Free Republic

'The View' host Sherri Shepherd covers the latest issue of 'Precious Times' magazine. In an eight-page feature story in the Christian women's lifestyle publication, the 41-year-old comedienne shares candid revelations about her faith, including her conversion from being a Jehovah's Witness to Christianity. "Before I converted to Christianity, I was a Jehovah's Witness. In 1993, my mother was dying from diabetic complications. My sister was heavy into drugs, and we would have to go and get her from crack houses. I was in a very physically abusive relationship. I was sleeping with a lot of guys and had more abortions...

WASHINGTON, July 21, 2008 – The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime recently declared Afghanistan’s Konar province to be “nearly poppy-free” in 2006 and 2007. Afghan counter-narcotics and government officials speak with members of the media during a groundbreaking at the new Konar Teacher Training Center in downtown Abad, July 6, 2008. Courtesy photo  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. During a July 6 trip to the province, Afghanistan’s minister for counternarcotics, Gen. Khodaidad, announced that Konar has qualified for two monetary awards totaling $750,000 from the Counternarcotics Trust Fund. Konar Gov. Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi and his provincial...

MEXICO CITY — The capture was worthy of an action thriller: elite Mexican troops rappelling from a helicopter onto the deck of a mysterious submarine. The 33-foot vessel turned out to be crammed with parcels believed to contain cocaine, possibly tons. Its disheveled crew of four emerged in stocking feet and baggy shorts, saying they had shipped out from Colombia a week earlier under threat of death. Mexico's military confirmed Thursday that the men are Colombian but offered little new information...Capt. Jose Luis Vergara, a spokesman for the Mexican navy, said authorities were hauling the "very well-constructed" vessel to shore...

A homemade submarine packed with cocaine was seized Wednesday by the Mexican Navy off the Pacific coast. The 30-foot vessel was first detected as it made its way north about 200 miles off Oaxaca, but was intercepted hours later when it surfaced. The sub had a crew of four men who were arrested and flown by helicopter to the city of Huatulco. The suspects claim to be Colombian fishermen who had been forced to pilot the sub for drug traffickers threatening to harm their families. A Navy spokesman said the sub seizure is a first for Mexico. Other makeshift submarines...

The owner of a Montreal cafe where patrons can smoke a psychoactive variety of sage says he will close up shop next month. Matthew Liscomb told the Montreal Gazette that Les Mentheurs would go out of business on Aug. 23 due to legal battles and changes in provincial tobacco laws. On top of that, he said, business insurance has been increasingly difficult to get. It's not been easy getting insured and it's not legal to operate a business without proper insurance, he told the Gazette. The closure will mark the end of a stormy history for Les Mentheurs, a 30-seat...

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen killed eight youths and a police chief and took dozens of restaurant patrons hostage for hours in two attacks in the drug gang-ridden state of Sinaloa, officials saidSunday. A group of hitmen sprayed four cars with bullets on a busy street in the city of Guamuchil in the early hours of Sunday, killing five young men and three female minors, a police source told Reuters. Advertisement In an earlier attack on Saturday, six other armed men caused pandemonium in the Pacific port city of Mazatlan by taking refuge in a shopping mall to escape security forces...

WASHINGTON — The pens, pads, mugs and other gifts that drug makers have long showered on doctors will be banned from pharmaceutical marketing campaigns under a voluntary guideline that the industry is expected to announce Thursday. The industry’s Code on Interactions with Health Care Professionals will ask the chief executives of large drug makers to certify in writing that “they have policies and procedures in place to foster compliance with the code.” The code was written by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry’s trade association. But the code provides no definite limits on the millions of dollars...

It seemed an ideal marriage, a scientific partnership that would attack mental illness from all sides. Psychiatrists would bring to the union their expertise and clinical experience, drug makers would provide their products and the money to run rigorous studies, and patients would get better medications, faster... --snip-- An analysis of Minnesota data by The New York Times last year found that on average, psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from makers of newer-generation antipsychotic drugs appear to have written three times as many prescriptions to children for the drugs as psychiatrists who received less money or none. The drugs...

