Free Republic

Drug dens, homeless shantytowns and prostitution are rampant in New York City's parks, a Post investigation found. Comparing the manicured lawns of Manhattan's Central Park to the barren, rat-infested eyesore of Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn, the disparity is shocking. While the Bloomberg administration boasts that parks are in better shape than they've been in four decades, an investigation of 70 parks over the last nine months found: * Clusters of homeless living in tents and small shantytowns in 10 parks, including Riverside Park near 148th Street in Manhattan. * Hookers brazenly plying their 24-hour trade, including at Printers Park...

Excerpt: SEOUL - South Korean police said Friday they have arrested members of a major drug-trafficking ring with suspected links to Afghanistan's Taleban insurgents. ‘Police have rounded up a drug-trafficking ring involving Afghans andPakistanis who are suspected of being linked with the Taleban,’ a National Police Agency spokesman told AFP. ‘They are suspected to trying to smuggle raw materials for heroin production into Afghanistan,’ he said. Police said two Afghans, three Pakistanis and four Koreans tried to use South Korea as a shipping point for several tons of acetic anhydride destined for southern Afghanistan. The chemical is heated with morphine,...

Police sniffer dogs will have to wear bootees when searching the homes of Muslims so as not to cause offence. Guidelines being drawn up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) urge awareness of religious sensitivities when using dogs to search for drugs and explosives. The guidelines, to be published this year, were designed to cover mosques but have been extended to include other buildings. Where Muslims object, officers will be obliged to use sniffer dogs only in exceptional cases. Where dogs are used, they will have to wear bootees with rubber soles. “We are trying to ensure that...

Presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee John McCain told Mexican leaders security at the border is a precondition of immigration reform. McCain ended a visit to Colombia and Mexico Thursday, The Arizona Republic reported. I believe we must have comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want our borders secured first, McCain said at a Mexico City news conference. That will require some walls. It will require virtual fences. It will require high-technology equipment. We must secure our borders, and then we will address the issue of comprehensive immigration reform. McCain was one of the authors of an immigration reform bill that...

Appearing before Mexico's drug-fighting Federal Police, John McCain promised Thursday that as president, he would quickly implement a U.S. aid package to give the officers more helicopters, technology and training. Mr. McCain, visiting the federal force's new command center as he concluded a three-day trip to Colombia and Mexico, paid his condolences to the hundreds of officers who have died in the drug fight since President Felipe Calderón took office 19 months ago. Those deaths, Mr. McCain said, "will not be in vain." "I want to thank President Calderón and the people of Mexico for their efforts in making our...

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reported last month that a teenager who has been depressed in the past year was more than twice as likely to have used marijuana than teenagers who have not reported being depressed (25 percent compared with 12 percent). The study said marijuana use increased the risk of developing mental disorders by 40 percent. So much for the "harmless" nature of pot. There are more worrisome statistics still. The 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that among Americans age 12 and older there were 14.8 million current users of...

MEXICO CITY — Three decapitated corpses were discovered in Mexico's northwestern Sinaloa state Friday, bring to a total of seven headless bodies found and 11 police assassinated in a bloody week of often drug-related violence in the country, officials and news reports said. The three headless corpses were found in a car in Culiacan, Sinaloa, together with a note critical of one of the Beltran Leyva brothers, heads of a faction of the divided Sinaloa drug cartel, state judicial officials said in a statement. The Beltran Leyva brothers are in a fight with Sinaloa-based Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the country's...

PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - Panama has ruled out hosting a U.S. military base to replace one in Ecuador which is being reclaimed by the Quito government, a senior Panamanian official said on Friday. Panama -- along with Peru and Colombia -- had been tipped as a possible site to replace the Manta air base in western Ecuador, a key strategic asset in Washington's campaign to stop Latin American cocaine from reaching the United States.

