Three New Brunswick Smoke Shops Raided in "Bath Salts" Bust, Six People Arrested

 

Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office has announced that three smoke shops in New Brunswick and a gas station in East Brunswick were raided and charged in the sale of illegal drugs. According to the Prosecutor's Office, the raids began on Aug. 2 after four months of investigative work and netted the following arrests: Jarnail Sandhu, 25, of Sayreville, owner of the Shell gas station located at 1010 Route 18 in East Brunswick, was arrested and charged with distribution of bath salts and synthetic marijuana; possession of bath salts and synthetic marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. He was jailed with bail set at $100,000, with no 10 percent option. Sandhu's mother, Charanjit K. Sandhu, 56, of Nanuet, N.Y., was also arrested and released on her own recognizance. She faces the same charges as her son. Ayman S. Al-Nsairat, 40, of East Brunswick, owner of the Amsterdam Smoke Shop, 29 Easton Ave. in New Brunswick. He was charged with possession of toxic chemicals and possession of drug paraphernalia, and was released on his own recognizance. Maria M. Almanzar, 20, of Union City at the Amsterdam Smoke Shop. She was charged with possession of toxic chemicals and possession of drug paraphernalia, and distribution of toxic chemicals, and was released on her own recognizance. Lukasz M. Poplawski, 21, of Staten Island, N.Y. at the Amsterdam Smoke Shop. He was charged with possession of toxic chemicals and possession of drug paraphernalia, and distribution of toxic chemicals, and was released on his own recognizance. Ranmanjeet K. Dhillon, 24, of Woodbridge, at the Jamaican Discount Smoke Shop at 38-A Easton Ave. in New Brunswick. Dhillon was charged with possession and distribution of toxic chemicals and possession of drug paraphernalia, and was released on her own recognizance. Additionally, the Jamaican Smoke Shop at 40 Easton Ave. in New Brunswick was also raided, and "Some illegal substances and drug paraphernalia were seized," according to the Prosecutor's office. No arrests were made at that location. Bath Salts are mix of chemicals that mimic the effects of cocaine and methamphetamines and were banned earlier this year. 6,547 bags, jars and vials containing synthetic marijuana and bath salts were also seized by police during the investigation, marked for sale for between $20 to $30 each, according to the Prosecutor's Office. Police also seized 2,914 pipes, bongs and hookahs, 193 digital scales, 357 canisters containing nitrous oxide, 13 imitation handguns used to fire blanks, and 46 containers designed to conceal illicit drugs, according to the Prosecutor's Office. Packaging material, grinders, cigars and rolling papers, "All identified as products used to prepare and help sell the illicit drugs," according to the Prosecutor's Office. $25,145 in cash from the sales of the illegal drugs was also seized. More than $163,000 in synthetic Marijuana and bath salts were seized. Members of the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Gangs, Guns and Drugs Task Force are handling the investigation, assisted by police in New Brunswick, East Brunswick and Sayreville, according to the Prosecutor's Office

Two Mexicans Killed for Reporting Criminals on Social Web Sites

 

Two young people were murdered and their bodies left hanging off a pedestrian bridge in Nuevo Laredo, a border city in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, for presumably using social-networking Web sites to report criminals. The bodies of the young man and young woman showed signs of torture, and motorists were the ones who spotted the bodies and called police. Officials, however, have not issued a statement about the killings. The young man was dressed in a polo shirt and shorts, while the young woman wore only shorts. Messages warning others not to use social-networking Web sites to report drug traffickers were left on each of the bodies. One of the messages was signed “Z,” a reference to Los Zetas, which operates along the border with the United States and is considered Mexico’s most violent drug cartel. The grisly discovery prompted a large deployment of the security forces around the bridge. Los Zetas has been battling an alliance of the Gulf, Sinaloa and La Familia drug cartels, known as the Nueva Federacion, for control of smuggling routes into the United States. The cartel has also been blamed for several massacres in recent years. Los Zetas has been accused of being behind the Aug. 23, 2010, massacre of 72 migrants, the majority of them from Latin America, at a ranch outside San Fernando, a city in Tamaulipas. The cartel has also been blamed for the massacre of 27 peasants in May at a ranch in Guatemala’s Peten province, which borders Mexico and Belize. The latest brutal incident occurred on Aug. 25, when suspected Zetas gunmen set fire to Monterrey’s Casino Royale, killing at least 52 gamblers and employees trapped inside, most of whom died of smoke inhalation. Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, known as “El Lazca,” deserted from the Mexican army in 1999 and formed Los Zetas with three other soldiers, all members of an elite special operations unit, becoming the armed wing of the Gulf drug cartel. After several years on the payroll of the Gulf cartel, Los Zetas, considered Mexico’s most violent criminal organization, went into the drug business on their own account and now control several lucrative territories.