...the pharmaceutical industry has become a lightning rod for critics. For example, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, blasted the drug industry in a much-publicized 2004 book, accusing it of profiteering and having become "a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit." She maintained the pharmaceutical industry's reputation for innovation is a myth, that it "feeds off the NIH" and that new drugs "nearly always stem from publicly supported research." ...Mr. Zycher and his colleagues concluded that scientific contributions of the private sector were essential for the discovery and/or development of virtually all the...

Un-freaking-believable. Jaxon Van Derbeken at the SFChronicle follows up on his weekend report exposing how San Francisco operated a special tax-funded shuttle service for illegal alien Honduran drug lords to protect the poor “youths” from federal immigration officials. Now, we learn that when the city was told to stop flying the illegal immigrant drug offenders home to escape prosecution and formal deportation and permanent bars from US citizenship, they instead sent the “youths” to southern California group homes–from which they easily escaped: Until recently, San Francisco flew juvenile illegal immigrants convicted of drug crimes to their home countries rather than...

President Hugo Chavez's Venezuela has become the key trafficking route for most of the cocaine sold on Britain's streets, anti-drugs officials believe. Last year, about 250 tons of cocaine are thought to have passed through Venezuela - up to a five-fold increase on 2004. Much of this ended up in Britain. Anti-drugs officials estimate that more than 50 per cent of all the cocaine consumed in Britain has been trafficked through Venezuela - under the "revolutionary" regime of Mr Chavez. The figure could be as high as two thirds. Senior commanders in Venezuela's security forces are thought to be profiting...

Anheuser-Busch Cos. will stop making and selling caffeinated alcoholic drinks as part of a settlement with 11 state attorneys general, the attorneys general said Thursday. The states' top lawyers began an investigation of the U.S.'s largest brewer by sales a year ago. They alleged that the St. Louis company had failed to adequately disclose negative health effects of its Tilt and Bud Extra drinks on their labels, made false or misleading marketing claims that they help users stay up late for partying, and illegally targeted minors with its advertising. "Quite simply, alcohol mixed with high amounts of caffeine is a...

All that is needed to stop the violence is to legalize drugs. How often do you hear this canard repeated by libertarians, George Soros' Open Society Institute acolytes, communists, and others who want to legalize marijuana and related substances? They would have you believe that the reason people are killing each other is not because they are mean-spirited, evil, ruthless, greedy people; no, they reserve such adjectives for oil company executives. They would have you believe that what causes the violence is that drugs are illegal. This is just sophistry. It is usually the type of speciousness one finds emanating...

Police reports show that three men arrested in a Phoenix home invasion and homicide Monday may have been active members of the Mexican Army. While on the J.D. Hayworth show, Phoenix Law Enforcement Association President Mark Spencer said that the men involved were hired by drug cartels to perform home invasions and assassinations. The Monday morning incident at 8329 W. Cypress St. resulted in the death of the homeowner. Between 50 and 100 rounds were fired at the house. Spencer said a police officer told him that one of the men captured said they were completely prepared to ambush Phoenix...

Mexico City, Jun 22 (EFE).- Police found the bodies of five people who were killed with AK-47 assault rifles in Novolato, a city in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, in an apparent settling of scores between organized-crime groups, prosecutors told Efe. The bodies were found early Saturday lined up on the edge of an irrigation canal at the main entrance to the city's San Pedro neighborhood. "The five bodies had the hands tied behind their backs and were betweeen 25 and 30 years" old, a spokesman for the Sinaloa Attorney General's Office said. Police found 104 bullet casings from...

The other day, reading the New York Post's popular Page Six gossip page, I was surprised to find a picture of me, followed by the lines: "ABC'S John Stossel wants the government to stop interfering with your right to get high. The crowd went silent at his call to legalize hard drugs". I had attended a Marijuana Policy Project event celebrating the New York State Assembly's passage of a medical-marijuana bill. (The bill hasn't passed the Senate.) I told the audience I thought it pathetic that the mere half passage of a bill to allow sick people to try a...

