Free Republic

At least three people were killed and four injured in the second mass shooting to erupt in Los Angeles County in eight days -- the sixth in California this month, according to police. The latest shooting occurred Saturday in the upscale Beverly Crest neighborhood of Los Angeles, bordering Beverly Hills. The mass-casualty shooting unfolded around 2:30 a.m. when police received multiple 911 calls of a shooting in progress at a short-term rental luxury home in the neighborhood, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. A senior LAPD source told ABC News that the three people killed were found in a...

America’s first foray into rolling back prohibition 2.0 is barely underway, and already marijuana prices have dropped low enough to convince some cartel farmers in Mexico to abandon the crop. Mere months after two US states legalized marijuana sales, five Nobel Prize-winning economists released a UN report recommending that countries end their war on drugs. It would seem they were onto something. But in order to further decrease drug-trade violence in so-called producer states, the US first needs to legalize marijuana, but then also the US must stop using the UN to pressure producer countries into supply-based drug prohibition. Latin...

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — Two decapitated bodies and scalped heads were dumped outside a Sam's Club store in Acapulco while three headless corpses were found nearby on the resort city's main tourist strip, authorities in Mexico said Saturday. The bodies discovered outside the Sam's Club were cut into more than 20 pieces, Guerrero state's Public Security Department said in a statement.

mmigration: As the President gives an amnesty speech near a hotbed of Mexican drug violence, Arizona's governor takes her case to the Supreme Court and will use prison labor and online donations to build a border fence. President Obama flew into the border city of El Paso Tuesday, no doubt over the wildfires that have plagued the politically red state and whose disaster he has chosen to virtually ignore. He may have also passed the El Paso City Hall, which last summer became a war zone as gunfire from the Mexican side pockmarked the building. He was there to tout...

Four women and a 14-year-old girl have been found with their throats slashed in an exotic Mexico beach resort. The semi-naked and bound bodies of two women and the teenager were discovered in the salon in the early hours of Saturday morning. The other two victims were found dumped in an abandoned car and on a street behind a church in other parts of the town. All of the women were 30 years old or younger. The teenage girl had begun working at the salon five days prior to her death Police said they were not ruling out drug or...

Standing in the main foyer of Burges High School in El Paso, Texas, it's easy to think you had accidentally crossed the border into Mexico. Left and right, students are greeting each other in Spanish and kissing each other's cheeks, as they would in Mexico. Drug violence has forced thousands of Mexican families to seek refuge in the U.S. As a result, some students are entering U.S. classrooms along the Southwest border with traumas that schools have never seen before. And with so few people willing to talk about it, many aren't getting the help they need. In border cities,...

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Gunmen burst into a bar called "Desesperados" in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and opened fire on Sunday, killing five people and wounding nine others, authorities said. Assailants also killed the state's prisons director and his son in a second attack in the area, which has turned into a deadly battleground for warring drug cartels. Gunmen opened fire on the vehicle carrying Chihuahua prison director Gerardo Ortiz and his son in Chihuahua city, the state capital, located south of Ciudad Juarez. The state's prisons used to be the site of frequent battles between gangs,...

MEXICO CITY — Authorities found the remains of at least 23 people in a series of pits and scattered on the ground at a suspected drug-gang dumping site near the industrial hub of Monterrey in northern Mexico, an official said Friday. Investigators were using heavy equipment to search for more bodies at the rural site outside Mexico's third-largest city, local media said. Photographs showed charred spots on the soil suggesting some bodies may have been partially burned.

Rafael Morales had been married about five minutes when, in the middle of his wedding, gunmen stormed into the Lord of Mercy Catholic Church in Ciudad Juarez on Friday and kidnapped him, his brother and uncle. They shot another man outside. As the bride and guests were ordered to the floor, weeping in terror, the others were whisked away. On Monday, the bodies of the 29-year-old groom, his brother and uncle were found in Juarez alongside that of an unidentified fourth man in the bed of a stolen Toyota pickup truck with Texas plates. The corpses revealed signs of torture....

Police seize 5,000 amphetamine-based ‘Yaba’ pills, often referred to as "Hitler's drug," at Ben-Gurion airport; “It allows Thais to work for two days straight,” senior police source explains. A dangerous and addictive drug that was originally developed by Nazi scientists to boost the endurance of Axis soldiers, and which causes users to become aggressive and violent, is being smuggled into Israel from Thailand in ever-larger amounts, The Jerusalem Post has learned. In Thailand, the methamphetamine-based drug is known as “Yaba” (crazy medicine), and in the West, it is often referred to as “Nazi Speed” or “Hitler’s drug.”

(AP) — SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Caribbean islands battling drug-fueled crime had one of their bloodiest years on record in 2009, with Jamaica, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico hitting or coming close to all-time highs for homicides. The violence reflects the drug trade's deep entrenchment in the region, with high murder rates becoming a fact of life at tourist havens that traffickers use as transit points for South American drugs bound for Europe and the United States. In countries including the Bahamas, which set a record with more than 82 slayings, officials say they are contending with turf battles...

Clinics in Violent Mexican City to Turn Away Gunshot Victims   CIUDAD JUAREZ – Private clinics in Ciudad Juarez, the scene of a bloody turf war between rival drug cartels, are refusing to treat victims of gunshot wounds due to the risk to their staff and other patients. Representatives of the clinics told authorities during a meeting that they could no longer receive this type of patients because cartel hit men have occasionally gone to hospitals to finish off a member of a rival drug mob who survived an attack. Luis Carlos Esquivel, coordinator of Mexico’s State Health Services,...

Obama recently stated during a trip to Mexico that “More than 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico comes from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.” What REALLY line our shared borders are drug cartels, rapists, kidnappers, murderers, and unspeakable acts of violence such as beheadings. Why is the Mexican government unable, despite the abundant natural resources available to their country, to establish a pro business economic environment wherein the people of Mexico would want to stay in their own country because they have ample opportunities to flourish there just as they have available...

Mexican city's journalists scared silent Rival Mexican cartels employ violence to ensure silence By Hector Tobar Los Angeles Times NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - Here, it's better not to know. Information can be poison in this border city. When there's a shootout downtown, even the most ambitious radio reporter will not necessarily rush to the scene. So it went the day last month that four undercover federal police officers were ambushed and killed in thick lunch-hour traffic on the city's busiest street. The offices of several newspapers and radio stations were just blocks away - but the news broke 700 miles...

His body was found in shallow grave in a Juarez backyard. The home was a burial ground for the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes drug cartel. A lawsuit that was filed late Thursday blames the United States Government for the death of El Pasoan Luis Padilla. This lawsuit was filed just after 4pm Thursday in Federal Court. This suit is filed on behalf of the family of Luis Padilla, a Socorro High School graduate who had a wife and three kids. The suit alleges that the US Customs agents failed to pull out their informant after they heard him commit a murder...