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A Mexican federal judge ordered Andrew Tahmooressi back to prison after the U.S. Marine sergeant made his first official courtroom appearance since being locked up March 31 for accidentally crossing the border with guns in his pickup truck. The 26-year-old veteran of two tours in Afghanistan was finally able to tell his story to a judge, after his case had been delayed by both Mexico's unpredictable legal system and his own trouble settling on a lawyer. It was not immediately clear what Tahmooressi said at the evidentiary hearing, which was closed to the public.

Has anyone heard about Sgt Tahmooressi and what went on yesterday at his scheduled court date? I searched and haven't found a word about it. Anyone else?

A drug-smuggling tunnel equipped with electricity, ventilation and a rail system has been found connecting San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico. Authorities seized more than eight tons of marijuana and 325lb (147kg) of cocaine in the discovery. Officials have not revealed the exact length or location of the recently finished tunnel, but Mexican media report it is near Tijuana's airport. More than 75 such secret tunnels have been discovered since 2008.

Sister Antonia Brenner, a Beverly Hills-raised mother of seven who became a Roman Catholic nun and moved into a notorious Tijuana prison where she spent more than three decades mending broken lives, easing tensions and dispensing everything from toothbrushes to bail money, has died. She was 86. Brenner, who had been in declining health, died Thursday of natural causes at the home of her religious order in Tijuana. She was born Mary Clarke in Los Angeles on Dec. 1, 1926, to Irish immigrant parents. Her father grew wealthy running an office supply business, and the family counted Hollywood stars such...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded $25,000 that will go to the construction of benches made of garbage for a park in Tijuana, Mexico. According to an EPA press release, the agency joined the San Diego Center for Civic Engagement in awarding $45,000 to 4Walls International for the construction of park spaces that will use trash pulled from the Tijuana River Valley as building materials. …

San Diego Fire and Rescue crews were called to the San Ysidro border crossing for nearly 160 childbirth emergencies in 2012 — one almost every other day. Such calls continued in 2013, with 15 childbirth emergency calls to the gateway into Tijuana in January, eight in February and 17 in March, according to city records obtained by U-T Watchdog. There are no statistics on how many of the moms being rushed by emergency crews to local hospitals are U.S. citizens, as federal laws prohibit emergency crews and hospital teams from asking. Babies born under the circumstances are U.S. citizens as...

CHULA VISTA, Calif. - A woman faced a judge in a Chula Vista courtroom Thursday two days after her pit bull allegedly mauled a 4-year-old girl. Brittany Morgan Gardiner, 22, was arraigned on one count of having a dangerous dog that caused great bodily injury. It’s a felony charge with a maximum sentence of three years. ... Deputy District Attorney Mary Loeb Gardiner might be a flight risk and asked for her bail to remain at $25,000. “After this attack happened,” said Loeb. “This four year old girl is sitting there with her face torn up, bleeding everywhere and the...

@mrubin1971Two news stories from recent weeks, if true, should raise a red flag in the United States that Iran is preparing to use Hezbollah to strike at U.S. interests in Latin America, if not in the United States itself.First, this story from the Lebanese news portal Naharnet and sourced in part to Israeli radio. The Naharnet story was taken down shortly after it appeared: Hezbollah is using a training base established by Iran in northern Nicaragua near the border with Honduras, the Israeli radio reported on Thursday [September 6]. “The area is cordoned off and there are around 30 members...

There are two places in the world where an international border is undermined by a series of tunnels used by smugglers. I’m at one of them now, the border between southern California and the Tijuana area of Mexico. In the past four years, U.S. authorities have discovered at least 75 tunnels along the length of the 1,950-mile border, many around Tijuana. After several days along the border, I am struck by the proximity of buildings on the Mexican side to the warehouses on the U.S. side. The nearest buildings are probably the length of two football fields from each other...

Mexican soldiers hit the jackpot when they carried out a surprise search of a car in the unruly border town of Tijuana and found $15 million plus jewels and drugs stashed inside. The haul, uncovered on Friday, most likely belonged to one of the country's notorious drug cartels, the defense ministry said in a statement Tuesday. Showing the money off to the press, officials said it was believed that the cash was being transferred to a house used by members of the criminal gang headed by Joaquin Guzman," known by his alias as "El Chapo" and one of the most...

Mexican soldiers discovered the largest marijuana plantation in the country's history, hidden under black cloth in the middle of the desert. The 300-acre plantation is four times larger than the previous record discovery by authorities and workers had even installed toilet facilities, the Defence Department said. The towering pot plants sheltered under black screen-cloth in a huge square on the floor of the Baja California desert, more than 150 miles south of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego.

