On Tuesday in Atlanta, kidnappers shot a family dog and took 14 year-old Ayvani Hope Perez captive, demanding $10,000 for her release. 150 law enforcement officers fanned out over the Atlanta area to find Ayvani and bring the perpetrators to justice.
When they found Ayvani 36 hours later and arrested the kidnappers, it turned out one of the kidnappers should never have had the chance to kidnap Ayvani. In fact, he shouldn’t have been in the U.S. at all.
Read more here.
With the national debate focused on civilian gun control, is perhaps the biggest armed threat within the U.S. being minimized?
According to the FBI, criminal street gangs – mostly comprised of illegal aliens – are acquiring high-powered, military-style weapons to potentially engage in lethal encounters with law enforcement members and citizens alike.
Criminal street gangs are responsible for the majority of violent crimes within the U.S. and are the primary distributors of most illicit drugs, according to a 2009 report by the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, or NDIC.
The NDIC was a task force established in 1993 to coordinate law enforcement actions to stop drug trafficking and to curb the growing threat of violent gangs in the U.S. The agency was closed by the Obama administration in June 2011.
Prior to the shutdown of the NDIC, the agency released statistics on street gangs that some found unusual.
In 2010, the agency’s National Drug Threat Assessment stated that drugs were being sold on behalf of the cartels in “more than 2,500 cities.”
Then, in the 2011 official assessment, that number was reduced to “a thousand U.S. cities” – meaning that in one year, criminal drug gangs were cleaned out of 1,500 cities resulting in a 60-percent reduction.
Dave Gibson, a columnist for Examiner.com, asked, “Where were the press releases? Why isn’t the Obama campaign talking about this rather astounding feat every day?”
The NDIC’s reports were entirely removed from the Justice Department’s website.
An attempt to access the report brings users to a page that reads, “This website is no longer maintained and may contain dated information.”
Read more here.
Two weeks ago, I appeared, as I do occasionally, on a regional PBS show called “Kansas City Week in Review.” As one of four panelists from the local media, and the only conservative, I so altered the discussion on “immigration” that even our quick-witted host was left without words.
At the 2:05 mark of this video, I introduced an unexpected variation on the illegal-immigration theme. “The biggest mass killing this past weekend did not take place in Aurora, Colorado,” I told them. “It took place in Goliad, Texas.”
The other panelists looked at me as if I were crazy, which at least a few of them think I am. For that matter, I imagine most readers of this article don’t know what I am talking about.
Here is what happened. On July 22, less than 48 hours after the Colorado shooting, a Mexican coyote lost control of his Ford F-250 pick-up truck at high speed on Highway 59 outside of Goliad and killed 14 of the 22 Central Americans on board. Most had been laid out on the truck bed like sardines.
The driver, 22-year-old Ricardo Mendoza-Pineda, died in the crash as well. As the responders discovered the hard way, he was the only person on the truck with ID, in his case a driver’s license from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
“This is coming as news to many of your viewers,” I told the show’s host. “This was a criminal act that resulted in 15 deaths. And no one wants to talk about it because it has no useful political value for the people who determine what’s news and what’s not.”
“People go to the movie theater every single day,” retorted Kansas City Star reporter Mary Sanchez, who was at least aware of the Texas horror. “That resonates with people.”
To a degree, Sanchez was right. The movie theater shooting has more implicit news value, but I think we can agree that if a tea-party activist murdered 14 Central American day laborers in front of a Home Depot on July 22, it would still be headline news today.
Read more here.
A high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody is making startling allegations that the failed federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” isn’t what you think it is.
It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels.
The explosive allegations are being made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the Sinaloa Cartel’s “logistics coordinator.” He was extradited to the Chicago last year to face federal drug charges.
Zambada-Niebla claims that under a “divide and conquer” strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 as long as the intel kept coming.
Read more here.
The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is one of the better public schools in America, and certainly one of the best schools in California, period. Many parents consider a university education at such a school a blessing, and even those without children who attend college often look at America’s public university system as the envy of the world, and yet one more reason to be proud to be an American. UCLA is certainly a contributor to that sense of pride.