The McCain campaign's flat-footedness amid revelations of dangerous government drug testing on veterans reflects very unfavorably on the candidate. Whereas Barack Obama swiftly condemned the Department of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday morning, John McCain, perhaps the nation's most famous wounded veteran, still had not made any public remarks by our deadline last evening. Some scandals require studious silence until the facts emerge. This isn't one of them. As a three-month Washington Times/ABC News investigation revealed this week, the VA is administering drugs with severe potential side effects to hundreds of military veterans participating in studies that fail Medical Ethics 101:...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - A Mexican woman and her three American daughters have been caught smuggling $1.16 million worth of cocaine into Texas from Mexico, a rare case of a mother and her family trafficking drugs, U.S. customs said on Friday. The four women stashed the cocaine under their clothes and inside their 2006 Mercedes Benz and tried to cross through the Brownsville, Texas entry port from eastern Mexico. A sniffer dog alerted customs agents to the smell of cocaine emanating from the car and agents also noted unusual bulges under their clothes, finding cocaine packages on three of the...

More than dozen people living in New Mexico and Texas are named in what appears to be a hit list from a Mexican drug cartel, law enforcement officials said. At least one police officer from southern New Mexico is among the 15 to 20 people named in the threat, said Arturo Baeza, a sheriff's captain in that state's Luna County. The list, thought to be a threat from one of Mexico's powerful and warring drug cartels, was provided June 12 to local authorities by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, Baeza said. Drug cartels are waging a bloody fight for...

(English-language translation) Washington - The U.S. House of Representatives approved last night a $465 million fund included in the Mérida Plan to fight drug-trafficking in Mexico and Central America. The initiative, which President George W. Bush proposed in October of last year, was appproved with 416 votes in favor and 12 against, legislative sources said. The approval includes a total of $400 million for Mexico and $65 million for Central American countries. "The Congress has reached an agreement to support the first year of the initiative meant to fight drug-trafficking and the violence it generates," said Democrat Howard Berman, Chairman...

Just because the U.S. military now lacks what defense eggheads call a peer competitor — a country capable of beating us in a head-to-head confrontation — that doesn't mean it lacks for imagination in conjuring fearful foes. Sure, it was easier for John F. Kennedy to blow smoke about a non-existent "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, or for Ronald Reagan to convince us of the need for a "Star Wars" missile shield when Moscow was still our superpower rival (it may no longer be, but we're still spending $10 billion annually on missile defenses). Snip...The scientists also warn that...

A police spokesman says Oakland Raiders wide receiver Javon Walker was found unconscious on a Las Vegas street after apparently being the victim of a robbery. Police spokesman Bill Cassell said in a statement that Walker was taken to a hospital with "significant injuries" after being found early Monday on a street off the Las Vegas Strip. Cassell said Walker was in fair condition at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center. A Raiders spokesman said the team was "in the process of gathering information" and had no further comment. Walker, 29, played the past two seasons for Denver after four seasons...

With privately bought drugs proving to be up to five times as effective as NHS treatments, The Sunday Times reports on the suffering the co-payments ban is inflicting on patients... The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves. One drug for kidney cancer, routinely available through public health systems in most European countries but not to British patients, can reduce the size of tumours in 31% of patients, compared with just 6% of those...

I’ve heard of bomb sniffing dogs, cadaver dogs, and even hot dogs, but I’ve never heard of pub sniffer dogs. Where else but in Scotland would you find this rare canine breed? (A police operation has started in south west Scotland to send sniffer dogs into pubs to search for drugs. A total of 13 bars were visited by patrols in the Stranraer area as part of the initiative.) Going undercover requires the dog to assume the identity of the typical pub goer. Once it procures the confidence of the locals, it is free to search for drugs while the...

An English teenager died from complications two weeks after taking two abortion pills, her mother told an inquest into her death this week.Manon Jones, 18, described by her mother as a devout Christian teen, opted to terminate her pregnancy at six weeks because she feared the pregnancy would cause conflict within her "Muslim" boyfriend's family, the Daily Mail reported Friday. The teen took the first dose of medication to terminate the pregnancy on June 10, 2005, and the second two days later. On June 15, Jones felt light-headed and experienced heavy bleeding so her boyfriend took her to Southmead...