A terrorist organization whose home base is in the Middle East has established another home base across the border in Mexico. "They are recognized by many experts as the 'A' team of Muslim terrorist organizations," a former U.S. intelligence agent told 10News. The former agent, referring to Shi'a Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah, added, "They certainly have had successes in big-ticket bombings..." Now, the group is blending into Shi'a Muslim communities in Mexico, including Tijuana. Other pockets along the U.S.-Mexico border region remain largely unidentified as U.S. intelligence agencies are focused on the drug trade... The agent, who has spent years...

Reporting from San Diego — U.S. border authorities have arrested a controversial Muslim cleric who was deported from Canada to Tunisia three years ago and was caught earlier this month trying to sneak into California in the trunk of a BMW, according to court documents. Said Jaziri, the former imam of a Muslim congregation in Montreal, was hidden in a car driven by a San Diego-area man who was pulled over by U.S. Border Patrol agents near an Indian casino east of San Diego on Jan. 11. Jaziri had allegedly paid a Tijuana-based smuggling group $5,000 to get him across...

Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, 53, is arguably the world's most infamous drug trafficker, and has extended his empire from Colombia to China since he broke out of prison in a laundry van on January 19, 2001....... PACT WITH THE DEVIL? Amid the mayhem of severed heads and blood-stained streets, Guzman and his right-hand man Ismael Zambada have adeptly taken territory from gangs weakened by army operations while bringing in raw materials from China to make meth, using Africa as a route for cocaine into Europe, and growing their business in Colombia and across Central America. "In the past five years, the...

The severed head of a young man was found hanging from a bridge in the Mexican border city of Tijuana on Monday. The Baja California state attorney general's office said the head belonged to a man between 25 and 30 years old. It had several bullet wounds and was hung using a metallic ring and a nylon rope. A threatening message was found nearby on the bridge. Hours earlier, a woman between 30 and 35 years old was found shot to death in another Tijuana neighborhood, also with a threatening message left nearby. Authorities have blamed recent cartel-style violence in...

Baja California authorities seized 105 tons of marijuana Monday morning in what is believed to be one of the largest drug busts in recent Mexican history, according to Mexican authorities and media reports. About 10,000 packages of marijuana were hidden inside six cargo containers stored in a warehouse in an industrial area of the border city of Tijuana. The marijuana was discovered after police on routine patrol intercepted a convoy of vehicles escorting a tractor-trailer that had left the warehouse, officials said. After a shootout, 11 people were arrested. Police and soldiers, acting on information from the suspects, raided the...

Mexican authorities have found the bodies of seven young men killed in three separate attacks across Tijuana -- a spate of violence that runs counter to what officials have described as an improving security situation. The bodies, two of them decapitated and strung from a highway overpass, were discovered within an eight-hour period between Sunday evening and early Monday morning, according to the Baja California state prosecutor’s office. Law-enforcement officials in Tijuana and Baja California and Mexico’s federal military have made some visible progress working together against drug-related violence afflicting several regions of the country. Brazen shootouts and gruesome killings...

TIJUANA — The words from Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos this week contrasted sharply with his usual promotion of cross-border goodwill: “In the United States, they celebrate every death that is announced in Tijuana. They celebrate it so that the money stays there,” he said. “California real estate developers celebrate when things go badly in Tijuana so that people buy houses over there.” Ramos has a history of reaching out to U.S. officials, and he continues to maintain a good relationship with San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders. But on Monday at the opening of Tijuana’s new police command center, Ramos...

At least 16 migrants, including a woman, were being held for ransom by human smugglers in Tijuana, Mexico, according to a migrant who was freed, authorities said late Wednesday. "With respect to the man, we are not releasing his name but he is between 20 and 25-years-old. We can tell you that his family paid a ransom for his liberty and it was after that he came to us and told us there were others that were being held in Tijuana," Municipal Police Officer Jose Varela told CNN by phone. It was unclear how much the family paid, but reports...

My my... more evidence bubbles to the surface that the US-Mexican border wars is about more than the civil rights of illegal immigrants... or the anticipated built in voter bloc for desperate Dems. Today brings good news that the Mexican police are actively working to thwart Hezbollah's attempt to gain a foothold there. A survelliance operation focused on Hezbollah leader, Jameel Nasr, resulted in his arrest at his Tijuana home. Nasr employed Mexican nationals with family ties to Lebanon for his Hezbollah/Mexico network. According to the report, Mexican police mounted a surveillance operation on the group's leader, Jameel Nasr, who...

