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(BEIJING) -- China’s state-run broadcaster, CCTV, made a grisly announcement this week. It planned to live broadcast the execution of a Burmese drug lord and three of his henchmen for massacring 13 Chinese crewmen aboard a ship on the Mekong River. The murders had enraged China and the broadcast was initially greeted enthusiastically. The two-hour show, which aired on Friday, had all the elements of a sweeps week production, but as the program neared its close, the station abruptly changed plans and did not show the execution. CCTV did not say why it altered its programming, but while the show...

Is there no safe stash for drugs these days? The tan Hyundai was reportedly pulled over for not having working brake lights. When the deputy then asked the driver, Alexis Ann Clancey, 20, along her three passengers, if there were any weapons, drugs or contraband inside the car or on their person, they all said 'no' and gave consent to search, according to a news release from the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office.

A young child remains in critical condition after drinking Drano from a children’s cup at a Florida meth lab, authorities said Wednesday. A total of six people have been charged in connection with the Feb. 20 incident, including the child’s 36-year-old father, Jonathan Wayne Glass, of Milton.

One of the suspects in this case is dying. She is in her 60s, and confined to a wheelchair. One of the other suspects is her caretaker. Related News/Archive Roll call of some who died in 2012 Tampa Bay area has a long history of violent, heinous crimes Panhandle Tasering and rogue deputy hold lessons for current Pinellas Sheriff's Office troubles A young woman struggles with oxy addiction and recovery The girl in the window He is also in his 60s, and a disabled Vietnam veteran. This husband-and-wife crime wave were at their home in Parrish, just across the Sunshine...

Imagine that a police officer, after taking it upon himself to search someone's car, is asked to explain why he thought he would find contraband there. "A little birdie told me," he replies. Most judges would react with appropriate skepticism to such a claim. But substitute "a big dog" for "a little birdie," and you've got probable cause. Or so says the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week unanimously ruled that "a court can presume" a search is valid if police say it was based on an alert by a dog trained to detect drugs. The court thereby encouraged judges...

The US Is Putting More White People In Prison, And Meth Could Be To Blame Erin FuchsFebruary 28, 2013There's been a huge shift in the racial makeup of U.S. prisons in the past decade, The New York Times reports. The Sentencing Project analyzed prison populations from 2000 to 2009, finding the rates of incarceration for blacks dropped sharply during that period: 30.7 percent for black women and 9.8 percent for men. The report also found a major spike in incarceration rates for white men and women during the same period, according to The Times. The rate for white women increased...

Last week, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter told me and a thousand young libertarians that we libertarians are puss- -- well, she used slang for a female body part. We were in Washington, D.C., at the Students for Liberty conference, taping my TV show, and she didn't like my questions about her opposition to gay marriage and drug legalization. "We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist," she says. "The government takes 60 percent of your money. They take care of your health care, your pensions ... who you can hire ... and you (libertarians) want to suck up...

Forget about blessing the beasts and the children; sometimes the children are just beasts. Two teen girls -- one 13, the other 15 -- have confessed to gunning down a man in Guatemala City as reported by the Deccan Herald: "Criminal organizations are hiring and training minors as contract killers to exploit provisions in Guatemalan law that exempt minors from prosecution for such crimes, Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said." Gutemalan crime groups must be pulling a page from the playbook of the Mexican drug cartels. In December 2010 Mexican authorities arrested Edgar Jimenez a/k/a El Ponchis or The Cloak, an...

<p>Ann Coulter on why she thinks libertarians are "******s": "We’re living in a country that is 70-percent socialist, the government takes 60 percent of your money. They are taking care of your health care, of your pensions. They’re telling you who you can hire, what the regulations will be. And you want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, ‘Oh, but we want to legalize pot.’</p>

Last week, conservative Ann Coulter took a swipe at libertarians, calling them "pussies" for their stance on marijuana. Coulter's best qualities are her bluntness (get it?) and her willingness to fight. In her "pussies" comments, she argued that, since the US is a socialist welfare state, people's choices regarding their lifestyles are her business – hence MJ should be illegal. Coulter has a point; socialism turns strangers into family. However, her conclusion that statism and central control are warranted is an abandonment of principle. Libertarians come in several flavors, and nearly equally from left and right backgrounds. The actual Libertarian...

