Free Republic

Seven People Found Dead in Dallas-Area Apartment Published December 25, 2011 GRAPEVINE, Texas – Seven people believed to be related had opened their Christmas gifts and started cleaning up the wrapping paper when they were shot to death in a suburban Texas apartment, police said Sunday. Authorities said they believe the shooter is among the dead, but got a warrant before doing a full search on the small chance that it was otherwise. Four women and three men, aged 18 to 60, were found in an adjoining kitchen and living room area when police entered the apartment around midday, said...

A recent vacation in Mexico turned into a nightmare for a 79-year-old Illinois man. But it wasn't a devastating bus crash that almost killed U.S.-born Alfonso Acosta. It was his stay in one of Mexico's government-run hospitals. According to a harrowing account in the Quad-City Times, a daily newspaper, Acosta suffered a "major head injury, multiple facial fractures, broken ribs and a punctured lung." Yet for five weeks he lay "virtually untreated" at the hospital where he was taken in Toluca, about 40 miles southwest from Mexico City, say outraged family members in the United States who rushed to his...

In the past, most if not all North American indigenous peoples had a strong belief in individual property rights and ownership. Frederick Hodge (1910) noted that individual private ownership was “the norm” for North American tribes. Likewise, Julian Steward (1938, 253) asserted that among Native Americans communal property was limited, and Frances Densmore (1939) concluded that the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest had property rights similar to Europeans.’ These early twentieth-century historians and anthropologists had the advantage of actually interviewing tribal members who had lived in pre-reservation Indian society.

Mexican soldiers hit the jackpot when they carried out a surprise search of a car in the unruly border town of Tijuana and found $15 million plus jewels and drugs stashed inside. The haul, uncovered on Friday, most likely belonged to one of the country's notorious drug cartels, the defense ministry said in a statement Tuesday. Showing the money off to the press, officials said it was believed that the cash was being transferred to a house used by members of the criminal gang headed by Joaquin Guzman," known by his alias as "El Chapo" and one of the most...

Students studying Spanish in a Texas public high school were asked to recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance as part of an assignment, and when one student refused, stating that it upset her, the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson, writes Madeleine Morgenstern at the Blaze. The incident happened last month at Achieve Early College High School in McAllen, Texas — a city located about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. 15-year-old sophomore Brenda Brinsdon refused to participate, stating that she was particularly offended because the presentations in teacher Reyna Santos’s class...

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- Mexican officials say soldiers searching vehicles for hidden drugs found 140 Central Americans crammed into a tractor-trailer rig. The Defense Department says troops trying to fight narcotics traffic and organized crime in the southern state of Chiapas found the migrants on Sunday. It did not say what country they were from.

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - The recent arrests of three alleged drug gang leaders from Mexico and the shooting of a sheriff's deputy in South Texas are raising fears among some Lone Star State officials that the brutal drug wars plaguing Mexico are taking hold north of the Rio Grande. On Sunday, Deputy Hugo Rodriguez of Hidalgo County in the southern tip of Texas was shot several times when he pulled over a vehicle containing a person kidnapped by members of Mexico's Gulf Cartel, County Sheriff Lupe Trevino said. Rodriguez's bulletproof vest saved his life, Trevino said. "I have always said...

Less than two months ago, on the day after the 10th anniversary of September 11th, the Obama Administration suspended the most successful alien-interdiction program on the northern border. Border Patrol agents based in Rochester and Buffalo, who had taken thousands of illegal aliens into custody, were ordered to stand down. Specifically, a highly successful long-term monitoring of interstate buses and Amtrak trains was ordered to stop. Rochester and Buffalo became, for all intents and purposes, free-transit zones for illegal aliens. From the best enforcement in the northern tier of states, to no enforcement at all – in response to orders...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico says the country's economy expanded by 3.7 percent in the third quarter compared to the same period of 2010. Preliminary estimates by Mexico's Treasury Department show formal-sector employment grew by 4.2 percent.

"Hillary doesn't have to audition for the part of Caesar's wife. She knows when to be out of the room." -- Anonymous State Department source. Since it has been a few days, readers might want to refresh their memories by revisiting "In at the beginning." The State Department & the Gunwalker Scandal. Part 2. The 90% Myth. "I have not backed off" an AWB. The last four paragraphs: My sources say that this battle of the "statistics" was taken very seriously by all players -- the White House, State and Justice. Yet, WHY was this game of statistics so important...

