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LHASA, China—Police closed off Lhasa's Muslim quarter on Friday, two weeks after Tibetan rioters burned down the city's mosque amid the largest anti-Chinese protests in nearly two decades. Officers blockaded streets into the area, allowing in only residents and worshippers observing the Muslim day of prayer. A heavy security presense lingered in other parts of Lhasa's old city as clean-up crews waded through the destruction inflicted when days of initially peaceful protests turned deadly on March 14. It was not clear why the area was cordoned off, although rioters had prominently targeted businesses belonging to Chinese Muslim migrants known as...

Sorry if this has already been posted. They were talking about it on the air. The plan is for DC police officers to go house to house in certain areas and search for weapons and if any are found they will NOT prosecute. Last time I checked this was against the law.

Nearly a dozen members of a police SWAT team in western Colorado punched a hole in the front door and invaded a family's home with guns drawn, demanding that an 11-year-old boy who had had an accidental fall accompany them to the hospital, on the order of Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak. The boy's parents and siblings were thrown to the floor at gunpoint and the parents were handcuffed in the weekend assault, and the boy's father told WND it was all because a paramedic was upset the family preferred to care for their son themselves. Someone, apparently the unidentified...

'He really abused me,' resident says after arrest by Orem police officer OREM - Two days after Independence Day, 70-year-old Betty Perry experienced an ordeal she said shouldn't be happening in America. The retired military and U.S. government employee answered the door at her home Friday morning to talk with a police officer about her bone-dry lawn and ended up getting arrested and suffering a bloody nose. "What have I done?" she asked. "I'm old now. I can't believe this." The Orem police officer, as yet unnamed by city officials, cited Perry for violating a city ordinance with her "sadly...

Red's Trading Post in Twin Falls, Idaho, is the state's oldest gun shop, opened since 1936. In 2004, a routine BATFE audit revealed minor clerical errors. According to Red's, out of nearly ten THOUSAND firearms transferred between 1996 and 2004, the alleged error rate did not even reach 1%. Even the BATFE acknowledges these are minor paperwork errors -- there are no missing firearms and no willful illegal acts.And yet the BATFE has revoked the ability of Red's Trading Post to acquire firearms for resale, although they're still permitted to sell the firearms in stock ... for now. But that's...

TWIN FALLS - Red's Trading Post, one of Idaho's oldest gun shops, can trade no longer. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has revoked the business's license to buy, trade or obtain guns after an ATF audit found Red's employees sold guns improperly numerous times between 1999 and 2004. Red's manager, Ryan Horsley, admits when the business sold guns it sometimes left blank required parts of a gun purchase form, omitted a background check on a special order, failed to log multiple handgun sales to the same customer in five working days, did not keep track of...

Radley Balko, who has tirelessly publicized the problems created by the promiscuous use of SWAT teams, reports that federal police in Atlanta have used a SWAT team to help the recording industry enforce copyright law. Even worse, the target wasn't even a commercial piracy operation: Last night, a federal SWAT team assisted the RIAA in a raid on the studio of Atlanta musician DJ Drama. This local news report says the locally famous mixtape DJ is under investigation for piracy. But Drama's supporters say the DJ is a mix artist, not a bootlegger. They say news footage of the raid...

A wave of immigration raids in Concord, Pacheco and west Contra Costa County has prompted a local Latino advocacy group to file a complaint. Officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, falsely identified themselves as police, refused to show identification proving their agency affiliation and prevented detainees from taking prescription medication with them, according to a draft of a complaint by the League of United Latin American Citizens. The league also claims that agents wrongfully searched apartments of Latinos without permission under the pretext of picking up those with outstanding warrants, said Jerry Okendo, president of the league's Bay...

92-year-old woman was killed after she shot three Atlanta narcotics officers Tuesday night when they broke down the front door of her home trying to serve a search warrant, police said. One officer was hit in the arm, one was struck in the shoulder, and one was shot in the thigh. All were rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital, where they were in stable condition late Tuesday night. Police did not release their identities.

[...] Organizers blasted the federal Drug Enforcement Administration for targeting businesses that are legal under Proposition 215, a California law that permits marijuana use for medical treatment. Demonstrators said the action would restrict access to regulated pot shops for seriously ill patients. [...] "They didn't do any arrests, just took drugs and computers," said Paula "Cookey" Brown. "It just seems like a straight armed robbery." [...]

Two of the Moss Landing Harbor residents who were the subjects of random boat searches during Labor Day Weekend say their experiences were closer to armed invasions than the friendly "safety inspections" characterized by U.S. Coast Guard officials. Both residents said search crews entered the harbor in inflatable boats with machine guns mounted on their bows. Then, carrying M-16 rifles, they approached residents and boarded and searched their boats in the name of safety and "homeland security." One resident, who asked not to be identified for fear or retribution, said his experience was "very intimidating, very frightening." "To me it...

