US Aid: $15m Offered to Help Police City EL PASO -- U.S. and Mexican officials on Sunday angrily condemned Saturday's shooting attacks that killed three people with ties to the U.S. consulate in Juarez. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mexican President Felipe Calderon issued strong statements concerning the murders. The victims were identified as Lesley A. Enriquez, 25, who worked for the consulate and was four-months pregnant, her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, 30, a detention officer for the El Paso County Sheriff's Office, and Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, 37, whose wife also worked for the consulate. [continues 1000 words]
Peoria County State's Attorney Kevin Lyons is not the only one to raise questions about central Illinois' undercover drug enforcement. He's just the only one willing to do so in public. Lyons is convinced he made no progress with law-enforcement officials in private. "Everyone in the room will have guns and a bullet-proof vest except for me," he says via e-mail. "How wrong is that???" Drugs. Guns. Cash. Peoria's Multi-County Narcotics Enforcement Group is the place where that unholy trio collides, with support from your federal, state and local tax dollars. But P-MEG's own audits raise questions about how those resources are handled. [continues 1149 words]
Members of Americans for Safe Access, an advocacy group on the big island that supports safe access to cannabis medicine, are saddened to learn that Roger Christie's THC ministry has been raided by the feds ("Feds Raid Hilo Cannabis Ministry," March 11, Tribune-Herald). Thc ministry has served to provide cannabis to patients who were otherwise unable to obtain the medicine they had been legally prescribed. It is no coincidence that the raid and the 12 raids ("Feds also raided isle residences," March 12 Tribune-Herald) that occurred on the same day was a tightly orchestrated government move at all levels to stop the advancement of a bill in Honolulu to create state "compassion centers," or dispensaries, and to strike fear into local residents that the war on cannabis is not over. [continues 170 words]
'Either the Narcos, or the State.' In 1985, Mexican drug traffickers kidnapped, tortured and murdered Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, an undercover American DEA agent working out of the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara. The Reagan Administration reportedly hired bounty hunters to bring his killers to justice, in part because it could not rely on the Mexican government to do so. Americans are once again being killed by Mexico's narcos. On Saturday, Lesley Enriquez, an American employee at the U.S. consulate in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, was gunned down in broad daylight with her husband, orphaning their seven-month-old daughter. The Mexican husband of another consulate employee was also killed in a separate incident at nearly the same time. [continues 377 words]
In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's President Faces Citizen Outrage Amid Signs His War on Drug Gangs Is Failing The slayings of three people attached to the U.S. Consulate here underscore the failings of Mexico's military offensive against drug gangs despite a steady flow of troop reinforcements and personal attention from President Felipe Calderon. Calderon came to Ciudad Juarez on Tuesday for the third time in 33 days. The trip had been previously scheduled, but its agenda was overtaken by the consulate slayings -- the American couple and Mexican man are just three of the 500 people killed in the city this year alone. [continues 645 words]
Stephen Harper waltzed through his first interview gig on YouTube on Tuesday and along the way he gave a thumbs-up to the seal hunt and the crackdown on "guns, gangs and drugs" and a firm thumbs-down to legalizing pot. "The reason drugs are illegal is because they are bad," the prime minister said. "And even if these things were legalized, I can predict with a lot of confidence that these would never be respectable businesses run by respectable people." [continues 420 words]
Government Plans To Tweak Legislation The province said Tuesday it will change legislation that allows authorities to seize property used in crime. The proposed amendment to the Victims Restitution and Compensation Payment Act -- which will allow wrongly accused people to sue the government for costs -- is being introduced along with several other law and order measures the government previously pledged to implement. Justice Minister Alison Redford and Solicitor General Frank Oberle also announced the government will move ahead with a proposed provincial witness protection plan and a new law allowing police to seize body armour from criminals. [continues 270 words]
After two years without a fixed needle-exchange site, Victoria can't sit back and wait for health officials to develop an Island-wide distribution model, says Victoria Coun. Philippe Lucas. "There's absolutely no reason and no excuse for us to wait for an Island-wide model to be put in place before this municipality takes action in trying to reduce the spread of disease and improve the public health of our region," Lucas said. The Vancouver Island Health Authority is looking at a number of potential sites to establish an Island-wide distributed needle exchange program. [continues 196 words]
Drug users could be offered addiction treatment and clean needles under the same roof in a proposal now being considered by the Vancouver Island Health Authority. The authority is looking at using its Addiction Outpatient Treatment office at 1250 Quadra St. near Yates Street as a site for distributing hypodermic needles and other paraphernalia for illegal drug use, such as crack pipes and sterile swabs. It's an idea the executive director of Cedars, an addiction recovery centre in Cobble Hill, calls "absolutely insane." [continues 461 words]
