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February 12, 2012 in Nation/World
In brief: Guatemalan president to back legalizing drugs
Guatemala City – Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina said Saturday he will propose legalizing drugs in Central America in an upcoming meeting with the region’s leaders.
Perez Molina said in a radio interview that his proposal would include decriminalizing the transportation of drugs through the area.
“I want to bring this discussion to the table,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a crime to transport, to move drugs. It would all have to be regulated.”
Perez Molina, a former army general who took office last month, didn’t give any other details about his proposal. He said he will bring the subject up with Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes when Funes visits Monday.
U.S., Egyptian generals meet
Cairo – The Pentagon’s top general met Saturday with the head of Egypt’s ruling military council amid the fraying of bilateral relations over a criminal case against 16 American civil society workers.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey spoke with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and other members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has ruled Egypt since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year.
Official statements on the meeting gave no details on their talks about the grim backdrop of the visit – Egypt’s crackdown on American nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Egypt is prosecuting 43 NGO workers from such U.S.-funded groups as the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute.
Sun staff deny risk of being shut down
London – Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper was fighting to contain the damage after five employees at the Sun tabloid were arrested Saturday in an inquiry into the alleged payment of bribes to police and other officials.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the newspaper, said police had searched their homes and the group’s London offices, potentially deepening the scandal over British tabloid wrongdoing.
Executives moved quickly to reject claims that Murdoch could decide to close down the newspaper. In July, he shuttered the 168-year-old News of The World tabloid amid public outrage when the extent of its phone hacking of celebrities, public figures and crime victims was exposed.
Salmonella linked to chicken handling 
malcolmkyle on February 13 at 4:42 a.m.
* Colombia, Peru, Mexico or Afghanistan with their coca leaves, marijuana buds or poppy sap are not igniting temptation in the minds of our weak, innocent citizens. These countries are duly responding to the enormous demand that comes from within our own borders. Invading or destroying these countries, thus creating more hate, violence, instability, injustice and corruption, will not fix our problem.
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* Apart from the huge percentage of people addicted to both sugar and caffeine, a small minority of adults (nearly 5%) will always experience the use of drugs as problematic. - approx. 3% are dependent on alcohol and approx. 1.5% are dependent on other drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, heroine etc.
* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced, distributed and widely used by those who desire to do so.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the drugs it prohibits.
* Prescription drugs kill over 200,000 Americans every year— even when taken as directed and not abused.
* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement - even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* Apart from the fact that the DEA is the de facto enforcement wing of the pharmaceutical industry, the involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Cocaine from Central America has been well documented by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the late journalist Gary Webb.
* It’s not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste trillions of dollars in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it’s own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes, yet it has far higher use/addiction rates than most other countries.
* Prohibition is the “Goose that laid the golden egg” and the lifeblood of terrorists as well as drug cartels. Both the Taliban and the terrorists of al Qaeda derive their main income from the prohibition-inflated value of the opium poppy. An estimated 44 % of the heroin produced in Afghanistan, with an estimated annual destination value of US $ 27 Billion, transits through Pakistan. Prohibition has essentially destroyed Pakistan’s legal economy and social fabric. - We may be about to witness the planet’s first civil war in a nation with nuclear capabilities. - Kindly Google: ‘A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF NARCOTICS-FUNDED TERRORIST GROUPS’ Only those opposed, or willing to ignore these facts, want things the way they are.
* The future depends on whether or not enough of us are willing to take a long look at the tragic results of prohibition. If we continue to skirt the primary issue while refusing to address the root problem then we can expect no other result than a worsening of the current dire situation. - Good intentions, wishful thinking and pseudoscience are no match for the immutable realities of human nature.
Never have so many been endangered and impoverished by so few so quickly!