, they never have to wait for long.
“Satan himself lives here in San Pedro,” says one nervous mortician who asks to be identified only as Lucas. “People here kill people like they’re nothing more than chickens.”
Last year, an average of 20 people [...]
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5/14/2013
By Nick Miroff / Washington Post
MEXICO CITY — The recent changes ordered by new President Enrique Peña Nieto to Mexico’s anti-narcotics partnership with the United States have produced markedly different reactions here and in Washington, underscoring what appear to be diverging perceptions of the drug war’s goals and the costs of fighting it.
Peña Nieto’s decision to limit the ability of American agents to operate in Mexico has been met with dismay by U.S. law enforcement agencies, which left a heavy footprint under the previous administration of Felipe Calderon. They warn that intelligence sharing will suffer [...]
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