SNIPPET: "An Aeromexico plane flying to Mexico City from Paris had to land late Sunday afternoon at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal to remove a passenger whose name is on the U.S. no-fly list, Radio-Canada reported. The man was escorted out of the plane and taken into custody by the RCMP."

Illegal Immigration: The government puts the brakes on a problem-plagued "virtual" fence on our border with Mexico. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned kind? If ever there was a shovel-ready project, this is it. The much-ballyhooed "virtual" fence that was supposed to monitor and control illegal immigration doesn't work and is being scrapped as we evaluate alternatives and rely on existing technology. After years of delay and billions of dollars already spent, Secretary Napolitano on Tuesday halted work on SBInet. The system involves cameras, sensors and radars designed to let a small number of dispatchers watch the border on computer monitors...

TIJUANA, Mexico – Mexican federal police arrested two suspected gang leaders Monday, delivering another big blow to a brutal drug cartel that terrorized the border city of Tijuana for several years. The capture of Raydel Lopez Uriarte and Manuel Garcia Simental apparently wipes out the existing leadership of the cartel headed by Teodoro Garcia Simental, who was captured last month. Teodoro and Manuel Garcia are brothers. Lopez, known as "El Muletas," and Garcia, known as "El Chiquilin," were arrested Monday in La Paz, a city in the southern end of the Baja California peninsula, said Amy Roderick, a spokeswoman for...

TIJUANA, Mexico – Mexico has captured a kingpin accused of terrorizing his way to the top of a gang fighting for control of key U.S. drug routes — even ordering rivals dissolved in acid. Tuesday's arrest, announced by U.S. and Mexican officials, capped a series of victories in Mexico's U.S.-backed war on narcotics. Teodoro Garcia Simental, known as "El Teo," was arrested at 5 a.m. (8 a.m. EST; 1300 GMT), said Amy Roderick, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego, California. She said she had no other details. A U.S. official and a Mexican law enforcement...

<p>TIJUANA, Mexico — Tijuana's public security spokesman says a fleet of brand new patrol cars has been burned in a Molotov cocktail attack.</p>

ADD to post no. 105: http://www2.lasvegasnow.com/docs/terror_complaint.pdf http://www2.lasvegasnow.com/docs/terror_indict.pdf LAS VEGAS, NV — SNIPPET: “The real end, however, came in a Minnesota Federal Court. Two weeks ago, the FBI arrested Abdow Munye Abdow for two counts of making false statements to a federal official. The FBI believes Abdow lied about his trip to Las Vegas, and a passenger he was with who was on the terrorism watch list. The Nevada Highway Patrol pulled over Abdow and four other people on October 6, 2009 for speeding. Trooper Alan Davidson, a spokesperson for NHP, said the officer on the scene began asking questions.” SNIPPET:...

TIJUANA, Mexico — The mutilated body of a state official who authorities said was suspected of giving fake driver's licenses to drug gang members was found hanging from a bridge Friday in the Mexican border city of Tijuana. Relatives identified the man as Rogelio Sanchez, a Baja California state official in charge of driver's licenses, said Prisma Perez, a spokeswoman for the state Attorney General's Office. Sanchez, 44, was kidnapped Wednesday as he left his home in Tijuana. "The investigation indicates he had been giving licenses to organized crime," Perez said. His body was found hanging from the Morelio bridge...

SAN DIEGO – Four people were injured in a gunbattle today involving an attempt to smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico at the busiest border crossing in the U.S., authorities said. More than 70 people traveling in three vans involved in the incident were in federal custody, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Angelica DeCima. Details remained sketchy, but van drivers tried to storm past inspectors at the San Ysidro port of entry and make their way into the U.S. without stopping, DeCima said. “It was human smuggling, definitely,” said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement....

The journalists at the center of an embarrassing scandal for the grass-roots organization ACORN also paid a visit to the ACORN office in San Diego County. Grass-roots organizing has gotten a black eye on the national stage after undercover videos involving ACORN, a controversial group with a local office, were released that were shot during a series of visits from a hidden-camera crew. At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, a video was broadcast on Fox's "Hannity" that purported to show a San Diego ACORN staffer discussing human trafficking with two people who were undercover. Earlier in the day, local ACORN officials,...

TIJUANA, Mexico — Firefighters found six bodies inside a burning car in Tijuana, and 15 people were killed in three separate shootings in another northern Mexican border town besieged by drug violence, authorities said Tuesday. Near Mexico's southern border, meanwhile, the bullet-ridden bodies of eight men suspected to be drug traffickers were found in a Guatemalan frontier town. In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, four bodies were found in a burning compact car's seats and two in the trunk, according to a police report Tuesday. The victims' identities and the motive for the killings were not released, but...