Police in South Korea say they have arrested a number of South Asian men suspected of involvement in drugs rings linked to Taleban insurgents. The men were suspected of trying to smuggle raw materials for heroin production into Afghanistan, a police spokesman said. In one raid, officers seized about 12 tons of acetic anhydride. When mixed with morphine extracted from opium poppies, the chemical produces heroin. Separate raids A total of nine people had been arrested in South Korea, the French news agency AFP quoted police as saying. Two men, an Afghan and an Indian, were arrested on Wednesday when...

WASHINGTON — Besieged Texas sheriffs have vowed to press the White House and Congress to deliver emergency assistance to law enforcement officers battling drug cartels along the Mexican border to match the $400 million on its way to Mexico. The sheriffs said they were frustrated that President Bush and Congress agreed to provide assistance to Mexico as part of the Merida Initiative, without offering additional federal help to their departments. The officers said they'd seek direct federal assistance, as well as changes in Department of Homeland Security restrictions to permit local law enforcement departments to use homeland security funds to...

The last case directly involving the Second Amendment before D.C. V. HELLER was UNITED STATES V. MILLER, decided in 1939. A great deal of misinformation has been written about MILLER, but the facts are much stranger than most of the fiction that has been printed about the case. The article that is linked reveals fascinating items about the MILLER case. The trial judge, Hiram Heartsill Ragon, was a partisan Democrat Roosevelt appointee who was endorsed by the KKK. Ragon was an anti-gun activist who used the criminal, Miller, as his vehicle to fashion a test case for the Roosevelt administration...

Members of the Delaware House of Representatives have approved a resolution declaring "it is against the public policy of this state" for food and water to be withheld from a 24-year-old woman left with brain injuries following a drug overdose.The case of Lauren Richardson is reminiscent of that of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who died after courts ruled doctors could follow her husband's orders to deprive her of food and water until she died.The Schiavo case, on which WND reported exhaustively, ended in March 2005 when she died, despite a battle by her parents who wanted to care...

San Francisco will shift course and start turning over juvenile illegal immigrants convicted of felonies to federal authorities for possible deportation, Mayor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday as he took the blame for what he conceded was a costly and misguided effort to shield the youths. Newsom said he hadn't known until recently that the city was keeping the juvenile offenders from being deported as part of its sanctuary-city policy, but he added that "ignorance is no defense." "All I can say is, I can't explain away the past," Newsom said. "I take responsibility, I take it. We are moving in...

MEXICO CITY - The severed heads of four men were found dumped on a Mexican street on Wednesday with a message accusing a drug gang kingpin of treachery, police said. Neighbors in the northern city of Culiacan found the men's bodies wrapped in plastic sheets and a blanket, with their heads stuffed into white plastic bags. An obscenity-laden note scrawled onto a piece of cardboard invited Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman -- the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel -- "to see what his stupid acts had caused." Guzman, who is considered Mexico's most-wanted man, is battling a rival gang...

A New York judge on Wednesday sentenced former child movie star Tatum O'Neal -- arrested in early June for trying to buy crack cocaine -- to two days treatment and a 95 dollar fine, local news media reported. O'Neal struck a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in exchange for attending two half-day drug-treatment sessions and paying the fine, the New York Daily News reported. "I'm going back to my meetings and back to my life," said O'Neal, 44. "I'm just glad that I got the deal that I got. I wish it hadn't happened, but we...

New study in the FASEB Journal shows how substances similar to THC are necessary for healthy skin and may lead to new skin disease treatmentsScientists from Hungary, Germany and the U.K. have discovered that our own body not only makes chemical compounds similar to the active ingredient in marijuana (THC), but these play an important part in maintaining healthy skin. This finding on "endocannabinoids" just published online in, and scheduled for the October 2008 print issue of, The FASEB Journal could lead to new drugs that treat skin conditions ranging from acne to dry skin, and even skin-related tumors. "Our...