Yet at the same time, if recent news are any guide, the school has a legally questionable weakness for illegal aliens and their enablers. On July 25 of last month, we reported that UCLA had given roughly $100,000 to the racist “brown pride” group MEChA, whose stated mission is to reclaim a large chunk of the United States for chicano peoples as a separate nation. Ironically, the money was being given to MEChA as part of an attempt to retain as many students as possible (IE stop them from failing out), a curious choice considering that MEChA’s mission appeared to have nothing to do with academics, except for trying to subvert it as much as possible in the name of one racial or ethnic group.
And apparently, UCLA is not even satisfied with spending money to retain as many students who are sympathetic to illegal immigrants as possible. Now, Campus Reform reports that they have set up a specific wing of the university devoted exclusively to teaching students who are covered under California’s DREAM Act – that is, illegal immigrants:
Read more here.
Turns out that libs and progs may get their DREAM Act, without Congress having to do a durned thing. This is thanks to the Obama administration, which is using the Department of Homeland Security to legislate illegal immigration. Essentially, the Department of Homeland Security will stop any deportation proceedings for illegal immigrants who are caught but determined to have the following criteria: attending school, have family in the military or are primarily responsible for other family members’ care. Those with criminal records will be the focus of future deportation proceedings. As for the 200,000 who are caught each year but do not have a criminal record … you can stay!
Making inroads among students in school systems across the nation is a new drug known as “spice.” Also known as K2, spice is a mixture of herbs and spices that typically is sprayed with a synthetic compound chemically similar to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. It mimics the effects of marijuana and can be purchased in head shops, tobacco shops, various retail outlets and over the internet as a chemically-laced incense product.
Not surprising is that spice has become a problem in the military. The Navy recently discharged 16 sailors assigned to the USS Bataan for using or dealing spice. Seven midshipmen were also expelled from the Naval Academy and five cadets from the Air Force Academy. During the last four months 151 sailors have been accused of using or possessing spice under the Navy’s zero tolerance policy.
Spice made its entry into the U.S. from Europe in 2008 when a public high school in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago reported the first Illinois school drug overdose involving spice. The drug caused the student to experience a marijuana-like high which led to a severe anxiety/panic attack. The student related how he had purchased the drug over the Internet, smoking it just before the start of the school day. The package in the student’s possession had as its ingredients: “Herbal extracts of Blue Lotus flowers, Bay Bean, Dwarf Skullcap, Lion’s Tail, and others — all legal. Troubling is that hospital urine tests do not detect spice.
Joseph Proctor told his girlfriend he was popping out to the convenience store in the quiet Mexican beach town where the couple had just moved, intending to start a new life.
The next morning, the 32-year-old New York native was dead inside his crashed van on a road outside Acapulco. He had multiple bullet wounds. An AR-15 rifle lay in his hands.
His distraught girlfriend, Liliana Gil Vargas, was summoned to police headquarters, where she was told Proctor had died in a gunbattle with an army patrol. They claimed Proctor — whose green van had a for-sale sign and his cell phone number spray-painted on the windows — had attacked the troops. They showed her the gun.
His mother, Donna Proctor, devastated and incredulous, has been fighting through Mexico’s secretive military justice system ever since to learn what really happened on the night of Aug. 22.
It took weeks of pressuring U.S. diplomats and congressmen for help, but she finally got an answer, which she shared with The Associated Press.
Three soldiers have been charged with killing her son. Two have been charged with planting the assault rifle in his hands and claiming falsely that he fired first, according to a Mexican Defense Department document sent to her through the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.
It is at least the third case this year in which soldiers, locked in a brutal battle with drug cartels, have been accused of killing innocent civilians and faking evidence in cover-ups.
Such scandals are driving calls for civilian investigators to take over cases that are almost exclusively handled by military prosecutors and judges who rarely convict one of their own.
