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WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama said on Thursday "individuals in the Iranian government" were aware of the alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, and they must be held accountable. "We believe that even if at the highest levels there was not detailed operational knowledge, there has to be accountability," Obama told a joint news conference with the visiting South Korean president.

Ms Valles, 21, fled Mexico in fear of her life, hustling her parents, sisters, husband and one-year-old son into a 4 x 4 vehicle and hurtling across the border to seek asylum in the United States. They left just in time. That night a squad of hit men arrived at their small bungalow and ransacked the rooms. "I would like to go back home," she said. "But if I hadn't left my country I wouldn't be alive now." In spite of her diminutive size and sweet, girlish manner, Ms Valles had some powerful and vicious enemies. The criminology graduate was...

Gunmen in northern Mexico have shot dead three relatives of a police officer being held over a deadly arson attack on a casino last month. The officer's father, stepmother and stepbrother were killed in their home in the city of Monterrey. Police believe it was an act of revenge by the Zetas drugs cartel, after the officer named gang members allegedly involved in the casino attack. The blaze killed 52 people and caused revulsion across Mexico. Police officer Miguel Angel Barraza is one of six suspects detained in connection with the 25 August arson attack on the Casino Royale in...

The DEA announced Thursday the results of Project Delirium. Agents said it was a 20-month long investigation that spanned the country with the La Familia Michoacana cartel as its target. DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart said the operation resulted in 1,985 arrests, $62 million in cash, and around 2,773 pounds of meth, 2,722 kilos of cocaine, 1,005 pounds of heroin, 14,818 pounds of marijuana and $3.8 million in other assets. Of those arrested, 35 were in Austin after law enforcement executed search warrants at 11 homes in the area on Wednesday.

In one of the most chilling revelations yet about the violence in Mexico, a drug cartel-connected trafficker claims fellow gangsters have kidnapped highway bus passengers and forced them into gladiatorlike fights to groom fresh assassins. The elderly are killed. Women raped. And able-bodied men are given hammers, machetes and sticks and forced to fight to the death. In an interview arranged by intermediaries on condition neither his name nor the location of his Texas visit be published, the trafficker also admitted to helping push $5 million to $10 million a month worth of cocaine into the U.S. Law-enforcement sources confirm...

The signature crimes of the most violent drug cartel in Mexico are its beheading and dismemberment of rival gang members, military personnel, law enforcement officers and public officials, and the random kidnappings and killings of civilians who get caught in its butchery and bloodletting. But this disparate band of criminals known as Los Zetas is no longer just a concern in Mexico. It has expanded its deadly operations across the southwestern border, establishing footholds and alliances in states from New York to California. Just last year, federal agents tied a cocaine operation in Baltimore to the Zetas. “Those of us...

The U.S. is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the capture of whoever is responsible for the slaying of an American federal agent in Mexico, suggesting Washington seeks to snare the person who ordered the killing or doubts those in Mexican custody acted alone. [snip] Mike Vigil, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration executive who was based in Mexico, said....."They have arrested a few lowlifes that apparently were involved, but what is not known is if they were the only ones responsible," Vigil said. ...Alonzo Pena, who recently retired as deputy director of Immigration and...

EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) The mayor and police chief of a small town on the U.S.-Mexico border were among 11 suspects indicted for allegedly trafficking around 200 guns to Mexico, authorities said on Thursday. The U.S. Attorney's office in New Mexico said the mayor of Columbus, Eddie Espinoza, the town's police chief Angelo Vega, and village trustee Blas Gutierrez were among those arrested on an 84-count indictment. "Gutierrez, Espinoza and Vega were duty sworn to protect and safeguard the people of Columbus," U.S. Attorney Kenneth J. Gonzales said in a statement. "Instead, they increased the risk of harm that the...

La Familia drug cartel is selling not just drugs, but also counterfeit Microsoft Office computer software, according the Redmond, Wash., tech giant. Microsoft showed off unauthorized copies of its Office 2007 software in Paris today which the company said it found for sale in Mexico. The pirated copies of Office were marked with La Familia cartel's rectangular "FMM" logo that the Microsoft says proves the link between the counterfeiting and the organized crime group, according to a Bloomberg report. "This is the real side, the scary side of counterfeiting and it plagues the world," said David Finn, Microsoft's associate general...

The decapitated bodies of 15 young men have been found in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco. Police said they were discovered near a shopping centre and were all aged between 15 and 25. They were dumped there by drug cartel members fighting over the control of the drugs business in the city. SNIP In this latest violent incident, police responding to a report of a burning vehicle near Acapulco's Plaza Senderos shopping centre shortly after midnight found five other abandoned vehicles and the decapitated bodies. Media reports say that three messages signed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, leader of...