Disaster Can’t Destroy Gun Rights Monday, September 12, 2005 National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre slammed New Orleans authorities Monday for seizing legal firearms from lawful residents."What we’ve seen in Louisiana - the breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of disaster - is exactly the kind of situation where the Second Amendment was intended to allow citizens to protect themselves, " LaPierre said."When law enforcement isn’t available, Americans turn to the one right that protects all the others - the right to keep and bear arms," LaPierre said. "This attempt to repeal the Second Amendment should be...

Most visitors just knock on the door. But when a detective approached Troy Levi Miller's home one day last year, he made no attempt to contact anyone inside. Instead, he wiped a sterile cloth over the doorknob and left. A test on the cloth allegedly revealed traces of methamphetamine, and those results helped a narcotics task force get a warrant to search the South Salt Lake house. But now, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball has thrown out the test as a violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. Kimball's ruling was the third one from a...

Some home schoolers say they were having a meeting in Simpsonville Park when an officer started bullying them. The group of home schoolers included 6 mothers and about 15 to 20 kids, every Wednesday for the past 5 years the group has come to Simpsonville Park to socialize and meet with each other, but they say this past Wednesday was like no other. One of the mothers in the group, Jan Blanchard says, "We were just sitting there talking..." "I heard a man yelling take your hands out of your pocket and I turned around and he was yelling at...

It appears the Brits have climbed the Cliffs of Insanity and taken a collective nosedive into the River of Outright Absurdity. My friend, author Michael Z. Williamson, and I used to laugh about Britain, their unreasonable ban on armed self defense and their hysterical attempts to further correct the problems caused by said ban by implementing yet more stringent and bizarre restraints on people's rights. Mike was born in the UK. I used to kid him about the future of Great Britain. I used to tell him that soon, sharp implements will be banned, and people will be forced to...

Camera's first catch gets felony drug charge As Marcus D. Jackson smoked dope in a blue Chevy Caprice, he had no idea anyone was watching, police say. But about a block away, officers were monitoring his every move on a surveillance camera set up at Augusta and Pulaski to target crimes both serious and minor that bring down the neighborhood's quality of life. When they swooped in and arrested Jackson, the officers allegedly found $20 worth of pot and Ecstasy, a so-called "club drug," valued at $60. The 1:30 a.m. Saturday bust was the first one for Operation Disruption, which...

<p>Watch your mailbox -- and pray you haven't been chosen.</p> <p>Internal Revenue Service officials have begun sending letters to taxpayers chosen largely at random for special audits later this year and next year. These audits, the first of their kind in more than a decade, are designed to give agents a fresh look at how much cheating exists, what types, how to spot it and how to reduce unnecessary audits in the future.</p>

Court: IRS Owes Millions for Fraud Washington (Jan. 22, 2003) – A federal appeals court has ruled that attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service committed "fraud on the court" after giving secret deals to two pilots in return for their testimony against 1,300 other pilots who bought into the same tax shelters. The federal appeals court on Friday overturned a previous Tax Court ruling against the pilots, who were found guilty of tax evasion and ordered to pay a collective sum totaling more than $2 billion in penalties. The appeals court ruling requires the IRS to pay tens of millions...

VANCOUVER -- Riding high after U.S. states rejected measures to relax drug laws, drug czar John Walters came to Canada this week to talk tough about a new front in the drug war. Marijuana poses a greater danger to the United States than heroin, cocaine or amphetamines, said Mr. Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, in an interview yesterday in Vancouver. About 60 per cent of six million people who need treatment services for drug abuse in the United States are dependent on marijuana, he said. Earlier this month, Mr. Walters campaigned against...

— WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Countering a basic principle of American anti-drug policies, an independent U.S. study concluded on Monday that marijuana use does not lead teenagers to experiment with hard drugs like heroin or cocaine. The study by the private, nonprofit RAND Drug Policy Research Center rebutted the theory that marijuana acts as a so-called gateway drug to more harmful narcotics, a key argument against legalizing pot in the United States. The researchers did not advocate easing restrictions in marijuana, but questioned the focus on this substance in drug control efforts. Using data from the National Household Survey on Drug...

<p>NEDERLAND, Colo. -- It was an honest mistake. What seemed to be a crazed man firing a gun at officers turned out to be a frustrated motorist banging on the hood of his broken-down truck.</p> <p>Ronald Cobbley, 37, was on his way home around 3 p.m. Friday when his temperamental blue pickup stalled. Irritated, Cobbley jumped out and began to curse and beat his fists on the hood.</p>

Big Governor Is Watching You Terror From On High Cloaked in the favorite conservative lingo of states' rights, the Bush administration has drawn up a proposal that ought to give even the president's staunchest backers the willies. Presented as a draft, the "Model State Emergency Health Powers Act," written by the Centers for Disease Control, sets forth procedures and rules so that a state government could respond to a sudden outbreak of smallpox, anthrax, or other form of bioterror attack. Granting governors the power to declare a "bioterrorism emergency," the proposal, as originally written, would have allowed them to quarantine...