Conservative talker Ann Coulter appeared Thursday on Fox Business Network’s “Stossel” to do battle with the show’s Libertarian host — and his 1,400+ Libertarian guests. Their biggest point of contention? Social Conservatism versus the Libertarian “Individuals Should Be Left Alone” approach. The evening began pleasantly enough, the two discussing whether the U.S. should’ve invaded Iraq following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Coulter believes military action was justified because Saddam Hussein was “definitely looking for uranium from Niger.” But then things became a little more heated when Stossel decided to shift gears and brought up legalizing drugs. “Libertarians and pot,” Coulter...

Today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that "a court can presume" an alert by a drug-sniffing dog provides probable cause for a search "if a bona fide organization has certified a dog after testing his reliability in a controlled setting" or "if the dog has recently and successfully completed a training program that evaluated his proficiency in locating drugs." The justices overturned a 2011 decision in which the Florida Supreme Court said police must do more than assert that a dog has been properly trained. They deemed that court's evidentiary requirements too "rigid" for the "totality of the circumstances"...

America has almost 12 million illegal immigrants. Many of them came here on visas and never left. But about 60 percent of them walked in from just one country -- Mexico. Though the stalled Obama Economy has caused about 900,000 to go home since 2007, there are still about 6 million Mexicans living in the United States who've sneaked across our borders. Everyone from Marco Rubio to John McCain and our golfer in chief are trying to figure out how to deal with the illegal immigrants we have already and prevent future waves of Mexican migrants. But no one seems...

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Forbes-listed billionaire who heads the Sinaloa cartel, may have died in a shootout with rival narcos in Guatemala's northern Peten province as reported by Sonia Perez for The Associated Press. However, it's still too early to pop the champagne, dance in the streets and celebrate with joy on the hopeful news because "officials stressed late Thursday that they had not yet found any bodies or even confirmed a shootout happened." Guatemala is among the major transit points for cocaine smuggled from Colombia through Central America and Mexico before reaching crazed druggies in the United States....

Sen. Rand Paul says he'll wait until 2014 to decide whether to run for president, but he believes voters are ready for a Libertarian-minded Republican candidate. "I would absolutely not run unless it were to win," the Kentucky Republican said on "Fox News Sunday." "Points have been made, and we we will continue to make points. But I think the country is really ready for the narrative coming — the Libertarian Republican narrative." Voters want a "different face," he said. In order to expand the party's reach, Paul believes the GOP should embrace candidates who are willing to push a...

When Ean Seeb and his business partners founded Denver Relief, their medical marijuana dispensary in downtown Denver’s Baker neighborhood in 2008, it was strictly a bare-bones effort. No fancy interior decor,noproprietary strains or products, no state-of-the-art grow house. Their inventory at the time was as limited as their personal bank accounts. After all, as a cannabis business they did not have access to traditional bank loans and had to literally bootstrap their way up the hard way, borrowing seed money from friends, family and employees and building out the operation one step at a time. “Denver Relief started with $4,000...

Too Big to Jail How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one...

Honolulu (AP) - A bill that would have legalized marijuana in Hawaii has died in the state House. House judiciary committee Chairman Karl Rhoads said Tuesday that he decided to kill the bill after learning from House leadership that the initiative does not have enough votes to pass the House. Key lawmakers in the Democratic-controlled House supported the measure, including the speaker and the majority leader.

(KUTV) Four months ago, Salt Lake City Police mistakenly raided the house of a senior citizen looking for drugs. The Police Chief apologized, but now, the woman is still waiting for an explanation on how the mistake could happen. Salt Lake Police busted through the front door of the home on October 3 looking for an alleged drug dealer, but instead, they found a 76-year-old woman. Officials say the woman was in her nightgown, making sweets for a church function the following Sunday, when police kicked in her door and held her at gunpoint.

Despite increased efforts, manpower, and resources, the war on drugs has been a resounding failure. W.C. fields once quipped, “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.” Not only does the government continue to fail in its crusade against drugs, it continues to perpetrate a policy of immense immorality. It has been over forty years since President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. What do we have to show for it? The United States has wasted over one trillion dollars, caused incarceration rates to exceed that of...