"U.S. investigators are piecing together details of an audacious new trend in drug smuggling: South American gangs are buying old jets, stuffing them full of cocaine and flying them across the Atlantic to feed Europe's growing coke habit.

"A University of Colorado student who started wearing hijab after converting to Islam is fighting the Boulder County Jail's insistence that she remove her headscarf for a booking photo, saying that to do so would violate her religious beliefs.

Lots of interesting facts about the world's largest country.

"A police officer from the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez who fled to the U.S. along with his wife and children asked for asylum Tuesday in a Dallas immigration courtroom.

"While some may argue that social networking tools, like Twitter and Facebook, are a waste of time, and others consider them to be innocent fun, there are a few people who would say these innovations are so much more.

"Detectives are to get training on using social network websites like Facebook and Twitter in order to catch killers.

"Our marijuana laws are clearly doing more harm than good. The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.

A brave Cape Flats woman has spoken out about her horrific rape ordeal at the hands of her trusted doctor the day before her son's burial.

"A debate about legalizing marijuana and possibly other drugs — once a taboo suggestion — is percolating in Mexico , a national exhausted by runaway violence and a deadly drug war.

"In today's technology-laden society, hearing of crimes solved or cold cases cracked with state-of-the-art tech tools has become commonplace. But for one New Jersey family all it took to catch an alleged thief was a camera and a little luck.

"Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.

This week, the Iranian regime completed its ridiculous and unjust show trial of seven Baha'i leaders and sentenced them to 20 years in prison. -- all upstanding Iranian citizens whose only crime is that they belong to the Baha'i community.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - A Dominican national has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for entering the country illegally for a third time.

"Public support for Arizona's controversial new immigration law has increased slightly, a new CBS News poll shows, with 57 percent of Americans characterizing the law as "about right" in the way it addresses the issue of illegal immigration.

Armed with whistles and clad in uniforms emblazoned with the words "See Something, Say Something", 40 volunteers have formed a community watch team after a young Chinese woman was raped and beaten to death last week.

"So if you're taking a picture for a mugshot, chances are you're already a loser. Why not go that extra mile by having your face decorated for the occasion?" Warning- Some people may find some of these to be very upsetting.

BLANTYRE, Malawi (AP) — A judge sentenced a couple to the maximum 14 years in prison with hard labor under Malawi's anti-gay legislation, and crowds jeered the two men as they were driven from the court house to jail Thursday.

From the article: Larry Klein was the man who heard the alleged victim's cries for help. Police the suspect pulled the woman off the street to a dumpster and raped her.

I was looking up some stats the other day and came across some disturbing numbers. South Africa is the #1 country per capita. Over 1 in every 1,000 have been raped. The United States in #1 in raw totals, 95,000 reported rapes.

Twenty armed men blocked a road and tried to hijack a convoy of food for earthquake victims, but were driven off by police gunfire, U.N. officials said Tuesday.

Victoria Police have arrested eight people over an attack on two Indian students in Melbourne last night.

London, Jan 8: A Brit woman, who went to the police after being raped by a waiter in a Dubai hotel, found herself arrested instead for having illegal sex with her fiance.

"In the 40 years since U.S. President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs," the supply and use of drugs has not changed in any fundamental way. The only difference: a taxpayer bill of more than $1 trillion.

I was horrified to discover that an old school friend has joined a group called "Facebook Rape is a Common Side Effect of Going to University". The name alone was enough to make me feel sick, but it got worse when I clicked on the link.

Managers of an apartment complex say someone lit their dog on fire and they think it was meant as retaliation. The dog died one week after the incident.

An Irish priest has been seized by gunmen in the troubled southern Philippines, local police say.

I was checking out the FBI's crime numbers for my home state this morning. One that stood out was Forcible Rape. In the state of Florida in 2008 there have been 1,355 reported cases of forcible rape for that year.

'A Sudanese woman has been jailed for a month after refusing to pay a fine for "dressing indecently" by wearing trousers, her lawyers say.

As many as a dozen men armed with automatic weapons stormed into a drug rehab center in Ciudad Juarez Wednesday night, lined up the recovering drug addicts and alcoholics against a wall and opened fire at point-blank range, killing 17 people.

An aide at a Grand Junction nursing home has been arrested on charges of using a pillow to silence a screaming patient

"A law-enforcement official told the Associated Press that the Los Angeles County coroner has ruled Michael Jackson's death a homicide. The finding would make it more likely that criminal charges will be filed against the doctor who was with the pop star when he died.

Israelis are in shock after a brutal beachfront murder by a group of drunken youths.

What good is the ability of foreigners to contribute via Twitter if their contributions only worsen the situation for activists on the ground?

I saw a review about the movie that PBS had on the sex trade that is or was going on from Russia to other countries. They were complaining about why it was put on in that manner.

Police said Goncalves was the third and final victim of Keith Luke, a 22-year-old Brockton man who authorities said devised an "evil plan'' fueled by racism to kill as many "nonwhites'' and Jews as he could before taking his own life.

Police are considering whether they can charge the parents of teenagers who hosted wild parties in Melbourne last night.

An Ecuadorean immigrant beaten to death in an apparent U.S. hate crime was carried to his grave on Saturday in a town that has seen thousands of others seek their fortunes abroad.