The End of the World A mile east of the Tijuana International Airport is an area police call El Fin del Mundo, the End of the World, where drug-cartel assassins dump their victims. Both Mexican and American citizens have been found there. On December 18, 2004, according to Sergeant Tom Bulow of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, San Marcos resident Noé Chávez García was lured to Tijuana by two acquaintances who shot him several times and left him in this corpse-disposal zone. He survived his wounds to tell his story to the FBI and Mexican officials. His is a...

Authorities announced charges Thursday against a Mexican gang that took Tijuana-style violence to the upscale suburbs of San Diego County, kidnapping, torturing and killing well-to-do residents, even after some families paid large ransoms. The gang, a rogue cell of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix drug cartel, moved across the border in 2002 and posed as U.S. law enforcement, donning FBI and police uniforms and caps while snatching victims outside homes and public places, said San Diego County prosecutors. Nine victims were killed from 2004 to 2007, and the bodies of two of them were dissolved in chemicals at a rented house...

TIJUANA, Mexico – The bodies of four U.S. citizens were found strangled, beaten and stabbed in a van in this border city, two days after they reportedly left their Southern California homes for a night at the Mexican clubs, U.S. officials said Thursday. The victims, ages 19 to 23 years old, were found tied up on Saturday...

TIJUANA, Mexico — The bodies of four U.S. citizens were found strangled, beaten and stabbed in a van in this border city, two days after they reportedly left their Southern California homes for a night at the Mexican clubs, U.S. officials said Thursday. The victims, ages 19 to 23 years old, were found tied up on Saturday, but their deaths were not reported earlier because they were under investigation, said Fermin Gomez, an assistant state prosecutor in Baja California. U.S. consular officials in Tijuana said the victims — two men and two women from the San Diego and Chula Vista...

As U.S. travelers avoid Mexico as a destination, Tijuana tourism suffers TIJUANA – Avenida Revolución is nearly a ghost town now, with the global economic crisis and drug cartel violence slamming the Mexican tourism industry. With the swine flu scare, even more tourists are staying away. On April 27, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel alert recommending U.S. travelers avoid all nonessential travel to Mexico. Even before that, the U.S. State Department, for more than a year, had a travel alert in place because of Mexico's drug cartel violence.

TIJUANA, Mexico — Seven police officers were assassinated in about an hour's time in what authorities said Tuesday was a coordinated effort that followed months of relative calm in a border city stricken by drug-fueled violence. Three officers were injured. Municipal police detained three or four people after Monday night's attacks, said Jose Manuel Yepiz, spokesman for the Baja California state attorney general's office. He did not have additional details. After four officers were killed by gunfire outside a convenience store, police scanners hummed with "narcocorridos," or drug ballads. One voice threatened over the airwaves that 30 officers would be...

ACAPULCO, Mexico — Gunmen killed six people, including a local police chief, in a series of attacks Monday in mountain towns in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero. The police chief of Pungarabato was repeatedly shot while driving his red Mustang on a highway near the small town early Monday, Guerrero state public safety department said in a news release. Five other men were found gunned down in different towns in the isolated mountainous zone known as the Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Land, the state police said. In the border city of Tijuana, soldiers detained 60 people at a...

Reporting from San Diego -- A U.S. citizen was one of the three men who were found decapitated this week in Tijuana, Mexican authorities said Friday. The body of George Harrison, a 38-year-old former Chula Vista resident, had been dismembered and mutilated and was dumped in a vacant lot near Tijuana's beachside bullring. Harrison had several drug-related convictions in the United States and was suspected of drug trafficking in Mexico, Baja California Assistant Atty. General Rafael Gonzalez said.

A drug gang kidnapped and killed six people near a town in the US-Mexican border region, prompting a series of gunbattles with soldiers that left 15 others dead. The violence on Tuesday started when gunmen kidnapped nine alleged members of a rival drug gang in Villa Ahumada and later executed six of them along the PanAmerican highway outside of the town, 130km south of Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, said Enrique Torres, spokesman for a joint military-police operation in Chihuahua State. Assailants later released three of the men, although their whereabouts was not immediately known, Torres...

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican drug gangs near the U.S. border are breaking into police radio frequencies to issue chilling death threats to cops which they then carry out, demoralizing security forces in a worsening drug war. "You're next, bastard ... We're going to get you," an unidentified drug gang member said over the police radio in the city of Tijuana after naming a policeman. The man also threatened a second cop by name and played foot-stomping "narcocorrido" music, popular with drug cartels, over the airwaves. "No one can help them," an officer named Jorge said of his threatened colleagues...

