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As The Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers." On the surface, those competing actors are fueled by an overlapping mixture of ideologies and political agendas. Just below it, experts suspect, they're powered by something else: Captagon. A tiny, highly addictive pill produced in Syria and widely available across the Middle East, its illegal sale funnels hundreds of millions of dollars back into the war torn country's black market economy each year, likely giving militias access to...

Leading Democratic and Republican senators said on Sunday there were encouraging signs in the push to overhaul U.S. immigration laws - a top priority for President Obama's second term - and they would introduce their plan this week. -snip- McCain said the political aspect of immigration reform should sway any Republicans who object to a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. "We are losing dramatically the Hispanic vote, which we think should be ours, for a variety of reasons, and we've got to understand that," he said. McCain said change also was needed because "we can't go on forever with...

Four illegal immigrants from the tiny European nation of Albanian are facing deportation after being caught near Brownsville. U.S. Border Patrol agents caught the four wading across the Rio Grande River in Brownsville on Wednesday. The four immigrants appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Felix Recio on Friday. Judge Recio sentenced them to time served but they are now facing deportation. The group makes up a total of 16 Albanian immigrants caught in Brownsville since late December. Border Patrol statistics show only 38 immigrants from the southeast European nation were arrested along the entire southwest border in 2011.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio is developing a wide-ranging immigration reform plan—including steps to give more than 12 million illegals currently in the U.S. legal status—in an effort to seize the initiative on a contentious issue that polls show is hurting the Republican Party with the nation’s rapidly growing Hispanic population. Rubio laid out the broad outline of his plan in an interview with the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, at the same time President Obama announced he would push a comprehensive immigration plan of his own this March. Surprisingly, both hold similar goals—creating a process in which undocumented...

The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. was actually dropping at the end of the George W. Bush years — but that progress has stopped under President Obama, according to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies. With enforcement increasing and the economy souring, CIS said a net of 1 million illegal immigrants left the U.S. from January 2007 to January 2009, as the population went from 11.8 million down to 10.8 million. But progress has halted since Mr. Obama took office in January 2009 and, if anything, the illegal population in the United States rebounded slightly,...

OUR OPINION: LOCAL LAWS ARE NO SUBSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL REMEDY Riverside, a small New Jersey town, got more than it bargained for after passing a get-tough immigration law last year. Proponents of the law blamed newcomers from Latin America for crowding, scarce parking, increased crime and strained public services. Although it never was enforced, the law worked anyway. Influx of strangers Hundreds, if not thousands, of Brazilians and other immigrants fled. Now the town has other woes: a deserted downtown, economic malaise and lingering resentment. Two weeks ago, Riverside repealed the law in the face of mounting legal bills and...

This month, the FBI announced it had interrupted a plot to attack one of America's busiest airports - JFK International in New York. The target was the airport's complex of airline fuel storage tanks and the pipelines that feed them. At a news conference, Roslynn Mauskopf, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, said, "Had the plot been carried out, it could have resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths and destruction." She added that "The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable." Some of the media later dismissed this threat as ill conceived and technically beyond the...

As Carole King sang thirty years ago, “It’s too late, Baby.” She was referring to romance, but in this context it is too late for Team Bush to recapture the loyalty of the conservative GOP base. Immigration/amnesty, Dubai Ports, Harriet Meyers, Katrina, deficits and Iraq have destroyed Mr. Bush’s credibility as president. The new federal effort on gay marriage is as transparent as the dispatching of “less than 5,000 unarmed national guardsmen” to our southern border: a cosmetic ploy in a vain effort to keep the conservatives in line. This White House just doesn’t get it. Period. Before - when...

You've read about him. You've seen him on TV. A sappy network TV movie about him, starring Corbin Bernsen, is now doing re-run hell on the Lifetime Channel. To believe the conventional wisdom, Morris Dees, Jr. is a brave man who protects Blacks and Jews against White Supremacist Klansmen. That's the PR, anyway. The truth is otherwise. The real Morris Dees, chief of the misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is using our courts to take American land from Americans and give it to illegal aliens. If this is the new civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. must be turning...

WND Exclusive CONTROLLING THE SUBSTANCES Big money in Mexican meth New laws cut down on U.S. labs, but drugs still flow Posted: August 19, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com While new state and federal laws are cutting down the number of U.S. meth labs, the deadly drugs continue to flow into the U.S. across the porous border with Mexico, say law enforcement authorities. The federal anti-meth law was recently amended to permit states to impose their own stiffer restrictions and penalties. In Oregon, for instance, legislators now require cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a principal ingredient in methamphetamine, to...

Per Foxnews Alert. Two Iraqi's with no documentation are arrested along the US/Mexico border. Shady characters.....

High Risk Counties Some of the terrorists who helped with the September 11th attacks are now reported to have entered the country through Hidalgo County. State Representative Kino Flores, who sits on the state homeland security board, in an exclusive with Newschannel Five tells us these terrorists are said to have helped with the operation. Since then, the Valley's International Crossings have been under a tight watch with all incoming traffic being closely monitored.

<p>A group of Islamic terrorists is said to be working its way toward the United States from South America. The movement was reported within the U.S. intelligence community earlier this month and sent to law enforcement authorities around the country.</p>