<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A grocery store worker accused of handing out a semen-tainted yogurt sample at an Albuquerque market pleaded guilty Thursday.</p> <p>Under terms of his plea agreement, Anthony Garcia admitted he tainted a sample of the yogurt he was handing out at Sunflower Market in January. He also admitted putting some of his semen on a plastic spoon that he placed with the yogurt.</p>

A fatal accident that the police say involved an illegal immigrant driving drunk has stirred outrage in Massachusetts and put Gov. Deval Patrick on the defensive for his resistance to a federal program intended to deport criminals.

Suspected Mexican drug traffickers from the Zetas drug cartel on 20 September drove two trucks to a main avenue in the Mexican Gulf coast city of Boca del Rio in Veracruz state and dumped 35 corpses during rush hour while gunmen stood guard, menacing frightened motorists with automatic weapons. So, why is this being written about here? Well, if for no other reason, Mexico’s drug cartels have declared a de facto war with the government for control of the country’s northern provinces for exports routes into the United States. Meanwhile, Washington, fixated on the decade-old war on terror, the Middle...

Officials with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration say they took down several bosses from the Sinaloa Cartel in a move they say "decimated" a Utah-based cell of the Mexican crime ring. At least seven arrests came Tuesday .. part of an 18-month investigation that has yielded more than 30 arrests in Utah, California and Nevada. Authorities have also seized more than 30 pounds of methamphetamine, 200 pounds of marijuana, a kilogram of heroin and a kilogram of cocaine, as well as more than $322,000 and guns.

“Mexican commandos have discreetly traveled to the United States, assembled at designated areasand dispatched helicopter missions back across the border aimed at suspected drug traffickers,” reports the New York Times. This is all part of what the Obama Administration is calling “boomerang operations” which are designed to get at Mexican drug traffickers through the back door. ”The cartels don’t expect Mexican police coming from the U.S.,” one senior military official told the Times. Clearly things are not going well in Mexico.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The Los Angeles, Times reported that William G. McMahon, William D. Newell and David Voth, the three key supervisors in the Phoenix-run investigation that went wrong, were promoted to management positions at the ATF's Washington headquarters. The House committee investigating "Fast and Furious" asked the ATF to explain the new jobs and to confirm whether or not McMahon, Newell and Voth had been promoted. The ATF's acting director Kenneth E. Melson, told the Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff that the jobs were not considered promotions because as no one received a raise in...

Federal officials said Thursday they've taken down a drug and weapons trafficking ring involving members of a U.S. Iraqi community and a major Mexican drug cartel that was caught selling large amounts of drugs, guns and grenades. Police in El Cajon said they've arrested more than 60 people in the takedown of the ring, whose members are suspected of being affiliated with the Chaldean Organized Crime Syndicate based in Detroit. Smugglers were shipping drugs from El Cajon to Iraqis in Detroit, authorities said. El Cajon and federal police say they have seized 18 pounds of methamphetamine, narcotics, cocaine and other...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Police in southern California have arrested 60 people and broken up an Iraqi criminal ring accused of selling drugs, machine guns and improvised bombs out of an immigrant social club, authorities said on Thursday. The swoop by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and local police targeted a network operating out of El Cajon, which is near San Diego and close to the border with Mexico.

UKIAH -- An estimated $800 million worth of marijuana has been seized following a massive raid on illegal grows on public lands deep in Northern California's pot country, authorities said Tuesday. ... Several Mexican-based drug trafficking organizations were behind the illegal grows, Department of Justice spokeswoman Michelle Gregory said. In previous years, officials have blamed Mexican drug cartels for some of the state's largest growing operations, but Gregory stopped short of making that claim.

At least 122 firearms from a botched U.S. undercover operation have been found at crime scenes in Mexico or intercepted en route to drug cartels there, according to a Republican congressional report being issued on Tuesday. Mexican authorities found AK-47 assault rifles, powerful .50 caliber rifles and other weapons in late 2009 that were later linked to the U.S. sting operation to trace weapons going across the border to Mexico, the report said. Guns from the program, dubbed "Operation Fast and Furious," also were found at the scene of the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in the border...