SAN DIEGO (CNS) - The mother of a 14-year-old boy suspected of working as an assassin for a Mexican drug cartel pleaded not guilty in San Diego Thursday to a charge of being in the United States illegally.

... The murder rate in Guatemala is already double that of Mexico, where more than 10,000 drug-related murders have taken place this year. Now there is evidence that one of Mexico’s most vicious cartels, the Zetas, are setting up bases in Guatemala as they come under increasing pressure from Felipe Calderon’s government. The Zetas have set up training camps and are trying to intimidate Guatemalan cartels. So far they’ve forced at least one Guatemalan drug family to leave the country. “When you have drug traffickers afraid of other drug traffickers, you know its getting pretty bad,” U.S. Ambassador Stephen McFarland...

...one law enforcement officer, speaking on condition that his name not be used, told The Brownsville Herald that the two-day toll “easily” passed 100... A Texas businesswoman, who was in Matamoros running errands, reported being in the downtown area when a shootout erupted just a block away. The woman reported hearing machine guns and over 20 seconds of continuous grenade explosions... Another woman said that while she was walking near the Pumarejo General Hospital in Matamoros, she saw a truck with armed gunmen collide with an SUV carrying a family. The woman stated that the impact rolled the SUV on...

The decapitation of the lead Mexican investigator in the alleged murder of a jet-skier on a border lake is a sharp retort to President Obama's administration, a Texas congressman said. "The Mexican drug cartels just sent a message to the White House that the United States no longer controls the border," Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, told WND. The severed head of investigator Rolando Armando Flores Villegas was delivered this week to an army garrison in Ciudad Miguel Aleman in the Tamaulipas state in Mexico. The city is across the river from Zapata County, Texas, the location of Falcon Lake, where...

Violence continued Wednesday in Matamoros as a grenade was thrown at city hall and a local university was shut down because of a threat of some type of attack. Also, the Mexican navy announced the arrest of 30 Gulf Cartel members during operations conducted Monday and Tuesday throughout the state of Tamaulipas. As disturbances continued to plague Matamoros, panic ripped through downtown around 9:30 a.m. when a grenade was thrown at city hall, injuring two people. Federal police and the military cordoned off an area six blocks wide around the main plaza at the intersection of Calle Sexta and Morelos....

The bodies of the four young men were discovered early on Sunday, hung upside down by their feet from a bridge near a wealthy area of Cuernavaca, a leafy city about an hour outside Mexico City, where many of the nation's elite own homes. The victims' genitals, index fingers and heads had been cut off, according to a statement from the attorney general's office in Morelos state, which includes Cuernavaca. Their heads and genitals were found nearby, along with a handmade sign, the statement said. "This will happen to everyone that helps the traitor Edgar Valdes," the placard read, referring...

MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities say that police in Ciudad Juarez have captured five alleged drug gang members suspected in the killings of two federal officers, including one whose body was hacked to pieces. One of the suspects is also believed to have acted as a lookout in the July 15 car-bomb attack on police that killed an officer and two other people, Luis Cardenas Palomino, regional security chief for the federal police, said Friday. He described the five men as members of the La Linea gang, which works for the Juarez drug cartel. He alleged they killed two federal...

Barbara "Hair on Fire" Espinosa of Scottsdale, AZ is down on the border today along with some 500 other Arizona citizens, at a Tea Party rally in support of Arizona's SB 1070 Immigration Law. Barbara is on private property, just west of Naco, and described her position as about 100 feet from the border fence. She says, "Right across from the border fence where we are, the property belongs to the drug cartel and the area is used to transport drugs and humans into the United States. Senate candidate JD Hayworth is there and has been talking to the ranchers...

Local law enforcement was bombarded with calls from across the country Saturday asking about a report that the Zetas had taken over two ranches off Mines Road. But officials with the Laredo Police Department, Webb County Sheriff’s Department and Border Patrol said they knew nothing about such an incident, while Erik Vasys, an FBI spokesman in San Antonio, said the agency does not comment on rumors.

With the massive amount of US military on the way to Costa Rica, has our country rolled over and now admitted that it has lost control of the trafficking of drugs, money laundering and crime in general? Ever since I can remember Costa Rica has said, “If ever invaded, it´s neighbors would come to its rescue.” In times past that referred to Venezuela, but now we have Chavez and….well that´s another 100 pesos. The new friendly neighbor must be the United States who is sending 46 war ships, 200 helicopters and 7,000 Marines to rescue us from invading drug cartels,...