MOUNT JULIET, Tenn. - A Midstate man said a police officer nearly choked him to death during a traffic stop. The incident was caught on tape. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating how Mount Juliet Cpl. Bill Cosby interacted with James Anders, Jr. Cosby stopped the 26-year-old Wilson County man in April. Cosby suspected Anders hid marijuana in his mouth. The officer used a vascular restraint technique to keep Anders from swallowing. On the video recorded inside Cosby's patrol car, Cosby said he smelled marijuana and handcuffed Anders and his passenger. The video also showed the officer putting his...

SAN FRANCISCO -- California's best-known sanctuary city -- a haven for illegal immigrants -- has been escorting convicted juvenile offenders back to their home countries at city expense for nearly a generation and shielding them from federal officials in the process But after several recent embarrassing incidents, this famously liberal enclave has been forced to reconsider how it deals with young undocumented criminals. Ever since a city juvenile probation officer was detained by federal immigration authorities in Houston nearly seven weeks ago and questioned about two offenders he was escorting back to Honduras, the city has stopped flying such people...

GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up. Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last....

A Rogers husband and wife who worked as a pastor and school bus driver were sentenced Monday to four years in prison for cooking methamphetamine in their family home. Joseph and Barbara Sisneros pleaded guilty last week to a reduced charge of possession of drug paraphernalia with intent to manufacture as part of a plea agreement between Deputy Prosecutor Drew Ledbetter and defense attorneys Blake Warren and Bobby Digby. "This meth lab was not a small operation," Ledbetter told Benton County Senior Circuit Judge Tom Keith. "Certain people should be held to a higher standard. At best, the court could...

Un-freaking-believable. Jaxon Van Derbeken at the SFChronicle follows up on his weekend report exposing how San Francisco operated a special tax-funded shuttle service for illegal alien Honduran drug lords to protect the poor “youths” from federal immigration officials. Now, we learn that when the city was told to stop flying the illegal immigrant drug offenders home to escape prosecution and formal deportation and permanent bars from US citizenship, they instead sent the “youths” to southern California group homes–from which they easily escaped: Until recently, San Francisco flew juvenile illegal immigrants convicted of drug crimes to their home countries rather than...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States leads the world in rates of experimenting with marijuana and cocaine despite strict drug laws, World Health Organization researchers said on Tuesday. Countries with looser drug laws have lower rates of abuse, the researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine. The survey of 54,000 people in 17 countries found that 16 percent of people in the United States had used cocaine in their lifetimes -- far higher than the next highest rate, found in New Zealand, where 4.3 percent of people reported having used cocaine. More than 42 percent of...

The Joint Bazaar, an island in the river Panj, separating Tajikistan/Afghanistan. Merchants display foodstuffs. The real business is exchanging weapons for heroin. Mohammad Aslam: “We trade a kilo of heroin for ten Kalakovs (Kalashnikov AK-74s) or 15 Kalashnikovs.” “the Taleban give us a kilo for just five or six, everybody benefits.” “When we get one Kalashnikov we sell it for $200, but the gun will fetch 50% more in Jalalabad.” “We have old friends in the government, everybody gets a cut.” Mir Alam: “I am just looking for a good customer. It isn’t important to us who it is. We...

An effort by San Francisco to shield eight young Honduran crack dealers from federal immigration officials backfired when the youths escaped from Southern California group homes within days of their arrival, officials said Monday.

San Francisco -- An effort by San Francisco to shield eight young Honduran crack dealers from federal immigration officials backfired when the youths escaped from Southern California group homes within days of their arrival, officials said Monday. The walkaways are the latest in a string of embarrassments for city officials who are protecting illegal-immigrant drug dealers from federal authorities and possible deportation because of San Francisco's 1989 declaration that the city is a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. Until recently, San Francisco flew juvenile illegal immigrants convicted of drug crimes to their home countries rather than cooperate with the federal Immigration...