Gale-force wind warnings issued

 

Hurricane Katia could bring gale-force winds across the Atlantic to Scotland by Monday, forecasters have warned. The hurricane, which is moving from Bermuda, is expected to result in stormy weather and gusts of up to 75mph, although no official severe weather warnings have yet been issued. Forecasting provider Meteogroup said it is still too early to predict the effect the hurricane would have on the country's weather. Forecaster Andy Ratcliffe said: "By the time it gets across the Atlantic, it will be the remnants of Hurricane Katia. "We're still a little uncertain on the exact track of its path, although it looks like the centre of depression will be in the vicinity of Scotland." Meteogroup has forecast winds of 60mph, or possibly 75mph in some areas, accompanied by spells of heavy rain. Katia is the second major hurricane of the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season and was rated as a category four hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale at its peak. The scale rates hurricanes from one to five, with five being the strongest

Millions of Hotmail users cut off by Microsoft 'cloud' failure

 

As well as Hotmail, the outage affected Office 365 and the Skydrive online storage service. Microsoft said the cause appeared to be related to the Domain Name System, the computer network that ensures that web addresses are connected to websites. “Preliminary root cause suggests a DNS issue,” the firm said on its office 365 Twitter feed. The problems lasted for at least two-and-a-half hours, beginning at around 4AM British Summer Time. On a company blog, Microsoft said it had fixed the problem at 5.45AM, but the repairs took some time to “propagate” through the DNS network.  "We are working on propagating the DNS configuration changes and so it will take some time to restore service to everyone. Again we appreciate your patience," the firm said. For Office 365, Microsoft’s subscription-only competitor to Google Apps, which went live earlier this year, it was the second major technical failure in less than a month. Such incidents are likely to give pause to organisations considering migration to online “cloud” services, whereby software is delivered from vast data centres, over the internet.

Mexican helicopters flying over Texas

 

Mexican military helicopters have been flying over Texas, a staging ground for missions into Mexico to fight drug traffickers, a Mexican official said. The San Antonio Express-News reports Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. said as many as 10 of the Mexican helicopters have been spotted flying over south Texas in daylight during the past 17 months. U.S. Federal and state agencies would not elaborate on the missions, the newspaper said. But a Mexican official with knowledge of the flights said, "Yes, I can tell you they exist, they are going on -- certainly for the last couple of years." Most of the helicopters have been sighted near Falcon Lake, where Mexican authorities are battling the Zetas cartel, the Express-News said. U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, who represents part of Harris County and is chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, would not confirm details about the flights. "It is a highly sensitive, coordinated effort to take out the cartels that has been effective," McCaul said. "Beyond that, I don't want to compromise the operations or the safety of our agents." Catherine Frazier, deputy press secretary for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, said state law enforcement officials are not told in advance of the flights. "Failure to do so stirs up unnecessary concern among local people and could result in situations of mistaken identity or friendly fire, putting our peace officers and citizens in harm's way," she said.

A Mexican death cult is fuelling America's anti-immigration backlash.

 

In September 2008, 11 decapitated bodies were discovered in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. When police arrested the killers, they found an altar in their home dedicated to Santa Muerte – the patron saint of death for Mexican drug cartels. One year later, an illegal immigrant called Jorge Flores Rojas was arrested in North Carolina for running a sex ring. He, too, had built a shrine in his east Charlotte apartment to Santa Muerte. Flores forced his girls to have sex with as many as 20 men a day while he knelt in his living room praying to the skeletal figure of death. In August 2011, the Mexican army stumbled upon a tunnel that ran right under the US border for 300 metres. It was six feet high and equipped with lights and ventilation. It also housed – you guessed it – an altar to Santa Muerte. Europeans complain mightily that Muslim immigration has introduced fundamentalism to their secular continent. Yet they tend to look upon Middle America’s fear of illegal Hispanic immigration with contempt, as if its paranoia was motivated entirely by racism. Reporting on new legislation designed to drive illegal immigrants out of the Deep South, The Guardian’s Paul Harris writes that it heralds, “The prospect of a new Jim Crow era – the time when segregation was law – across a vast swath of the old Confederacy. [The legislation] will ostracise and terrorise a vulnerable Hispanic minority with few legal rights.” Indeed it will, and that is a tragedy. But the debate about illegal immigration isn’t just about competition over jobs or lingering white racism. Many Americans share the European fear that mass migration is subverting their democratic culture from within. In the same way that exotic cells of Jihadists have established themselves in London and Paris, criminal gangs motivated by bloodlust and kinky spiritualism have been found living in the suburbs of Boston and Atlanta. One of its many manifestations is the cult of Santa Meurte. Santa Muerte is part Virgin Mary, part folk demon. The image of a cloaked saint wielding a scythe is supposed to offer those who venerate it spiritual protection. Offerings come in the form of flowers, alcohol, sweets and tobacco. Contraband can be used to invoke protection from the police. For the poor of Mexico – a nation torn between extremes of wealth and injustice – Santa Muerte is a very pragmatic saint. Like the gang leaders who offer hard cash in return for allegiance, she provides material blessings that the Catholic Church can no longer afford to bestow. Tens of thousands of Mexicans living in America venerate Santa Muerte and have no association with crime. Nor is the cult purely ethnic: in North California, the Santisima Muerte Chapel of Perpetual Pilgrimage is tended by a woman of Dutch-American descent. But the prevalence of Santa Muerte imagery among drug traffickers injects an interesting cultural dimension to the debate over illegal immigration. It accentuates American fears that the drug war in Mexico is turning into an invasion of the USA by antidemocratic fanatics. The Mexican conflict has claimed 35,000 lives since it began in 2006. Recently, the violence has spilled over the border and spread throughout the US along narcotics routes that stretch from Arizona to New York. The warring cartels are bound by a perverse ideology, with Santa Muerte as a unifying icon that terrifies opponents into submission. The gang known as Los Zetas marks its territory by mounting severed heads on poles or hanging dead bodies from bridges. Its members are family men who regularly go to church. A splinter group, called La Familia, is fronted by a fellow called El Mas Loco (The Craziest One). Loco has published his own bible, a confused mix of peasant Marxism and passages culled from American self-help books. The goal of these groups is to undermine democracy and govern autonomous secret societies through family, blood and religion. It’s a global trend. The Lord’s Resistance Army that slaughtered and raped its way across Uganda from 1987 to 2007 was led by a man who claimed to channel the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the culprit behind this apocalyptic criminality was the death of Communism, which deprived thugs and thieves of a secular ideology to justify their actions. Organisations like FARC and Real IRA converted overnight to pushing drugs. But in Mexico, family and religion filled the vacuum left by the failure of socialism. Whatever its origins, the spread of the cult of Santa Muerde reflects the fact that the debate over immigration in the US is about more than economics. Sadly, Mexicans seeking work get caught in this existential drama and are either swallowed up into the gangs or demonised in the US for crimes they have not committed. Nevertheless, Americans of every ethnicity are legitimately concerned about their country being poisoned by a criminal subculture that blends political corruption with ritualised murder. Europeans should not be so quick to judge their transatlantic friends. Americans face a vicious threat of their own.

The new Libya won't trust Britain so easily now | News

 

The documents revealing the cosy relationship between top British and Libyan intelligence officials are embarrassing not just because they confirm Britain's rendition of Islamist terror suspects, including Abdel Hakim Belhadj, the Transitional National Council's new security commander in Tripoli, but also because they lend credence to Britain's reputation as a slippery operator in the Middle East. David Cameron's support for the TNC was meant to gain souk cred by tying Britain's banner to the spirit of the Arab Spring. Cameron has said the new documents should be examined by the independent Detainee Inquiry, chaired by Sir Peter Gibson. They show how keen Tony Blair was to bring Gaddafi into the fold following Saddam Hussein's fall in April 2003 and to trade an end to Libya's pariah status in return for help in the war against terrorism. There was little wrong with that. What is sickening is the extent to which Britain sought to ingratiate itself by delivering up Gaddafi's opponents. No less disturbing is the manner in which Britain's cosying up to Gaddafi has been represented as a mistake by misguided individuals, for which institutions such as the London School of Economics have suffered. Perhaps the most fascinating new document was sent on March 18, 2004 to Musa Kusa, head of Libyan intelligence, by Mark Allen, MI6's director of counter-terrorism, who crowed about Belhadj's rendition while arranging a forthcoming visit by Blair to Libya. A week later Gaddafi welcomed the British PM in his Tripoli tent (as requested by Allen for publicity reasons). It is difficult to say who was the greater showman: the unctuous Blair or Gaddafi joking how his Third Universal Theory, the basis of his Green Book, paved the way for Blair's Third Way politics. Within two months, Allen was pipped as the next MI6 head by John Scarlett, who, two years earlier, as chief of the Joint Intelligence Committee, had backed Blair's argument that Saddam had dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Allen left the SIS shortly afterwards. For Middle East watchers, an interesting outcome has been these glimpses of intelligence machinations in this most secretive of regions. A Le Carré of the al Qaeda conflict will surely follow. It is Cameron who now has to deal with the practical consequences. The ultimate fate of Gaddafi and his family is out of his hands. But Britain has tough decisions to make about other players, including Musa Kusa, who defected from Libya in March, came to Britain, and was last heard of in a Qatar hotel. In 1980 he was expelled from Britain for advocating the murder of Libyan dissidents. For this and his wider role in Libyan terrorism, many powerful voices argue that he should be tried in Britain. But, even at this stage, it may be that he has too much to reveal. More immediately, the Prime Minister needs to assess the role of former Islamists such as Belhadj in the new regime and take appropriate measures. It will not be enough to kick the rendition issue into the long grass by referring it to the Gibson inquiry, which has yet to begin its work. If David Cameron hoped for an easy ride in post-Gaddafi Libya, these papers have disabused him of that notion.

former MP Margaret Moran, who is to face 21 charges in relation to claims she made for parliamentary expenses.

File photo of former MP Margaret Moran, who is to face 21 charges in relation to claims she made for parliamentary expenses. Photograph: Michael Stephens/PA

The former Labour MP who claimed for dry rot treatment on a home more than 100 miles from her constituency will be charged with fiddling her expenses by more than £60,000, prosecutors said today.

Margaret Moran, one of the last politicians investigated over the scandal, will appear before magistrates facing 21 charges relating to her parliamentary claims.

Moran, former MP for Luton South, will appear before City of Westminster magistrates' court on 19 September, the Crown Prosecution Service said.

police have released images of 28 suspects they want to question about serious street disorder that “wreaked havoc” across Northern Ireland

The police have released images of 28 suspects they want to question about serious street disorder that “wreaked havoc” across Northern Ireland.

Detectives from a specialist public order inquiry team are hoping the public will help them identify the men in these images as part of their investigations into rioting in east Belfast and Ballyclare during June and July.

Three people were shot during three nights of sustained sectarian violence at an interface on the Lower Newtownards Road in Belfast in June.

In Ballyclare six officers sustained whiplash when a hijacked bus rammed a police vehicle during riots that erupted after Union and paramilitary flags were removed from lampposts in July.

Assistant Chief Constable Alistair Finlay said the response from the public appeals to date had been “positive”.

A second tranche of photographs will be released on Thursday showing suspects police want to speak to in connection with rioting in north and west Belfast during July.

Last month all of Northern Ireland’s main news organisations wrote to the PSNI Chief Constable to protest at having to hand over riot footage of trouble in east Belfast.

The letter highlighted to Matt Baggott the “genuine fear that terrorists and rioters will target the media whom they perceive to be evidence gatherers for the State” if the PSNI continues to demand the disclosure of material gathered for news purposes.

The PSNI has declined to comment on the source of these latest images.

TV cameras to be allowed into criminal trials

 

David Cameron is expected to pave the way for the historic move in a long-awaited speech on crime planned for later this month. However, the televised coverage is expected to be limited and will not allow cameras to record witnesses giving evidence as occurs in America. Television cameras are currently banned from most courts in England and Wales although the proceedings of the new Supreme Court - the top court of appeal which replaced the law lords - can be broadcast. Some Scottish court cases are also televised, including proceedings involving Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber. The decision to allow limited broadcasting in other criminal cases is set to spark debate.