“I hate the fact that he died alone and in pain an in such an unjust way,” Donna Proctor, a Queens court bailiff, said in a telephone interview with the AP. “I want him to be remembered as a hardworking person. He would never pick up a gun and shoot someone.”
President Felipe Calderon has proposed a bill that would require civilian investigations in all torture, disappearance and rape cases against the military. But other abuses, including homicides committed by on-duty soldiers, would mostly remain under military jurisdiction. That would include the Proctor case and two others this year in which soldiers were accused of even more elaborate cover-ups.
The first involved two university students killed in March during a gunbattle between soldiers and cartel suspects that spilled into their campus in the northern city of Monterrey. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission said soldiers destroyed surveillance cameras, planted guns on the two young men and took away their backpacks in an attempt to claim they were gang members. The military admitted the two were students after university officials spoke out.
In that case, military and civilian federal prosecutors are conducting a joint investigation into the killings. The military, however, is in charge of the investigation into the allegation of crime-scene tampering.
In the second case, two brothers aged 5 and 9 were killed in April in their family’s car in the northern state of Tamaulipas. The rights commission said in a report that there was no gunbattle and that soldiers fired additional rounds into the family car and planted two vehicles at the scene to make it look like a crossfire incident. The Defense Department stands by its explanation and denies there was a cover-up.
Read more here.
The end of the year means a turnover of House control from Democratic to Republican and, with it, Congress’ approach to immigration.
In a matter of weeks, Congress will go from trying to help young, illegal immigrants become legal to debating whether children born to parents who are in the country illegally should continue to enjoy automatic U.S. citizenship.
Such a hardened approach — and the rhetoric certain to accompany it — should resonate with the GOP faithful who helped swing the House in Republicans’ favor. But it also could further hurt the GOP in its endeavor to grab a large enough share of the growing Latino vote to win the White House and the Senate majority in 2012.
Legislation to test interpretations of the 14th Amendment as granting citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants will emerge early next session. That is likely to be followed by attempts to force employers to use a still-developing web system, dubbed E-Verify, to check that all of their employees are in the U.S. legally.
There could be proposed curbs on federal spending in cities that don’t do enough to identify people who are in the country illegally and attempts to reduce the numbers of legal immigrants.
Democrats ended the year failing for a second time to win passage of the Dream Act, which would have given hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants a chance at legal status. House Republicans will try to fill the immigration reform vacuum left by Democrats with legislation designed to send illegal immigrants packing and deter others from trying to come to the U.S.
Democrats, who will still control the Senate, will be playing defense against harsh immigration enforcement measures, mindful of their need to keep on good footing with Hispanic voters. But a slimmer majority and an eye on 2012 may prevent Senate Democrats from bringing to the floor any sweeping immigration bill, or even a limited one that hints at providing legal status to people in the country illegally.
Read more here:
A peace march called by local authorities in western Mexico turned into a show of support for a slain drug lord Sunday, with adults and children carrying signs lauding the capo known for handing out Bibles to the poor.
Hundreds of people turned out for the march in Apatzingan, the birth place of La Familia cartel leader Nazario Moreno, who was known as “The Craziest One” and reputedly indoctrinated his gang members in pseudo-Christian ideology.
The government says Moreno was killed in Apatzingan on Thursday in a shootout with federal police. The hunt for Moreno and other La Familia leaders set off two days of battles in key parts of Michoacan state, with cartel gunmen using torched cars and buses to blockade highways. At least 11 other people were killed, including a baby and a teenage girl.
The Apatzingan government convoked the march to call for peace and demand that federal troops and police leave the city. But local officials quickly distanced themselves from the event after people showed up with the pro-Moreno signs.
One man held up a sign that said: “Nazario will always live in our hearts.” A boy in a checkered shirt held another saying “Mr. Nazario, for students your ideals live on.” A little girl in pigtails held a sign reading “La Familia Michoacana is more than one state.” A woman held one high over her head proclaiming: “Long live La Familia Michoacana.”
Read more here.
U.S. Constitutional Free Press 