Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is asking the U.S. government for details about ATF’s “Fast and Furious” operations.

As our CBS News Investigation has revealed, “Fast and Furious” was a secret program under which, sources say, ATF purposely allowed thousands of assault rifles and other weapons from the U.S. into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico. Insiders call it letting the guns “walk.”

Documents show that ATF-walked guns began turning up at many violent crime scenes in Mexico from the start. Two of them – AK-47 variant semi-automatic assault rifles – were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 14, 2010.

Photo: Tiasma31 (CC)

Fox News reports:

“Hands on the car!! Hands on the car!!” “Guys! Come to the railing!! Come to the railing!!”

The urgent commands were coming from heavily armed agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And the people quickly putting their hands up or onto the vehicle are not along the Mexican border, as one might expect with ICE, but in cities all over the country.

For the past two months, ICE, working with local law enforcement, nabbed hundreds of alleged gang members with transnational ties to major drug-smuggling cartels. Operation Southern Tempest had one goal: disrupt the dealing of cocaine, crack, meth and pot in American neighborhoods.

“These are not simply drug dealers,” ICE Director John Morton told Fox News. “We are talking about violent street gangs that are involved with everything from murder to theft to racketeering.”
Morton is announcing the results of his nationwide sweep through more than a hundred U.S. cities today at 12:30 p.m. (EST).

In a couple of raids in Miami, Fox News had exclusive access, joining agents as they planned their raids, first on dry erase boards, then out on the streets, expecting resistance and possible firefights as they jumped out of their vehicles and chased down alleged gang members. Morton says, more and more, drug smuggling cartels in Mexico, Central America and South America are selling in discounted bulk to established gangs in the U.S. Those gangs include MS-13, the Latin Kings, Bloods and Crips, who then break the drugs down into $20 bags, $50 bags and $100 bags of coke, meth and pot and sell them to drug users in American cities. When the gang members are not U.S. citizens, federal law allows for relatively quick deportation…

For more information, see original article.

Police in northern China faced an unexpected and unholy menace last week when more than 100 fake monks besieged their police station, a Chinese newspaper reported today.

Police from Baotou city, in inner Mongolia, told the North News that the incident began last Wednesday when what appeared to be a group of monks attacked a toll booth and escaped by bus.

Officers stopped the vehicle at a roadblock after a lengthy car chase and arrested 31 of the men – but the suspects fought back with steel bars and knives, allowing the rest to make their getaway on a double-decker bus.

The following day, more than 100 men, apparently monks, besieged the city’s Guyang police station to demand the release of those arrested.

They arrested 178 fake monks, confiscating the sticks, knives, fake medicines and fake gold necklaces they were carrying.

A new strain of Nazism has found an unlikely home: Mongolia.

Once again, ultra-nationalists have emerged from an impoverished economy and turned upon outsiders. This time the main targets come from China, the rising power to the south.

Groups such as Tsagaan Khass, or White Swastika, portray themselves as patriots standing up for ordinary citizens in the face of foreign crime, rampant inequality, political indifference and corruption.

Dayar Mongol threatened to shave the heads of women who sleep with Chinese men. Three years ago, the leader of Blue Mongol was convicted of murdering his daughter’s boyfriend, reportedly because the young man had studied in China.

Though Tsagaan Khass leaders say they do not support violence, they are self-proclaimed Nazis. “Adolf Hitler was someone we respect. He taught us how to preserve national identity,” said the 41-year-old co-founder, who calls himself Big Brother.

“We don’t agree with his extremism and starting the second world war. We are against all those killings, but we support his ideology. We support nationalism rather than fascism.”

It is, by any standards, an extraordinary choice. Under Hitler, Soviet prisoners of war who appeared Mongolian were singled out for execution. More recently, far-right groups in Europe have attacked Mongolian migrants.

Nerds behind bars.The Volokh Conspiracy illuminates this tragic first-world problem.

In a decision issued today, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a Wisconsin prison’s rule forbidding inmates to play Dungeons & Dragons or possess D&D publications and materials [HT: Josh Blackman].

The prison’s rationale for the ban is that playing D&D might stimulate “gang activity” by inmates. But the government conceded that there is no evidence that Dungeons and Dragons actually had stimulated gang activity in the past, either in this prison or elsewhere. The only evidence for the supposedly harmful effects of Dungeons and Dragons were a few cases from other states where playing the game supposedly led inmates to indulge in “escapism” and become divorced from reality, one case where two non-inmates committed a crime in which they “acted out” a D&D story-line, and one where a longtime D&D player (not an inmate) committed suicide. Obviously, almost any hobby or reading material might lead people to become divorced from reality, or in rare cases commit suicide. And disturbed individuals could potentially “act out” a crime based on a scenario in almost any film or literary work. Should prisons ban The Count of Monte Cristo on the grounds that it might encourage escape attempts? Moreover, the “escapism” rationale conflicts with the gang argument. People who become engrossed in escapism and retreat from society are presumably less likely to become active gang members.

Only miles from the scenic vistas and celebrity mansions that draw sightseers from around the globe — but a world away from the glitz and glamour — a bus tour is rolling through the dark side of the city’s gang turf.

Passengers paying $65 a head Saturday signed waivers acknowledging they could be crime victims and put their fate in the hands of tattooed ex-gang members who say they have negotiated a cease-fire among rivals in the most violent gangland in America.

Read More on SFGate

The city’s street gangs are becoming tweet gangs.

Manhattan’s young thugs have turned to Twitter, and the cops who track them are fast behind, the Daily News has learned.

It’s old-school crime meets new technology: attacks being plotted – and thwarted – 140 characters at a time.

One investigator recently warned parents and teens that the bastion of OMG and LOL has been infiltrated by violent crews waging turf wars.

A boy shot in the leg weeks earlier on Lenox Ave. may have been targeted because of a battle the Original Young Gangsters crew started on Twitter.

“It’s horrible,” NYPD Lt. Kevin O’Connor of Manhattan North’s gang intelligence unit told a forum in Harlem.

A basic search of the social-networking site for OYG or Jeff Mob, the gang based in the Jefferson Houses in East Harlem, yields shout-outs and throwdowns.

“I knoe bitches from oyg that would dead mob yah s–t in harlem,” one girl wrote in a series of tweets aimed at drawing out a rival for a fight.

Investigators are monitoring the traffic in hopes of sweeping up gangbangers before the bloodshed – and searching Twitter after attacks for clues.

“It is another tool … just like old phone records,” a police source said. “We can go through them [messages] to track these guys.” …

[continues in the New York Daily News]

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