[Washington Examiner] Federal law enforcement officers assigned to the Port of New York and New Jersey in Newark, N.J., made the largest discovery of cocaine in nearly 25 years last month when they found $77 million worth of cocaine inside a shipment container that had just arrived from overseas.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Monday that approximately 3,200 pounds of cocaine was found in the large container on Feb. 28.
"This is a significant seizure, in fact it is the largest cocaine seizure at the Port of New York/Newark since May 1994," Troy Miller, director for Customs and Border Protection's New York Field Operations, said in a statement.
#2
For as long as I can remember there have been stories like this about "the biggest drug bust ever" and yet there is no shortage of product on the street. When there are no more stories about people dying from drug overdose and gang bangers are no longer shooting each other then it might be safe to speculate that the flow has been disrupted.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/12/2019 11:29 Comments ||
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#3
Abu, all of this is just like the stories about Saudi oil production. They are just trying to juice the market, justify a price increase NOT lose customers.
[Washington Examiner] President Trump has chosen David Malpass to lead the World Bank for the next five years. Malpass currently serves as the undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs. He has been a critic of the World Bank in the past, and as such his nomination has generated controversy.
Malpass’ doubts about the effectiveness of the World Bank makes this a good time to revisit how it intentionally overstated world poverty in order to get more money from American taxpayers, then fired the employee who wouldn’t play along with the scam.
This situation has cost American taxpayers about $2 billion each year for most of the last decade. And we only know about it because of a whistleblower at the World Bank named Dr. Yonas Biru, an outstanding Ethiopian economist whom I represent, who was fired for failing to play along and insisting upon telling the truth.
SPARTA, New Jersey (WABC) -- A bull attacked its owner in New Jersey Friday afternoon, sending the woman to the hospital with lacerations and bruises.
Sparta Dispatch received several calls of a cow in the roadway on Houses Corner Road around 3 p.m., along with reports that the animal was approaching vehicles.
"I saw this young bull, and many cars pulled over were trying to protect him," said one neighbor who didn't want to be identified. "He was very calm. People were petting him on his head...I had cereal in my car, believe it or not, and I fed him out of the passenger side window."
While Officer Arlene Lippencott was en route, authorities received further information from the owner, identified as Wendy McDermott. She told police the animal was actually a bull that had been acting in a highly aggressive manner lately.
McDermott advised that she would attempt to coax the bull back into its enclosure with food.
MOUNT HOLLY, N.J. (CBS) ‐ Menacing-looking vultures are taking over a town in South Jersey and residents want them to buzz off. Hordes of vultures have been hanging around in Mount Holly. Residents want them gone but not everybody feels that way as environmentalists say the vultures are an important part of the ecosystem.
Doris Adler took a picture outside her Mount Holly home when, she says, as many as 50 vultures were roosting in her trees.
#5
So, Chris Christe is thinking about running again?
Posted by: ed in texas ||
03/12/2019 11:43 Comments ||
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#6
Doris Adler took a picture outside her Mount Holly home when, she says, as many as 50 vultures were roosting in her trees
Eew. The environmentalist should set up tent underneath them. Not just being funny these things absolutely wreck the soil and water underneath a roost.
[MAIL] The doomed Ethiopian Airlines jet 'had smoke pouring from the rear' before coming down 'with a loud boom' in a crash which killed 157 people, a witness has said. This model of jet typically makes more than 8,500 flights a week. These are the airlines that use it (See NYT article at #3 below).
Gebeyehu Fikadu saidhe saw flight ET302 'swerving and dipping' while 'luggage and clothes came burning down' when it crashed within minutes of take-off from Addis Ababa on Sunday morning.
All 149 passengers and eight crew members on board the Nairobi-bound plane died in the disaster - the second involving a 737 MAX 8 in just five months. Emphasis added
[PULSE.NG] Thousands of opposition supporters erupted into the streets in Benin's biggest city on Monday to accuse President Patrice Talon of seeking to exclude them from forthcoming legislative elections.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/12/2019 00:00 ||
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[H&H] Promises have been made that the grave of a famous war horse will be protected following news that the land the grave is located in is set to be redeveloped.
The grave of ’Blackie the war horse’, an equine hero who fought and survived the battles of the First World War, was given grade II listed status, which protected the site at the RSPCA centre in Halewood, Liverpool, in 2017. The charity has since announced the centre is set to close at the end of May.
Blackie served at the battles of Arras, Somme, Ypres and Cambrai before returning to Britain where he lived into his late 30s. His was the first war horse grave to be granted heritage protection by Historic England after a member of the public contacted them with concerns that it was threatened by proposed building work.
A spokesman for the RSPCA said the decision to close the centre was made because Knowsley Council had "redesignated the land" for residential development.
But the council said the charity made the decision to close the branch due to financial reasons.
(Reuters) - The United States is to withdraw all remaining diplomatic personnel from Venezuela this week, the U.S. State Department announced late on Thursday.
"Like the January 24 decision to withdraw all dependents and reduce embassy staff to a minimum, this decision reflects the deteriorating situation in Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy," the State Department said.
It did not say on what day the personnel would be withdrawn from the embassy in Caracas.
The South American nation has been in the throes of political unrest for months over its contested presidential election.
Venezuela is suspending school and business activities on Tuesday amid a continuing power blackout, Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez said in a televised broadcast on Monday.
It is the third such cancellation since power went out last week.
#3
Could be the only non-Maduro building in Caracas with power would make it a tempting destination for civilians.
Like in those survival books where on day ten that character fires up the generator and gets jumped by every friend, neighbor, joe, and bad guy within earshot.
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/12/2019 13:42 Comments ||
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#5
Apparently Maduro's National Guard has been playing some baseball against some protestors, and Maddy gave a speech basically removing the leash from the brown shirt dogs. Basically, officially, stage 4 socialism.
Combine that with blackouts and a likely, impending outbreak of cholera, starting to sound a bit too sporty.
#6
Usually the US only pulls out everyone when they have good intel that shit is going sideways and they don't want ambassadors killed or taken hostage.
#7
So I think shit is about to get real, real soon.
My guess as well. The Wagner Group may have been conducting EXFIL 'Havana dry runs' for the bus driver. Likely to be a number of people getting deceased real soon... but I've been wrong before.
#9
#7 So I think shit is about to get real, real soon.
I suspect the widespread power outage was a tripwire that triggered the decision to withdraw. We should be able to run for at least a week w/o power. Maybe the gen-sets crapped out. There's less than 30 people left so the logistics of taking off are not overwhelming. What is overwhelming is the amount of things being destroyed right now. The machines usually break before we run out of paper to shred and hard drives to crunch.
Posted by: Bangkok Billy ||
03/12/2019 17:41 Comments ||
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[DAWN] Thousands of people rallied against Russia’s increasingly restrictive internet policies on Sunday which some say will eventually lead to "total censorship" and isolate the country from the world.
The mass rally in Moscow and smaller events in other cities across the country was called after the Russian lower house of parliament backed a bill to stop Russian internet traffic from being routed on foreign servers, in a bid to boost cybersecurity.
The move was labelled by critics as the latest attempt to control online content under President Vladimir Putin ...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances... , with some fearing the country is on track to completely isolate its network like in North Korea.
Activists counting people said more than 15,000 people have turned up to listen to internet and media rights activists as well as music performers who have complained of government pressure in recent months.
"The government is battling freedom, including freedom on the internet, I can tell you this as somebody who spent a month in jail for a tweet," one of the rally speakers Sergei Boiko, an internet freedom activist from Siberia, said. Police detained several people without explanation. A correspondent saw a man being dragged away by arms and legs near the entrance to the rally. The popular Telegram messaging app, which Russian authorities have been unsuccessfully trying to block for many months, called on its users to attend the rally last week.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/12/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
But how will "Peggy" answer customer service calls now?
Posted by: ed in texas ||
03/12/2019 7:29 Comments ||
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[DAWN] Former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, who led a failed attempt Curses! Foiled again! to break Catalonia from Spain in 2017, was chosen to represent his separatist party in European Parliament elections in May, the party said on Sunday.
Puigdemont, who lives in self-imposed exile in Belgium, was selected by the pro-independence Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) party during a meeting to pick its candidates.
"We believe that the best way to continue internationalising the conflict and that Europe ...also known as Moslem Lebensraum... understands what is happening in Catalonia... is that this candidacy be headed by Carles Puigdemont," Elsa Artadi, a JxCat politician in Catalonia’s regional parliament, said on Twitter.
The push by Puigdemont and his party to hold an independence referendum in October 2017 in defiance of a court ban sparked Spain’s deepest political crisis since its transition to democracy in the 1970s.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/12/2019 00:00 ||
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[Breitbart] The Pentagon inspector general is investigating allegations that a two-star Army general is retaliating against active-duty Green Beret instructors under his command who have voiced concerns over his lowering of standards for Green Beret candidates, three sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News.
The allegations involve Army Maj. Gen. Kurt Sonntag, who is commanding general of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center (SWCS) where Green Berets are selected, trained, and graduated.
Breitbart News spoke with more than a half dozen current and former Green Beret instructors and several others in the Green Beret community, whose firsthand accounts paint an alarming picture of an Army general gone rogue, a hostile command climate where soldiers are fearful of retribution for speaking out, and a total breakdown of unit morale.
Current and recent former instructors at SWCS, also known as cadre, say standards at the school’s prestigious Qualification Course (Q-course), where Green Berets are graduated, began to dramatically slide after Sonntag took command in May 2017.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Washington Examiner] President Trump has chosen David Malpass to lead the World Bank for the next five years. Malpass currently serves as the undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs. He has been a critic of the World Bank in the past, and as such his nomination has generated controversy.
SPARTA, New Jersey (WABC) -- A bull attacked its owner in New Jersey Friday afternoon, sending the woman to the hospital with lacerations and bruises. 
MOUNT HOLLY, N.J. (CBS) ‐ Menacing-looking vultures are taking over a town in South Jersey and residents want them to buzz off. Hordes of vultures have been hanging around in Mount Holly. Residents want them gone but not everybody feels that way as environmentalists say the vultures are an important part of the ecosystem.
[MAIL] The doomed Ethiopian Airlines jet 'had smoke pouring from the rear' before coming down 'with a loud boom' in a crash which killed 157 people, a witness has said.
...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
