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MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican police have captured a leading drug baron from the border city of Ciudad Juarez, the country's most violent town in a turf war that killed 6,300 people last year. Vicente Carrillo Leyva, a leader of the Juarez cartel, was seized while exercising in a park in an upscale residential district of Mexico City, police said on Thursday. The Juarez cartel is locked in a bitter war with traffickers from the state of Sinaloa for control of smuggling routes into Texas. The fighting forced the government to send 5,000 extra troops into Ciudad Juarez last month.

Barack Obama has sent Sir Winston Churchill packing and pulse rates soaring among anxious British diplomats. A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back. The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure. But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust...

Barack Obama loves Lincoln. It seems not a day goes by that he isn't quoting the Civil War icon or comparing himself to that great man. But it looks like we are finding one great leader that Barack Obama doesn't like so much: Winston Churchill. It appears that President Obama is dissing the Brit's most famous and stalwart leader by quickly returning the most famous bust of the man loaned to this country by the United Kingdom in the aftermath of 9//11. The return of the bust of Churchill flustered the British government because they didn't ask for it to...

Sam Zell’s Empire, Underwater in a Big Way The Worldwide Plaza building in New York, left, was part of Macklowe Properties. Center and right, the Chicago Title and Trust building and the Chicago Mercantile building are part of Tishman Speyer. In 2007, Sam Zell, the billionaire Chicago investor, sold a portfolio of 573 properties he had assembled over three decades, Equity Office Properties Trust, to the Blackstone Group for $39 billion. It was the largest private equity deal in history, but Blackstone did not stop there: it immediately flipped hundreds of the buildings for $27 billion. Today, the wreckage of...

HOUSTON -- As Barack Obama considers the pantheon of larger-than-life presidents who came before him, David Adickes pauses to consider Barack Obama. The Houston sculptor carefully examines the president-elect’s profile: his slightly furrowed brow, the firm mouth pursed somewhere between smile and frown, the expressive eyes. Adickes squints. Something is not quite right. “Looking at him, I see that his ears have to go back about a quarter of an inch,” Adickes says, then reaches to gently tweak the features on a life-size model of the president-elect’s head. The bust is the first step in plans for a replica of...

In 1847, a Dr Hyde Clark wrote a paper entitled Physical Economy - a Preliminary Inquiry into the Physical Laws Governing the Periods of Famines and Panics. His paper was published in the Railway Register. It opens with the comment: “We have just gone through a time of busy industry and are come upon sorrow and ill-fortune; but the same things have befallen us often within the knowledge of those now living...a period of bustle, or of gambling, cut short in a trice and turned into a period of suffering and loss, is a phenomenon so often recorded, that what...

Cedric Benson's time with the Chicago Bears is up.The troubled running back, whose relationship with the team soured further because of his second arrest in little more than a month Saturday, was waived by the team on Monday, sources told ESPN.com's John Clayton. Before his release, Benson made one last ditch effort to repair the situation, issuing an apology on Monday afternoon."I apologize for making the poor decision to drink and drive during the early morning of Saturday, June 7th," he said in a statement. "Given the incident last month, it was a particularly bad decision. I have no excuse...

PARIS - Divers trained in archaeology discovered a marble bust of an aging Caesar in the Rhone River that France's Culture Ministry said Tuesday could be the oldest known. The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 B.C. Divers uncovered the Caesar bust and a collection of other finds in the Rhone near the town of Arles — founded by Caesar. Among other items in the treasure trove of ancient objects is a 5.9 foot marble statue of Neptune, dated to the first decade of the third century after...

Almost everyone's breasts look good in Hollywood. From Anne Hathaway and Victoria Beckham to Catherine Zeta-Jones, it doesn't matter if you're 20 or 50; when you get on that red carpet in your designer dress, you've got to get it right. C02 TREATMENTSSaid to be the biggest breakthrough since Botox, carboxy therapy can eradicate wrinkles and stretch marks on your de colletage and take years off your skin. It has recently been made available in Britain by Parisian doctor Jules-Jacques Nabet, who says: "Nothing else works like it for loose skin and stretch marks. It means there is no need...

This week opponents of the war were given a treat. They were told-in a single article-based on a single anonymous source-that a report which hadn’t been released said there was never any ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the al-Qaida network of terrorist groups. Millions of the war’s opponents were instantly elated with glee at the idea that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the war against the al-Qaida terrorist network; that the invasion was completely disconnected from any threat to the United States. Disregarding the misplaced glee for a moment, let’s face some facts. The report...

