Armed and masked navy officers cut open more than 20 shark carcasses filled with slabs of cocaine after checking a container ship in the southern Mexican state of Yucatan.
X-ray machines and sniffer dogs helped uncover the drugs, said Eduardo Villa, a commander in the Mexican navy. “Those in charge of the shipment said it was a conserving agent but after checks we confirmed it was cocaine,” he said.
Drug gangs have been forced to develop increasingly elaborate ways to conceal narcotics bound for the United States – in sealed beer cans, religious statues and furniture.
President Felipe Calderon has sent 45,000 troops and federal police across Mexico to try to crush powerful smuggling cartels moving South American drugs north. But traffickers armed with a huge arsenal of grenades and automatic weapons are far from defeated, worrying Washington as violence spills over into US border states like Arizona.
Some 2,750 people have died in drug violence in Mexico this year, a pace similar to that of 2008, when 6,300 were killed.
Led by Mexico’s most wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, smugglers from the Pacific state of Sinaloa are fighting a turf war with rivals. Guzman seeks to control Mexican and Central American smuggling routes into the United States.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The diamond necklace and earrings were modelled by the 22-year-old during the Elle shoot at Big Sky Studios in Islington, north London.
The jewellery, which was lent to the magazine by fashion house Dior for the day on June 6, was reported missing two days later.
Lohan is among a number of people present at the studio who could face questioning, the Sun reported.
A Yard spokesman said: “We had an allegation of theft made to us on June 8 and that is being investigated. There have been no arrests yet. We want to speak to a number of people in connection with the inquiry.
“It is alleged it is a necklace and earrings with diamonds with an estimated value of £250,000.”
A source added: “Jewellery is often lent out for big celebrities to wear on fashion shoots. Police are working out who had them when they went missing. People at Dior are very upset. It’s an embarrassment to the mag.”
“On my way back home
Now I’m in the zone
My Simcards a bomb
They blowing up my phone
Kicks Hong Kong
Bape in a garment
The face of hip-hop
My DC audience
And you n$ggas will acknowledge this
Born again social life thanks climate My climate is way higher then Lindsay Lohan nostrils on powder
Sorry Mark I don’t want offend your sisters good friend
But when my pen get in
It pretends it’s a soul in a entity
And it interferes and gets the best of me
So I’m one with that
I’m stuck with that
Y’all little ass n$ggas can’t fuck with that”
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Authorities say $1 million worth of aquarium rocks are missing after an underwater heist in the Florida Keys.
Miami boat captain Neal Novak told investigators that sometime in the past 18 months someone stole about 300,000 pounds of decorative live rock he had planned to harvest at his aqua farm in the waters three miles of Islamorada.
The rock is used in salt-water aquariums and reef tanks. Novak says it took him more than two years to place the rock on the ocean floor, where it became home to coral and plant life.
The theft was discovered May 13.
The Monroe County sheriff and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are investigating. The theft is considered grand larceny of farm animal aquaculture species, a third-degree felony.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The Mexican army is claiming success in the struggle to combat rising drug violence and corruption with the arrests in separate operations of a drug cartel leader in Cancun on the Caribbean coast and 25 suspected drug traffickers dressed as soldiers in the north of the country.
Authorities say that cartel head Juan Manuel Jurado Zarzoza, known as El R and the Puma, was arrested with three other suspected traffickers in possession of drugs and weapons. He was among those listed as Mexico’s most wanted for being behind the torture-murder of a retired army general in February as well as for extensive drug-running and extortion operations.
Jurado’s arrest has been seen as a blow to the operations of his Cardenas Guillen cartel in Cancun City, an international tourist resort and key base for cocaine trafficking from South America to the United States via the Gulf of Mexico.
Federal Defense Ministry officials said Jurado controlled all drug sales, kidnappings and extortion in the Yucatan peninsula and organized protection-money collection from the local tourist businesses.
In February retired Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quinones was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Cancun only 24 hours after arriving to clean up the city’s corrupt police force.
In another operation last weekend Mexican troops responded to a tip by raiding a ranch close to the U.S.-Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez. There they arrested 25 men dressed as soldiers and confiscated a large arsenal of weapons and narcotics.
The Defense Ministry said the haul consisted of 29 large-caliber firearms, three small-caliber guns, more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition, four vehicles, 95 pounds of marijuana, 35 pounds of cocaine and 2,500 doses of crack cocaine.
An army spokesman in Chihuahua state said the men, posing in soldiers’ uniforms, had been burning businesses and homes in Nicolas Bravo city.
