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"The raids, part of an ongoing operation dubbed Project Synergy, are being carried out by DEA, targeting designer synthetic drugs....Ali Reza Samanifar, 56, was arrested at his home, according to Shelby County sheriff's officials. He is charged with three counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance....Local law enforcement officials, assisted by DEA agents, are going to convenience stores and head shops across the country where the drugs are sold......Authorities believe some of the owners of these stores send profits from the sale of these drugs back to their homes in Yemen, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as other...

What a disappointment yesterday's mistrial in the Holy Land Foundation federal trial was. What the public wanted was clarity and closure in this long-running case, which Dallas first began to learn details of years ago in the groundbreaking reporting of this newspaper's Steve McGonigle. What the jury delivered after 19 days of deliberation – and an additional four-day delay in unsealing the verdicts – was confusion. /snip photo from Associated Press Defendants Shukri Abu Baker (center left) and Abdulrahman Odeh hug after a mistrial was declared yesterday in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Prosecutors say they'll retry the complicated case....

It's time for the United States to limit financial transactions that involve American companies to governance by secular laws. The swelling oil revenues of the Gulf states have created demand from those markets for U.S. investments in banks, real estate and industrial stocks. Most has been invested according to the usual financial guidelines, but the recent surge in revenues has also stimulated the demand to impose Islamic law (sharia) on financial investments.

Iraq - A spate of U.S. raids on Iraqi smugglers signals a new strategy to deny the guerrilla insurgency one of its chief recruiting assets: money. If U.S. military strategists are correct, the insurgency will soon face a financial crisis when old Iraqi dinar notes bearing the face of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) will be worthless. The military wants to deepen the crisis by launching raids on black marketeers thought to be funding the guerrilla movement. "If we can stop the money, we can stop the insurgency," a coalition military official in Baghdad told The Associated Press, speaking...

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are now in competition over which offers more compensation to the families of suicide bombers and to those harmed during IDF operations. Hamas offers monthly payments to families of suicide bombers or those who die in clashes with the IDF. The family also receives a one-time payment of $10,000 from Hamas but less than half that from the PA. Over the past two weeks, PA officials have visited families whose houses or business were demolished by the IDF to offer them financial assistance. More than 200 families have benefited, and some later published newspaper advertisements...