Buffett's Insurance Bust Ruthie Ackerman, 02.29.08, 9:30 PM ET All good things must come to an end -- even billionaire investor Warren Buffett's success in the insurance business. On Friday in Buffett's eagerly awaited annual letter to shareholders, he acknowledged 2007 was a good year, thanks to Berkshire Hathaway's stable insurance operations in a disaster-free 12 months, but he's not expecting a repeat. "That party is over,” he wrote. “It is a certainty that insurance-industry profit margins, including ours, will fall significantly in 2008. Prices are down, and exposures inexorably rise.” He predicted that even with another catastrophe-free year, the...

Japain Feb 21st 2008 From The Economist print edition The world's second-biggest economy is still in a funk—and politics is the problem THE ghost of Japan's “lost decade” haunts the United States. As the consequences of America's burst housing bubble are felt through financial markets, it has become popular to ask whether Japan's awful experience of boom-and-bust has lessons for other rich countries facing, at best, sharp slowdowns. Japan's property-and-stockmarket bubble burst in 1990, creating bad loans equivalent in the end to about one-fifth of GDP. The economy began growing properly again only 12 years later, and only in 2005...

Banking Bust: More To Come Liz Moyer, 01.16.08, 4:30 PM ET Banks have written down more than $100 billion since the summer. Yikes. Now the bad news: There are still billions worth of potentially toxic securities sitting on the books. The additional $1.3 billion write-down disclosed by JPMorgan on Wednesday was just the latest loss big banks have reported in the fourth quarter. Merrill Lynch is expected to report a sizeable write-down when it reveals fourth-quarter numbers on Thursday, by some estimates in the neighborhood of $15 billion. Bank of America, Wachovia and other big lenders report next week and...

The price of ethanol has fallen by 30% over the past few months as a glut of the corn-based fuel looms, while the price of ethanol's primary component, corn, had risen. That is squeezing ethanol companies' profits and pushing some ethanol plants to the brink of bankruptcy. Some ethanol companies are "under deathwatch" now, says Chris Groobey, a partner in the project-finance practice of law firm Baker & McKenzie, which has worked with lenders and private-equity funds involved with ethanol. That could be fine for big efficient players like Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., one of the nation's biggest ethanol producers by output....

t was a slow Friday at Red Herring magazine. The receptionist at the Silicon Valley tech title had stepped away from her desk. So a messenger strolls in from the summer sunshine, finds a 20-something reporter on her first real job and hits her with an eviction notice. Red Herring has three days to pay the rent or get out. Word got around, fast. Then someone looked outside. There, driving up in a rented silver Mazda minivan is a correspondent with gossip blog Valleywag. Aaaaaaand she's got a camera. Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech...

During the height of the real estate bubble, I wrote a column saying that the crash was coming and suggested selling any piece of real estate that was overpriced, questionable, or non-performing. As expected, I received angry replies. Today, I'm predicting the next crash, what I believe will cause it, and why it'll be a severe blow to the global economy. The signs are already here. Busts Beat Booms First of all, it's no big deal to predict booms and busts. All markets boom and bust. It's just easier to predict a bust because the signs are so obvious --...

The man responsible for protecting Egypt's antiquities has said he will "fight" for the return of an ancient bust of Nefertiti, an ancient Egyptian queen, now housed in a Berlin museum. Zahi Hawass also requested the temporary return of other ancient Egyptian artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone which is housed in London's British museum. "Some people say, 'If we give this bust to Egypt for three months they will not return it'." Hawass said, regarding the bust of Nefertiti, in an interview on Wednesday.Zahi Hawass is seeking "unique artifacts" from at least 10 museums around the world [AP]Germany says the...

“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants… With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers… Where once more marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending,… fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to...

SAN DIEGO – Federal authorities Wednesday arrested dozens of individuals across the country suspected of bringing 18 tons of illegal drugs into the United States, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said in an afternoon news conference here. Members of the Victor Emilio Cazares-Gastellum drug trafficking ring were awakened in the early morning hours by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies who served simultaneous arrest warrants as part of a 20-month-long investigation into the ring's operations, Gonzales and other federal officials said. Gonzales said the Mexico-based organization acquired drugs from Colombia and Venezuela to Central America, then smuggled them into...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Crude-oil futures tumbled as much as 3% Tuesday after Saudi Arabia's oil minister said major oil producers need not cut production further, disappointing hopes that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would intervene to prop up prices. Crude for February delivery was last down $1.39, or 2.6%, at $51.60 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract struck a 20-month intraday low of $51.25. Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi told reporters at an oil conference in India that the market is "significantly healthier" now than it was in October, when OPEC agreed to...