Robert Downey Jr. has publicly thanked Burger King for helping him overcome his problems with addiction. The fast food chain, he says, also helped to resurrect his career. The fast food epiphany happened in 2003 when the "Iron Man" star was driving a car piled with "tons of f---ing dope," Downey Jr. told Britain's Empire magazine. The actor decided to pull over for a burger and everything changed. "I have to thank Burger King," he said. "It was such a disgusting burger I ordered. I had that, and this big soda, and I thought something really bad was going to...

Bad news: It’s not for America, but for Mexico and Central America. The Merida Initiative, which I have blogged about extensively (see here), passed earlier today by a 311-106 margin. Via CQ Politics: ------------------------------------------------------------------ The bill would authorize $595 million for fiscal 2008, $645 million for fiscal 2009 and $350 million for fiscal 2010. The Senate supplemental would provide $450 million for fiscal 2008; the House version would include $461.5 million. The administration had requested $550 million. Members cited Mexico’s increasingly violent drug war, which has taken some 6,000 lives in the last two years, including recent assassinations of two...

A judge aborted a drug conspiracy trial Tuesday after some jurors were found to have been playing the puzzle game Sudoku while evidence was being given. Sydney District Court Judge Peter Zahra ended the trial Tuesday for two men facing a possible life sentence for drug conspiracy charges. The trial had been running for 66 days and had cost taxpayers an estimated 1 million Australian dollars (US$950,000). The judge was alerted after it was observed the jurors were writing vertically, rather than horizontally. It had been assumed they were taking notes. "Yes, it helps me keep my mind busy paying...

Guatemala plans to send hundreds of troops, elite presidential guards and anti-drug police to its border with Mexico to stem growing drug violence, the government said on Saturday. "The unit should be ready within about 90 days. We are talking about 500 troops" and members of the presidential guard, Interior Ministry spokesman Ricardo Gatica said. Gatica declined to say how many counternarcotics police would be sent to the border, where drug smuggling into southern Mexico, bound for the United States, goes unchallenged. In southern Mexico, suspected drug gunmen dumped a man's head outside a newspaper in Tabasco state on Saturday...

MONTERREY, Mexico - U.S. lawmakers will review the language of a US$1.4 billion anti-drug plan that Mexican officials contend infringes on their nation's sovereignty, a senior U.S. senator said Sunday.

The Hunt for American al Qaeda The United States is turning up the heat in the hunt for the California boy turned al Qaeda operative, Adam Gadahn, who has been charged with treason and is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan. If caught and convicted, Gadahn could face the death penalty. The State Department along with the Department of Diplomatic Security announced the beginning of a publicity campaign in Afghanistan urging locals to provide any information on Gadahn's whereabouts, with a reward if the information leads to his capture. Radio advertisements with information concerning the $1 million reward have...

(English-language translation) After meeting with different social sectors of the country, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte pointed out yesterday that the impunity and weakness of the Guatemalan state prevail as the major problems in fighting organized crime and drug trafficking. Negroponte declared that his country is willing to aid the Central American region in fighting criminals and announced that Guatemala will play an active role in the Mérida Plan towards that purpose. The Mérida Plan is a U.S. assistance program for Mexico, Central America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic to fight drug trafficking, transnational crime, and terrorism....

Mexico is beginning to look like a real war zone. The headlines in the news media are reminiscent of those from some of the most brutal days of the Iraq War. They speak of executions, beheadings, cryptic messages and dozens of people killed in a single day. But the war against drugs that Mexico is waging is not one that can easily eliminate the enemies. snip The Mexican government has made the fight against drugs its No. 1 priority.snip The rival drug cartels are killing each other off, law enforcement agents are hunting down drug dealers, and their hit men...