A Mexican drug suspect has confessed to dissolving the bodies of 300 rivals with corrosive chemicals near the U.S. border, in a claim highlighting the brutality of Mexico’s drug war. Santiago Meza, known as "The Stew Maker," told journalists he did away with bodies in industrial drums on the outskirts of the violent city of Tijuana. More than 700 people died in Tijuana last year as rival gangs battled for control of the city’s lucrative drug trade. Many others are missing and believed dead after being abducted. The suspect, who was paraded before journalists by the army on Friday, said...

(AP) Mexico City - Salim Boughader Mucharrafille was arrested in 2002 and convicted on organized-crime and immigrant-smuggling charges. Boughader, a Mexican of Lebanese descent, ran a cafe in the city of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, California.

Gunmen also opened fire on a Baja California state Attorney General's Office. MEXICO CITY -- At least 11 people were murdered in and around the Mexican border city of Tijuana in separate incidents over the weekend, police said. Several gunmen also opened fire on a Baja California state Attorney General's Office facility located in one of Tijuana's most dangerous neighborhoods. Two of the killings occurred in the neighboring city of Playas de Rosarito, where a body was found Saturday and gunmen murdered an 18-year-old man a day later. In Tijuana, which is near San Diego, California, two people were killed...

TIJUANA — Mexican soldiers freed three kidnapped businessmen Wednesday evening after an anonymous tip led them to a home in the Mesa de Otay area, authorities said at a news conference Thursday. Soldiers said they encountered little resistance when they stormed the home. They arrested eight men, confiscated 25 guns and took more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition, army officials said. Based on information gathered at the home, soldiers went to a residence in La Presa where three more men were arrested. They are accused of participating in the attack on the Baja California Attorney General's Office in Tijuana early...

TIJUANA, Mexico — Gunmen opened fire in the state attorney general's office in Tijuana today, wounding three agents, police said. One of the state officers was in serious condition after the 1:30 a.m. attack, a news release from the Tijuana police department said. City police said they had no further details, and the Baja California state attorney general's office declined to comment. Drug gangs have raided police offices in the past to rescue members in custody. Some have even invaded hospitals to kill wounded rivals. State police often interrogate suspects at the offices where the shootings occurred, but it was...

More than 5,000 people have been killed in Mexico's out of control drug cartel wars this year, so why is our government opening even more border crossings at this time with Mexico. Many elected officials are ignoring Mexico's raging war against the drug cartels and instead of focusing on safety and public security, trying to widen the openings in our border with Mexico strictly for commerce purposes. DOBBS: Disturbing new details emerging tonight from Mexico proving that the raging drug cartel wars there are far more deadly than the government of Mexico has previously admitted. The U.S. response, however, is...

Nearly 300 people have been killed since late-September – many mutilated, tortured and beheaded in gruesome terror tactics copied from Iraq's brutal conflict. In the past week alone, there has been an attack in a nightclub popular with students that left five young people dead or dying; a hit squad stormed a private hospital and killed a patient who was being treated for gunshot wounds; and armed men opened fire on a car parked outside a popular US-owned discount warehouse, killing a woman and seriously injuring a man. Mexico's drug war death tally of more than 4,000 this year –...

TIJUANA – About 500 federal police, state police and marines took over patrol of several city neighborhoods Tuesday from the municipal police officers who normally perform those duties. The action occurred in central and eastern Tijuana, where high crime rates related to drug violence have been recorded in the last two months. Municipal police are expected to undergo extensive background checks and training, Mayor Jorge Ramos said. The military and state and federal police are scheduled to be in place for a month. The municipal officers were called in from patrol Tuesday morning. When they arrived at their stations, they...

TIJUANA – Manuel GarcNa has worked up to 14 hours a day for the past month outside the coroner's office, which now doubles as a municipal morgue. The wave of violent crime in Tijuana has filled the refrigerated rooms of the building, and GarcNa is among at least half a dozen employees of funeral homes who mill around the hearse entrance, hoping to sell their services to the families of the deceased. When the families arrive, GarcNa tries to be the first to approach them. He speaks softly, hands them a business card and tells them the price. “It all...

TIJUANA, Mexico – Two people were shot to death at a taco restaurant in the border city of Tijuana on Saturday, hours after a man's decapitated head was found wrapped in duct tape. Prosecutors in Baja California state, where Tijuana is located, said two other people were wounded in the restaurant shooting, which apparently involved assault rifles. Another man was shot to death at a pool hall, and two men were found shot to death on a street. On Friday, gunmen attacked a state police convoy on a main boulevard in Tijuana, across the U.S. border from San Diego, but...