But in a setback for authorities last weekend, 53 inmates — including a dozen members of a powerful drug cartel — escaped from a jail in central Mexico. Dozens of guards were detained Monday for questioning over the escape.
The Saturday morning jailbreak in Zacatecas state in central Mexico was caught on CCTV showing guards standing by as the inmates were led out by an armed gang. They then got into a convoy of some 15 vehicles and left.
An extensive army and federal police manhunt is under way for the escapees. Eleven of the men are very dangerous, prison officials said. Some of them are believed to belong to the Gulf Cartel drug-smuggling gang.
Meanwhile, the prison governor has been detained for questioning along with 40 guards and two police commanders.
Nearly 11,000 people have died since 2006 in territorial fights by drug gangs and government crackdowns after President Felipe Calderon launched his anti-drug campaign by sending 45,000 troops to hot-spot drug areas.
The U.S. Department of Defense has warned that Mexico is close to becoming a failed state because of drug lawlessness.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
U.S. bonds worth an astounding $134.5 billion were seized by Italian police as smugglers attempted to cross into Switzerland earlier this month. Authorities have not indicated if they are real or fake, but either way, it could have implications for the U.S. bond market and the value of the dollar.
AsiaNews is reporting that Italy’s financial police seized bonds worth $134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso, an Italian border city known for catering to Italians who want to keep their money out of the Italian banking system. The confiscations include 249 U.S. Federal Reserve bonds each worth $500 million, plus 10 Kennedy bonds with face values of $1 billion, in addition to various other bonds.
If proven real, it “would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history,” says AsiaNews.
But if the bonds are authentic, it raises the question: Who do they belong to? The high face-values of the bonds are not available in regular banking and financial markets and are typically only handled by states. That would mean that some government is trying to sell a huge chunk of its dollar holdings.
But which? There are very few countries that would be able to move such large amounts. $138 billion is approximately half the total value of all goods and services produced in a year by Iran (which is a major oil exporter). Only three candidates are easily identifiable: Japan, China and the United States.
Although China has been very vocal about diversifying its reserves away from the dollar, since the two foreign nationals arrested were supposedly Japanese, Japan is for obvious reasons the prime suspect.
The Italian daily Adnkronos did not report the official charges against the two nationals, but indicated they may have been detained on suspicion of attempting to take a large amount of securities out of Italy without declaring it.
But why would Japan risk covertly moving tens of billions across country lines in a briefcase with a false bottom? Was this an attempt to quietly unload U.S. treasuries without having to sell them on the open market and risk setting off a market stampede and causing a dollar panic?
“Notice, by the way, that the U.S. media has totally ignored this story—even though the securities in question are allegedly U.S. instruments,” writes Karl Denninger for The Market Ticker. “Might the authorities know they’re real and be just a wee bit nervous that disclosure of a sovereign attempting to covertly dump nearly $140 billion in debt could cause a wee bit of panic, given that we’re running nearly $200 billion a month in deficits?” (June 11).
For now, the jury is still out. The bonds may very well turn out to be forgeries. But even if the bonds are fake, the matter might be even more worrisome, and not just because it would be “the biggest counterfeiting operation ever, by a factor of many times” (ibid.). AsiaNews ominously reports: “[T]he quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are indistinguishable from the real ones.”
Picture the Bernie Madoff fraud times two—and that is if this is the only incident.
High-quality fraudulent treasury bonds measured in the hundreds of billions is the last thing the U.S. government needs to deal with right now. The U.S government is attempting to find lenders to finance record spending and stimulus packages to prop up the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, it is trying to convince those same investors that the dollar will not be devalued, and that it is a stable store of wealth. Hundreds of billions of fraudulent securities does nothing to secure that faith.
Students of history will know that various countries have counterfeited currencies of foreign nations to influence currency exchange rates and undermine faith in foreign central banks. Even today, North Korea is known for counterfeiting the U.S. $100 bills. It is possible that something along those lines is occurring here too.
This is a story that deserves watching. The ramifications could be very significant.
1. When it comes to Italy the world press has tended to focus on Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s personal problems rather than on stories like the bonds smuggling affair which has been front page on Italian newspapers.
2. The fear of counterfeit bonds and securities has spread across Asia with the result that real securities are also considered with suspicion.
3. During the Second World War several countries at war printed and put in circulation perfectly counterfeit enemy money. It is also historically established that some central banks, like the Bank of Italy 65 years ago, issued the same securities twice (identical registered number and code). This way they could print more money with legal tender than they officially declared. The main difference though is that 65 years ago the world was involved in a bloody war, which is not the case today.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