Federal agents seized bank statements, tax records and correspondence, and found marijuana during a search at the home of state Sen. Ulysses Currie, according to court documents. The documents show agents found marijuana and "drug packaging materials" in a bag on a dresser and in other bags on the floor of a room in the house last week. * * * Currie, 70, is one of the most influential lawmakers in Maryland. The Democrat leads the budget-writing committee that steers state spending.

When Lylah Rose Goldwater visits Shayne Pitts in prison, she can't bring herself to shake his hand, the one that held the gun that killed her daughter 17 years ago. "There seems to be a connection between that handshake and my daughter's death," she said. "One of those emotional barriers I have yet to overcome, if ever." But Goldwater has overcome her hatred of Pitts, 35, who is serving a 40-year to life sentence for the killing of 19-year-old Melody Derosia-Waters in Hopkinton. The mother who once sat in her car outside a courthouse and aimed a gun at Pitts...

Oscar-winning actress Tatum O'Neal told the New York Post that her arrest on Sunday for buying cocaine ''saved'' her from ruining her life. ''I'm still sober!'' she told a Post reporter. ''Just when I was about to change that and wreck my life, the cops came and saved me. I was saved by the bell, by the guys in the Seventh Precinct.'' The actress says the death of her 16-year-old dog sent her into the downward spiral that ended with her hitting Manhattan's Lower East Side on Sunday night in search of drugs. ''It triggered that my mother passed away...

Seven officers named in previous list killed CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - We're getting word a drug cartel in Mexico left another hit list with the names of 12 police officers. Now some of the officers named have already resigned. A similar list of 22 names appeared earlier this year at a monument for fallen police officers in Ciudad Juarez. That list had this message: "For those who still don't believe..." Of the 22 named, seven were killed. Three were wounded in assassination attempts, and all but one of the rest quit their jobs. This new list of officers left at...

Bo (woof) In Commentary: Drugs. I don’t clearly remember how I’ve become addicted to them. It may have been my parents pushing them on me or maybe it was me demanding them. It’s all so hazy now. All I know is that I ‘need’ to have each and every one of my pills to keep me going every day. That’s why this story on an owner pilfering his dog’s drugs is so upsetting. (DES MOINES, Iowa - A Des Moines man who was arrested for driving while intoxicated apparently took his dog’s pills by mistake. Authorities say (con't @ http://boknowsonline.com/2008/06/02/478/)

INTERVIEW-N.Korean methamphetamines flood Philippines 30 May 2008 09:39:07 GMT Source: Reuters By Manny Mogato MANILA, May 30 (Reuters) - High-grade methamphetamines from North Korea have started to flood the Philippines, reducing street prices of the drug by about 50 percent, the head of the country's drug enforcement agency said on Friday. Dionisio Santiago, a retired general, told Reuters there was strong suspicion a huge shipment of methamphetamines seized at the former U.S. navy base of Subic north of Manila this week came from clandestine drugs laboratories in North Korea. "We've been informed by our counterparts abroad that North Korea has...

PARIS — Legendary designer Yves Saint Laurent, who reworked the rules of fashion by putting women into elegant pantsuits that came to define how modern women dressed, died Sunday evening, a longtime friend and associate said. He was 71. Pierre Berge said Saint Laurent died at his Paris home following a long illness. (Aids?) ... Bouts of depression marked his career. Pierre Berge, the designer's longtime business partner and former romantic partner, was quoted as saying that Saint Laurent was born with a nervous breakdown. ... When he bowed out of fashion in 2002, Saint Laurent spoke of his battles...

Mexico: the danger of 'drug ballads'  Last Updated: 12:01am BST 01/06/2008       In the past two years, 15 mexican musicians have been murdered. Their crime: to fall foul of the country's drug barons. Ioan Grillo reports It was three in the morning and the Mexican group Banda Guasavena were driving back from a concert at a cockfighting festival, just over the border from Texas. The audience had been even more rapturous than usual and Fausto Castro-Elizalde, the band's horn player, recalls them chatting happily about the evening.   Grupo Cartel de Sinaloa pose in a cemetery full of extravagant...

