Free Republic

On Oct. 2, 2004, the container ship Ever Unique, sailing under a Panamanian flag from Yantai, China, berthed in the Port of Newark. [snip] ... F.B.I. and Secret Service agents, acting as part of a sting operation, gathered around the container and cracked it open ... they found counterfeit $100 bills worth more than $300,000, secreted in false-bottomed compartments. The counterfeits were nearly flawless. They featured the same high-tech color-shifting ink as genuine American bills and were printed on paper with the same precise composition of fibers. The engraved images were, if anything, finer than those produced by the United...

Despairing business owners along the border are wringing their hands, watching over shops and stores with few customers. Waiters in the best restaurants stand idle amid empty tables. The week before Christmas, I found myself seated with a friend in Nuevo Laredo's plaza, both of us wondering the same thing: Where were all the Christmas shoppers and the camouflaged hunters who come south to eat and drink? Over the course of the day, we didn't see any. The streets, the market and the restaurants were ours alone. Tourist traffic from Laredo has dwindled to a trickle, while long, snaking lines...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Organized criminals in Europe are diversifying and moving away from specializing only in single types of crime, European police body Europol said on Tuesday. "The move away from a single type of criminal activity (e.g. drug trafficking) to diversification into multi-crime activities (e.g. drug trafficking, commodity smuggling and illegal immigration) is a continuing trend," Europol Acting Director, Mariano Simancas said in a statement. "It is also worth highlighting that organized crime groups focus on facilitating illegal immigration and trafficking in human beings, because they consider this a low risk...