Israel is at the center of international trade in the drug ecstasy, including distribution to North America from Europe, according to a document published last week by the U.S. State Department.

"A row has broken out in France after a court postponed a trial, apparently because it was to take place during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. Critics say the decision is a breach of France's strict separation of religion and state.

A 16-year-old Saudi girl drank a bottle of bleach in an attempt to commit suicide to escape a forced marriage to a 75-year-old man, press reports revealed Sunday.

"One man got stabbed. Another got shot in the chest. A 6-year-old boy was temporarily blinded when he was spray-painted in the face. And they were the lucky ones among those who have had run-ins with graffiti "crews," or gangs.

"No arrests have been made in the case, nor in any of the other shooting and stabbing incidents that left two dead and 13 injured -- most of them in Trinidad -- from late Friday through early Saturday, police said.

I was browsing the Internet (as you do), and was directed via another site to a site that has made a stand against Political Correctness.

Crime costs each of us £275 a year. Campaigners blamed the high costs on too much bureaucracy hampering officers' work.

"It's been 22 years since I left Britain, meaning that I've spent almost half of my life outside of this country. Has it changed? Of course. And it's largely inevitable that nostalgia will coat the memories even of a voluntary exile.

Two people are reported to have been killed and dozens injured when a bulldozer crashed into a commuter bus and cars in central Jerusalem. An ambulance spokesman said they died after the bulldozer driver went on the rampage on Jaffa Road.

The JP reports: A 17 year old young man was attacked Saturday evening near the Buttes-Chaumont, in Paris, in what has been denounced as an anti-Semitic attack.

On June 3, 2008, Judge Dr. Iannolo of the Rome Criminal Court stated that the Chinese newspaper China Times libeled Falun Gong and that all defendants, including the China Times' director, sponsor and author of the article, committed crimes.

Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.

A government official sparked an uproar Thursday after she said police should shoot to kill when confronting armed criminals in South Africa, a country notorious for its high rates of murder and rape.

Scotland Yard today claimed to have disrupted one of the biggest gangs smuggling illegal immigrants into Britain today.

''Following the violent death of a Moroccan teenager in Cologne, hundreds of immigrants have taken to the streets in nightly demonstrations to protest what they see as evidence of their second-class status in Germany. Police warn the city could be ready to explode.

''Gazans spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past week, cleaning out the stores in Egyptian Rafah and the nearby town of El-Arish.

''POLICE are struggling to cope with a wave of violent crime caused by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, one of Britain's senior officers has warned.

''Almost 700 Britons moved abroad every day last year, it was claimed yesterday. A record 250,000 emigrated in 2007, many because they wanted to escape high levels levels of crime and tax.

In a north London suburb last week, a schoolgirl was beaten, gang-raped and then had drain-cleaning fluid poured on her body apparently to destroy DNA evidence.

''Mr Walters said Mr Chavez had failed to root out corrupt officials or to deny Venezuelan ports and airfields to smugglers. Such failure, he said, came from more than neglect.

"LOS ANGELES - Two California men pleaded guilty on Friday to domestic terrorism charges stemming from a prison-based plot to rob gas stations to finance attacks on U.S. military operations, "infidels," synagogues and other Jewish facilities in Los Angeles."

"That a random Muslim kid helped some Jewish kids, that's what's positive about New York," said Adler, 23, who suffered a broken nose and required four stitches to close a lip wound.

9 youths beat a 26 year-old woman bloody on a Baltimore bus. 6 males and 3 females beat Sarah Kreager who suffered broken bones, bruises, and swollen eyes. Article and photos.

Worried parents are buying their children body armour to protect them from knife attacks.

Police in Bradford have joined forces with local mosques to clamp down on a rise in crime during Ramadan.

Indian police say they found 19 unexploded bombs in the southern city of Hyderabad after bomb attacks at two locations killed 42 people.

A Papua New Guinean woman says she has seen HIV-positive people being buried alive in the country's highlands. The HIV-infected woman claims she witnessed other infected people being buried alive by their relatives when they became too ill to care for.

Excerpts: "The 17½-year sentence in a domestic-violence case offers a rare glimpse of a topic often considered taboo among Somali immigrants. The victim wasn't in the St. Paul courtroom Friday when Afif Abdiaziz Ahmed was sentenced to 17½ years in prison.

Parents are sending children to school in stab-proof uniforms to guard against knife crime, it has emerged. Seven boys under the age of 16 have died in knife attacks in the space of just two months this year.

Britain is facing a mass exodus of people looking to escape the crime and grime of modern living. The country's biggest foreign visa consultancy firm has revealed that applications have soared in the last seven months by 80 per cent to almost 4,000 a week.

A gang of youths are reported to have attacked an ambulance in Sundsvall in the early hours of Sunday morning. A number of other violent incidents were also reported in the town on a night police described as "very messy".

A day after a prominent newspaper editor was shot to death downtown, the police here on Friday arrested seven men and seized several weapons that they suspected were used in his killing and those of two other men.

Police said they recovered firearm evidence connected to the slaying of an Oakland journalist during a series of early morning raids Friday, including one at a bakery linked to a black Muslim group.

A controversial POV-- does it have any merit?: