When policy makers in Washington worry about Mexico these days, they think in terms of a handful of numbers: Mexico's 19,500 hectares devoted to poppy cultivation for heroin; its 17,500 hectares growing cannabis; the 95 percent of American cocaine imports brought by Mexican cartels through Mexico and Central America.
They are thinking about the wrong numbers. If there is one number that embodies the seemingly intractable challenge imposed by the illegal drug trade on the relationship between the United States and Mexico, it is $177.26. That is the retail price, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data, of one gram of pure cocaine from your typical local pusher. That is 74 percent cheaper than it was 30 years ago.
This number contains pretty much all you need to evaluate the Mexican and American governments' "war" to eradicate illegal drugs from the streets of the United States. They would do well to heed its message. What it says is that the struggle on which they have spent billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of lives over the last four decades has failed.
There is little reason to expect the elections this year will do much to address the challenges to the bilateral relationship. Enrique Peña Nieto, elected president of Mexico on Sunday, is a scion of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was tainted by authoritarianism, corruption and fraud during seven decades in power, before it was booted out by voters 12 years ago. In the United States, neither President Obama nor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, has shown much interest in the nation's southern neighbor.
Puppet Masters
© Real World Image
The 'alleged' 'suspect' is guilty of travelling by train to seek legal advice at the request of his lawyers. (The train travels near to an Olympic venue)
The 'alleged' 'suspect' is guilty of travelling by train to seek legal advice at the request of his lawyers. (The train travels near to an Olympic venue)
The 24 year-old has previously tried to get to Afghanistan, allegedly for terrorist training, and is suspected of fighting for the Somali Islamist group al Shabaab, which has been responsible for thousands of deaths, including those of Western aid workers. He is accused of trying to recruit other Britons to its cause.
A Home Office lawyer warned after his discovery in the Olympic area that the man - known as CF - wanted to "re-engage in terrorism-related activities, either in the UK or Somalia" and is "determined to continue to adhere to his Islamist extremist agenda".
His detention is the most serious security alert yet to hit the Olympic Park.
It is disclosed today after a week which saw 14 terror-related arrests across Britain, including a white Muslim convert detained over an alleged plan to carry out a major terrorist attack.
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Results of an IED. 2 anti tank mines stacked.
Results of an IED. 2 anti tank mines stacked.
The identities and nationalities of the NATO victims were withheld and details of the attack were not immediately available.
The deaths take the number of NATO troops killed in the last two days to eight, one of the deadliest periods of violence for foreign troops in weeks.
In addition to the six NATO deaths, bombs and attacks killed 16 Afghan civilians, five policemen and two members of the U.S.-led coalition in southern Afghanistan, Afghan and NATO authorities said.
Comment: The closing line seems misleading. Was Afghanistan a hyper-chaotic nation before the United States and other Western Governments began destroying it? War is Chaos and Terror.
© codinghorror.com
I just paid the monthly bill today and it was $27.08. That's a 50% increase in 8 years. I don't have better service. I don't have more bells and whistles. What could possibly have resulted in this increase?
My actual charge from Verizon for the service is only $16.45. Here is the detail for the rest of the bill:
Federal Subscriber Line Charge - $6.29
Federal Universal Service Fee - $1.09
NJ Sales Tax - $1.67
911 System/Emerg Resp Fee - $0.90
Federal Excise Tax - $0.68
A full 39% of my bill is for government taxes and fees. I don't know if Verizon is calling things Federal to mislead people, or whether these surcharges are required by the Federal government. Who knows? I'm either being screwed by a Mega-Government or a Mega-Corporation.
"Evil requires the sanction of the victim." Ayn Rand"
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Ayn Rand (R)
Ayn Rand (R)
Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for (Ayn) Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated. Foreign PolicyTo put this information into some perspective I would ask you to read a paragraph from Wikipedia:
The World Bank estimates that 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). This means that a third of the global poor now reside in India.(...) India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world.Now into that context, to see what Indians are so eagerly googling, let's mix in the following sayings of Ayn Rand, which though few, hopefully give the full flavor of her "Objectivist" philosophy:
Iran is not seeking to have the atomic bomb, possession of which is pointless, dangerous and is a great sin from an intellectual and a religious point of view."
Thus did supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declare in February that Iran's possession of atomic weapons would be a mortal sin against Allah.
IranIt is also the unanimous judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, declared in 2007 and affirmed in 2011, that Iran has abandoned any program to build nuclear weapons.
Is the Ayatollah lying? Is the entire U.S. intel community wrong?
Iran's plants, at Natanz, where uranium is enriched to 5 percent, and at Fordow, where it is enriched to 20 percent - both below weapons grade - are under constant U.N. monitoring. Iran has offered to surrender its 20 percent uranium and cease enriching to that level, if the West will provide isotopes for its nuclear medicine and lift some of the more onerous sanctions.