The following petition has 2,200 signatures. Also please file any complaints with the FDA (Medwatch Reporting Form). Here is the link. https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/medwatch/medwatch-online.htm Find the blue Begin button to the right to start. Text of petition: The FDA, in compliance with the Montreal Protocol, has banned the use of life-saving CFC propellant albuterol asthma rescue inhalers in order to help restore the ozone layer, even though it has been widely acknowledged that these CFC inhaler emissions are too trivial to harm the ozone layer: Leslie Hendeles, University of Florida Professor of Pharmacy and Pediatrics, has noted that CFC inhalers release negligible...

Border Patrol drug-sniffing dog detected almost 1,400 pounds of marijuana stacked between pallets of squash in a tractor-trailer rig at the Interstate 19 checkpoint Wednesday. The trailer contained 63 bundles of marijuana, with an estimated street value of $1.1 million, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. The driver, a 41-year-old Mexican national, was taken into custody. The vehicle and marijuana were confiscated by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Officials said that since October 2007, the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector has seized more than 520,000 pounds of marijuana. Dog units have been responsible for one-fourth of the seizures.

MEXICO CITY — New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson urged U.S. lawmakers Thursday to resolve their differences over an aid package to help Mexico fight drugs, saying it would be "disastrous" for security on both sides of the border if the Merida Initiative fell through. U.S. President George W. Bush has used a wave of violence in Mexico to push for Congressional approval of the first US$500 million installment of the multiyear aid proposal. But the U.S. Senate approved only US$450 million for the plan, and the House US$461.5 million. The two chambers must agree on a final version before sending...

Nathaniel Abaraham was arrested overnight in Pontiac. Police say he was selling drugs. He shot and killed an 18-year-old man outside a Pontiac party store. Since his release, he's been working on a career in rap music. Most of his lyrics are about death, violence and drugs.

Obama's Gaffes Start To Pile Up. Sounds like a headline from this week's newspapers, right? Nope, it's from the Chicago Sun-Times over a year ago, March 28, 2007. One of the most glaring gaffes mentioned is his claim that "because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge, [his parents] got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born." The famous "Bloody Sunday" march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama took place on March 7, 1965. Obama's parents "got together" around November, 1960 as he was born August 4, 1961. Bear...

Sales of Desire - an unlicensed drug that is said to improve sexual performance - apparently went limp in Edmonton long before Health Canada's recent warning about the harmful side-effects of such drugs. Only one store contacted by Sun Media yesterday, and which asked not to be identified, said it normally stocked Desire but hadn't been able to order any for some time. Other Edmonton stores, like Popeye's supplements at 10651 124 St., stick with reputable suppliers and well-known brand-name products, according to manager Greg Lewis. Health Canada issued a warning Thursday about Desire, which was found to contain the...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - America's wildlife refuges are so short of money that one-third have no staff, boardwalks and buildings are in disrepair, and drug dealers are using them to grow marijuana and make methamphetamine, a group pushing for more funding says. "Without adequate funding, we are jeopardizing some of the world's most spectacular wildlife and wild lands," said Evan Hirsche, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association and chairman of the Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement. The cooperative said in a report released Thursday to Congress that the nation's 548 refuges and the 100 million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System —...

THIS drug is peddled on every street corner in America, and is found in every country in the world. It is psychoactive, a stimulant and addictive. Users say that it increases alertness and focus, and reduces fatigue. But the high does not last and addicts must keep consuming it in increasing quantities. Put this way, sipping coffee sounds more like an abomination than the world's most accepted form of drug abuse. But centuries of familiarity have put people at their ease. In the coming years science is likely to create many novel drugs that boost memory, concentration and planning. These...

As reported executively in the Laguna/El Paso Journal the Calderon administration was expected to rush more Mexican Army troops to the border cities of Juarez, Tijuana, Mexicali, Palomas and others. The first leg of that troop enforcement became an reality yesterday -- Hundreds more Mexican army soldiers arrived in Juárez under the cover of darkness as part of Joint Operation Chihuahua, intended to augment the Mexican governments war against the Mexican Drug Cartels operating in Mexico.