Free Republic

Seven members of one of El Salvador’s most violent street gangs received 390 years in prison for the gruesome massacre of 11 innocents. According to the Daily Mail, seven members Barrio 18 – one of El Salvador’s largest and most violent street gangs – received 35-year sentences for each of the 11 victims, in addition to five-year sentences for being affiliated with street gangs. Local authorities said that the group kidnapped and murdered “three laborers and eight workers of an electric company,” in San Juan Opico – a rural area roughly 30 miles northeast of El Salvador’s capital San Salvador...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A man and a woman were detained after several people were stabbed during a dispute on Indianapolis' southwest side late Thursday night. The incident happened at about 10:20 p.m. in the 1300 block of South Kappes Street, near Morris Street and Belmont Avenue. Five people were injured, and police said a dozen or more men were involved. The victims range in age from 17 to 20, and all of them suffered wounds to their backs...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration on Tuesday lost a long-running court battle over its plan to sell bonds to cover the state's public employee pension costs. The ruling by the 3rd District Court of Appeal could complicate negotiations over the state's already overdue budget. Republican lawmakers are holding up the $104 billion spending plan in part because they believe it will leave California with an unmanageably large budget deficit next year. Tuesday's ruling may only add to that concern, depriving the state of more than $500 million to help close the estimated $5 billion-plus deficit in the 2008-09 budget year. Schwarzenegger...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Heavily armed Mexican police, backed by helicopters, locked down the capital's most notorious neighborhood on Tuesday as part of the latest offensive against rampant drug trafficking. Hundreds of officers with assault rifles lined the Tepito neighborhood's main artery, searching passing motorists. Police had stormed the district, a warren of scruffy homes and market stalls, last week and seized a tenement complex known as "The Fortress" -- reputedly a major cocaine and marijuana distribution center. President Felipe Calderon has sent thousands of troops to fight drug gangs in their strongholds along the Pacific coast and near the...

Southern Californians protest nothing...usually. The lifestyle is as wide-open and apathetic as its sprawl of homes from the Mexican border north into Ventura County. I'm a native Angeleno, which means I was born in Los Angeles -- East Los Angeles to be exact, so don't bull me about being rooted somewhere else. ... There are two main reasons I left Los Angeles in 1991: Rampant crime and the influx of illegal aliens from Mexico -- and those two reasons are connected statistics show. Now, on 25 March 2006, the illegal aliens took their stomp to the streets of Los Angeles...

WASHINGTON -- State and federal law enforcement officers appeared before senators Wednesday to paint a horrific picture of life on the Southwest border, telling of violent assaults, running gunbattles, brazen cross-border incursions and threatened contract killings of U.S. officers. The hearing, co-chaired by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., prompted calls for a border crackdown to combat what Kyl described as "bad, nasty, dangerous people." U.S. Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar showed slides of battered agents, telling senators that his officers increasingly fall victim to attacks by assailants firing weapons, hurling rocks or pursuing the agents with vehicles....