San Francisco is now providing free, taxpayer-funded plane tickets home for illegal aliens – with an open invitation to visit again. City juvenile probation officers are shielding Honduran crack cocaine dealers from federal deportation and citing San Francisco's sanctuary status as justification for its policy, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. William Siffermann, chief of San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Department, claims federal authorities have never ordered him to stop flying illegal aliens back to their home countries. He cited city policy against turning young illegal alien offenders over to the federal government. "We are not obligated to," he said. "We are...

More than a third of Danes have used cannabis at least once in their lives, making them the top users of the drug in Europe. The new statistics from the European Centre for Monitoring of Drugs and Drug Addiction show that Denmark comes out ahead of France and the UK for use of the illicit drug. Of Danish adults 36.5 percent have tried it at least once in their lives, compared to 30.6 percent in France and 29.8 percent in the United Kingdom. However, Denmark only lies in seventh place for the use of cannabis in the last year, which...

You can still light up in a Dutch cafe after July 1, but only if you're smoking marijuana, not tobacco. Bloomberg reported June 20 that the Netherlands' new indoor-smoking ban allows patrons to smoke inside marijuana "coffee shops" as long as the joint is pure cannabis. But cutting joints with tobacco will be illegal. Tobacco smoking also will be banned in other public places except in separate, unstaffed rooms. "Every customer will have to learn how to smoke pure,'' said Robert Kempen, co-owner of The NooN and Mellow Yellow Amsterdam coffee shops. "Sales will definitely fall," said Rida Oulad, a...

Hope you pay close attention to what San Francisco’s illegal alien sanctuary policy has wrought. Over the weekend, the SFChronicle reported that open-borders radicals in the city’s juvenile probation department are shielding Honduran illegal alien drug dealers from prosecution and deportation by providing them a taxpayer-subsidized escort and plane ride back to their home country–where they can promptly turn around and re-enter the U.S. with impunity. It’s the San Fran illegal alien drug kingpin shuttle service. All in the name of “family reunification” and protecting the “youths,” of course! The feds and the city are pointing fingers. Nobody will admit...

Florida banks say they are tired of playing cops, and some congressional leaders agree. The Florida Bankers Association (FBA) issued a statement Thursday in support of 18 members of Congress who signed a letter asking bank regulatory agencies to ease off on their enforcement of bank-related provisions of the Patriot Act and the Bank Secrecy Act. Parts of the two laws require banks to report the suspicious activity of their customers, especially when conducting international business. The FBA's letter said it has seen very little evidence that banks' reports on potential criminal behavior have deterred such activity or led to...

A sign in front of Mauro Morales' Rio Grande City home announces his business for everyone to see. "Peyote Dealer," it proclaims in large block letters. Each day, drivers passing by slow down for double takes and some even pull over, get out and snap photos. Who can blame them?, Morales asks with a mischievous grin. He is, after all, part of a dwindling fraternity. The slight, 65-year-old Rio Grande City man is one of only three people in the United States - all in Starr and Webb counties -authorized to harvest and sell the psychedelic cactus. But as overharvesting...

I flushed my pills down the toilet. The prescription had expired. I had a queasy impulse to jettison the medicine this way because of some vague understanding that expired medicine could be dangerous. It may, but not in the way I imagined. Scientists are now finding a vast array of pharmaceuticals, from sex hormones, to anti-convulsants, to mood stabilizers, in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, the Associated Press found recently. The drugs get there via people like me, blithely tossing drugs into the water system — and through the natural metabolic practices of a country...

San Francisco juvenile probation officials - citing the city's immigrant sanctuary status - are protecting Honduran youths caught dealing crack cocaine from possible federal deportation and have given some offenders a city-paid flight home with carte blanche to return. The city's practices recently prompted a federal criminal investigation into whether San Francisco has been systematically circumventing U.S. immigration law, according to officials with knowledge of the matter.City officials say they are trying to balance their obligations under federal and state law with local court orders and San Francisco's policies aimed at protecting the rights of the young immigrants, who they...