No deal, says the United States. Iran must give up enrichment entirely and indefinitely.
Thus did supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declare in February that Iran's possession of atomic weapons would be a mortal sin against Allah.
Iran
Is the Ayatollah lying? Is the entire U.S. intel community wrong?
Iran's plants, at Natanz, where uranium is enriched to 5 percent, and at Fordow, where it is enriched to 20 percent - both below weapons grade - are under constant U.N. monitoring. Iran has offered to surrender its 20 percent uranium and cease enriching to that level, if the West will provide isotopes for its nuclear medicine and lift some of the more onerous sanctions.
No deal, says the United States. Iran must give up enrichment entirely and indefinitely.
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Alexis Tsipras
Alexis Tsipras
Alexis Tsipras, head of the Coalition of the Radical Left party, known as Syriza, told Parliament Saturday he was especially warning those who want to "grab state property on the cheap." He warned would-be buyers of state property that they might lose all their money and face criminal proceedings.
Tsipras proposes a moratorium on the payment of Greece's debt until the country, mired in a deep recession, returns to growth. He predicts his party will soon come to power because the coalition government will fail.
The newly-elected Parliament will stage a vote of confidence on the government at midnight on Sunday.
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Dominant Social Theme: The corruption of these Western banks is terminal!
Free-Market Analysis: So Barclays resides at the "heart of darkness" which is LIBOR - various rates at which banks and the rest of can borrow. Something isn't quite right about this.
Bloomberg is busy setting up QIBOR in Qatar, and the putative explanation is that there is too much corruption in London. Now we have an example of corruption! Convenient? Right on time ...
QIBOR is just like LIBOR and those involved will "set" the rate at which banks borrow after conversing with banks themselves. This is a US$ 90 trillion market and thus the movement of this facility from London to Qatar is no small event.
If one were interested in moving such a large market, charges of corruption would surely be helpful. And lo and behold, we are reading about them everywhere.
What is the big deal about financial corruption? It is simply a fact that the world's modern central banking is shot through with corruption. How could it be otherwise? It begins with central banks that fix the price of money and its volume and continues from there.
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The operation is said not to be in connection with this month's London Olympic Games
The operation is said not to be in connection with this month's London Olympic Games
A 30-year-old woman detained in west London on Thursday, when five men were also arrested, was freed on Saturday.
A 22-year-old woman became the seventh person arrested in the operation when she was detained in east London in the early hours of Saturday.
The arrests are on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.
On Friday, a magistrate granted detectives additional time until 12 July to keep in custody those arrested the day before.
The woman and a 21-year-old man were detained at separate addresses in Ealing, while a 29-year-old man was arrested in an Ealing street. The woman is married to one of the men.
Air strike is first since Pakistan reopened Nato supply route to Afghanistan and comes just before crucial diplomatic meeting
The death toll from a US drone strike in Pakistan rose to 19 on Saturday, increasing tensions ahead of a meeting between secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her Islamabad counterpart.
Pakistani authorities increased the estimate from an initially reported 12 suspected militants who were killed in the attack in the Dattakhel region in North Waziristan on Friday.
On Sunday, Clinton is due to meet with Pakistan's foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, in Tokyo. That meeting, on the sidelines of a major conference on Afghanistan, will be given added pique as a result of the increased use of drones by the CIA in recent months.
Friday's strike came just days after Washington and Islamabad resolved a protracted dispute over the use of unmanned armed aircraft, with Clinton apologising for an air attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November.
The apology paved the way for Pakistan to permit trucks carrying Nato supplies to cross into Afghanistan for the first time in more than seven months.
© Str/EPA
People in Multan, Pakistan, protest against US drone attacks on Saturday.
People in Multan, Pakistan, protest against US drone attacks on Saturday.
Pakistani authorities increased the estimate from an initially reported 12 suspected militants who were killed in the attack in the Dattakhel region in North Waziristan on Friday.
On Sunday, Clinton is due to meet with Pakistan's foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, in Tokyo. That meeting, on the sidelines of a major conference on Afghanistan, will be given added pique as a result of the increased use of drones by the CIA in recent months.
Friday's strike came just days after Washington and Islamabad resolved a protracted dispute over the use of unmanned armed aircraft, with Clinton apologising for an air attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November.
The apology paved the way for Pakistan to permit trucks carrying Nato supplies to cross into Afghanistan for the first time in more than seven months.
Comment: The headline 'Man travels on same rail route a few times over a couple of months at request of Lawyer" doesn't quite have the same attention-grabbing detail to it. This is in essense all he has actually done and the article is pure nonsense. Just look at how many times the words 'suspect', 'alleged', 'was possibly', 'claims', 'says' is framed around complete fiction. All in all a wonderfully written piece of propaganada with a highlight of presenting the new crime of the century: 'acting suspiciously in a dinghy'!