As if our military didn't have its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan, the head of the Minuteman Project border security group seems to think Minutemen might make good narcotics cops. Minuteman co-founder Jim Gilchrist suggested in recent radio interviews that the U.S. give Mexico 12 months to corral its criminal drug cartels and rising violence, particularly in border towns such as Juarez and Tijuana—or deploy the U.S. Army to do the job. That's the Minutemen. Their remedies for the drug war next door sound simplistic, but at least they're paying attention. While most of us north of the border...

Cannabis lovers will be exempted from a public smoking ban in the Netherlands from next week onwards. Marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands but has been decriminalised, with small quantities sold in coffee shops, making them big attractions for tourists. Cutting the Cannabis with tobacco which some smokers do, could land the shop owners a fine of up to 2,400 euros (3,778 US dollars). Not a problem, says coffee shop owner Arjan Roskam whose marijuana strains have won 31 Cannabis Cup prizes over the years and who count Hollywood celebrities, members of Europe's royal families, lawyers, judges and police...

NYPD Investigating Incident, Officers Placed On Modified Duty NEW YORK (CBS) -- Undercover police officers who arrested four men on drug charges are under investigation after surveillance video proved the men they arrested committed no crime. Drug charges against brothers Jose Colon and Maximo Colon, along with two of their friends have been dropped. The undercover NYPD officers are seen on video dancing in the street, then attempting to frame four innocent men. "I asked police officer why are you arresting me," said Maximo Colon. "Never did I get an answer." The investigators swore under oath they bought drugs from...

The El Paso sector Border Patrol chief, a UTEP professor and the special agent in charge of the El Paso FBI spoke about the cartel war in Juarez and Mexico. The deadly cartel war responsible for dozens of deaths a week in Juarez is liable to go on for another two years, the El Paso’s Border Patrol Chief Victor Manjarrez said at today’s El Paso Press Club Meet the Press forum. UTEP Professor Tony Payan blamed the former governor of the state of Chihuahua and mayor of Juarez for allowing the lawless atmosphere that led to the armed struggle between...

As organized crime galvanizes their hold on Mexico, their network infiltrates our colleges, street gangs, and our communities. Our country is being raped and ravaged as our elected leaders remain insulated and uncaring within the halls of Congress.

MONTERREY - Drug hitmen shot dead six Mexican policemen on patrol in the marijuana-producing state of Sinaloa, the latest in a growing stream of attacks on police, the local attorney general's office said on Friday. A group of armed men blocked a busy road in Sinaloa's state capital Culiacan on Thursday night and shot at the police with automatic weapons from two vehicles, a spokesman for the state attorney general said. "We believe the killers were drug hitmen. The police were from different local and state units traveling together in the same vehicle," he said. The attack came hours after...

RIVERTON — Tie dye, tee-pees, and cries for free love and world peace. If it sounds like an image of the 1960s, residents near Pinedale may believe they've traveled back in time next week when a large band of "hippies" hold their annual gathering at a national forest near Pinedale. Federal officials began arriving in Riverton earlier this month to prepare for the arrival of the group, which calls itself the Rainbow Family of Living Light. Anywhere between several hundred to a few thousand members of the group are expected, and their arrival has already drawn the ire of some...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Republican White House hopeful John McCain is heading to Colombia and Mexico next week for talks with their presidents on trade and narcotics, aides said Thursday. Burnishing his foreign policy credentials against Democrat Barack Obama, McCain will be in the Colombian city of Cartagena on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to a brief campaign statement. The Arizona senator will meet Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to discuss a bilateral free-trade pact that Democrats have held up in Congress, campaign aides said. They will also talk about US support for the Uribe government's fight against "narcoterrorism," McCain spokeswoman Hessy Fernandez...

President Hugo Chavez's Venezuela has become the key trafficking route for most of the cocaine sold on Britain's streets, anti-drugs officials believe. Last year, about 250 tons of cocaine are thought to have passed through Venezuela - up to a five-fold increase on 2004. Much of this ended up in Britain. Anti-drugs officials estimate that more than 50 per cent of all the cocaine consumed in Britain has been trafficked through Venezuela - under the "revolutionary" regime of Mr Chavez. The figure could be as high as two thirds. Senior commanders in Venezuela's security forces are thought to be profiting...

According to federal drug czar John Walters, the marijuana available in the United States is better than ever. Well, that's not quite the way he put it, but it's closer to the truth. Last week, as part of its ongoing effort to convince baby boomers that today's "Pot 2.0" is much more dangerous than the stuff they smoked when they were young, Walters' Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) announced that "levels of THC—the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana—have reached the highest-ever amounts since scientific analysis of the drug began in the late 1970s." The University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring...

MEXICO CITY — Unknown assailants shot to death a Federal Police commander and his bodyguard in a Mexico City restaurant at mid-day on Thursday, Mexican officials said. Igor Labastida, head of the Traffic and Contraband office of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), was shot dead along with one of his bodyguards, spokesperson Minerva Amado with the attorney general's office (PGR) said. "Two subjects got out of a black vehicle, entered a restaurant where the commander was eating and opened fire on him and his escorts," said Amado. Two other Labastida bodyguards were wounded and hospitalized, Amado said. Police are searching...

Ten people have been indicted in connection with a killing prosecutors allege was a botched kidnapping attempt carried out by members and associates of the Texas Syndicate prison gang on behalf of the Zetas. Juan Manuel "Pugs" Marquez Rodriguez, 27, is charged in the indictment with murder in the Dec. 21, 2006, death of Julio A. Serrano. He and nine others were indicted last week in state district court. Only Marquez is charged with murder. All 10 face charges of criminal conspiracy and engaging in organized criminal activity involving the attempted kidnapping of Serrano, which resulted in Serrano's death. The...

All that is needed to stop the violence is to legalize drugs. How often do you hear this canard repeated by libertarians, George Soros' Open Society Institute acolytes, communists, and others who want to legalize marijuana and related substances? They would have you believe that the reason people are killing each other is not because they are mean-spirited, evil, ruthless, greedy people; no, they reserve such adjectives for oil company executives. They would have you believe that what causes the violence is that drugs are illegal. This is just sophistry. It is usually the type of speciousness one finds emanating...

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified a primitive area of the brain that makes us adventurous -- a finding which may help explain why people routinely fall for "new" products when shopping. Using brain scans to measure blood flow, British researchers discovered that a brain region known as the ventral striatum was more active when subjects chose unusual objects in controlled tests. The ventral striatum is involved in processing rewards in the brain through the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine. Scientists believe the existence of this age-old reward mechanism indicates there is an evolutionary advantage in sampling the unknown.

An illegal immigrant dishwasher who lost $49,000 to the U.S. government as he tried to take it home to Guatemala will get some of the money back, his attorney told CNN Wednesday. Pedro Zapeta, an illegal immigrant, managed to save $59,000 while working as a dishwasher for 11 years. Pedro Zapeta was "very, very happy" when he learned about a federal appeals court ruling that says he is entitled to recover some of the money, said attorney Robert Gershman, who handled the financial end of Zapeta's case. Zapeta was carrying $59,000 in cash when he was stopped at a security...

The question isn't whether a Pembroke Pines police officer was justified in fatally shooting Vincent Hodgkiss in his home early Thursday morning, or whether illegal drug activity was taking place there. The real question is this: Was a paramilitary-style dawn raid the best way to go about serving a drug-related search warrant?

Authorities say it's the biggest pot bust in Cocke County in the last five years, maybe more. Around 10 a.m. Monday, helicopter pilots spotted hundreds of thousands of marijuana plants growing in the Cherokee National Forest in Cocke County. They alerted officers on the ground, and the crew trekked more than a mile into the forest from Interstate 40, where they came upon what they call a DTO, or drug trafficking organization. "They just live in it, move in, grow, and that's all they're there to do is grow marijuana," Special Agent Jason Poore said of the growers. Poore is...