Hundreds Of Skeletal Remains Found Along U.S.-Mexico Border

Mexican officials say hundreds of skeletal remains have been found scattered on ranches in a stretch of towns along the U.S.-Mexico border as police carried out a wide search to locate missing people.
Coahuila state prosecutors' spokesman Jesus Carranza said Monday that the remains were burned and extremely hard to identify.
Police have not said whether an organized crime group is suspected, but it's an area known to be dominated by the Zetas drug cartel.
The police operation took place on ranches of 11 different towns around the border city of Piedras Negras after interviews with family members and former local officials.
Investigators found bullet casings as well as barrels of diesel fuel at some of the farms likely used to burn bodies.

source: hoffpost

Medical radioactive material truck 'stolen in Mexico'

A truck carrying medical radioactive material has been stolen in Mexico, the UN's nuclear watchdog says.

Mexico told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that the truck was carrying a "dangerous radioactive source" used for cancer treatments when it was stolen on Monday.
The radiotherapy source was being taken from a hospital in the northern city of Tijuana to a waste storage centre.
It was stolen near the capital, Mexico City.
Mexico's Nuclear Security Commission said that at the time of the theft, the cobalt-60 teletherapy source was "properly shielded".
But the commission warned it could be "extremely dangerous to a person if removed from the shielding, or if it was damaged".
Local media reported that the truck, a 2.5-tonne Volkswagen Worker, was stolen by armed men at a petrol station in Tepojaco, on the outskirts of Mexico City on Monday morning.
Mexican police are currently conducting a search for the truck and its contents and have issued a press release to alert the public of its potential dangers.
Experts have long warned about the danger posed by radioactive material used for medical treatments and research in hospitals.



source:bbcnews

Catarina Migliorini Attempts Second Online Virginity Auction

The Brazilian college student who attempted to sell her virginity through an online auction last year is hoping lightning will strike twice.
In October, 2012, Catarina Migliorini was offered $780,000 for her virginity from a Japanese millionaire who bid for the privilege through a controversial online auction.
That deal was never consummated, but now she is attempting to do it again through her own website, VirginsWanted2.com.
"Well, after being featured by so many media outlets in so many countries, I decided to actually auction off my virginity," she told The Huffington Post by email via a translator.
The bidding ends Dec. 12, but Migliorini said the minimum bid for her to get into bed is $100,000. She told the Brazilian website PurePeople.com.br that her goal is to get $1.5 million.
Migliorini's previous auction was part of a proposed documentary called Virgins Wanted being made by Australian filmmaker Justin Sisely.
The auction made Migliorini a celebrity and Playboy cover girl in her native country, but also aroused controversy and skepticism.



In November 2012, after the auction, Brazil’s attorney general, Joao Pedro de Saboia Bandeira de Mello Filho, threatened Sisely with sex trafficking charges if the deal between Migliorini and Natsu took place.
Medical experts like Dr. Elizabeth Lyster, a board-certified gynecologist in Foster City, Calif., were incredulous, mainly because the time-honored technique of using an intact hymen to measure virginity is not foolproof, since it can be ruptured from activities like running or inserting a tampon.
"It causes a lot of problems in religious circles," Lyster told The Huffington Post.
Migliorini disagreed with the doctor and said she is prepared to do whatever it takes to prove she is truly a virgin.
"I am willing to subject myself to any exams that are necessary," she said. "When I say I am a virgin it's because there is no one in the world that can prove the contrary. I never had sexual relations of any type with anyone, not vaginal, not anal and not oral."
Migliorini said she pulled out of the original auction after she was introduced to the reputed auction winner, "Natsu." She didn't think he fit the description she had been given previously and became suspicious.
She also said she believes Sisely was trying to defraud her and others with his documentary.
“He wanted to forge words and phrases, situations and even feelings that did not exist,” she said. “For a while, I agreed but then I disagreed. To me, a real documentary must be something spontaneous.”
She also claims Sisely still owes her 20 percent of the money he is earning from the documentary.
Sisely has denied all of Migliorini's allegations and claims she breached their contract on at least two occasions.
"Aside from that, she failed to show up on filming days on several occasions. After being warned," he told HuffPost earlier this year. "After two years and three visa refusals trying to get her to Australia, she left the country for a fashion show in Brazil during filming."
He also said the finished documentary will support his side of the story.
Based on the reaction to her first attempt at selling her virginity, Migliorini is prepared for negative comments and is OK with them.
"I know that this is not a very conventional decision, but it is my decision," she said. "I am the sole owner of my own body. I am of legal age and have the right. I accept all criticism whether positive or negative, because talking is a right for all and is free."
She also is fine with other women following her lead, such as "Shatuniha," the 18-year-old girl from Siberia who recently sold her virginity for $27,000.
"Of course I don't care," she said. "The sun rises for all of us."




source:hoffpost

Honduras: The Most Dangerous Country On The Planet

Drug wars have made Honduras, the original banana republic, the world’s most dangerous country At first glance, it would appear to be a typical playground scene from anywhere in central America. The young girls play pit-a-pat and the boys charge excitedly after a half-deflated football across a makeshift pitch of caked mud. But amid this familiar school tableau in a hillside slum overlooking the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, there is a new and jarring sight. And that is of soldiers, armed with assault rifles, strolling around the school grounds. For the rickety wooden classrooms here have just been assigned a second role as the barracks for one of the new military units recently dispatched into the country's most violent districts; a last ditch effort to stem the daily toll of death and bloodshed. It is a sign of desperate times in Honduras, the most dangerous country on the planet outside a full-fledged war zone. The murder rate reached an unenviable global high of 85 for every 100,000 residents last year, and is on course to reach 90 per 100,000 in 2013. The question of how to tackle this epidemic of gang and drug violence, which exploded after Honduras became the key staging post for cocaine smuggling from South America to the US, is the overwhelming issue facing the candidates in next Sunday's presidential elections. The drug gangs threaten the very viability of the Honduran state, but it is unclear whether any of the presidential contenders really has an answer. This week, The Telegraph witnessed the scale of the problems at first hand after accompanying one of the new military patrols through some of the toughest slums of the capital, Tegucigalpa, a sprawling jumble of neighbourhoods that stretches across a bowl-shaped valley. "These areas were in the hands of the gangs," said Col Jose Lopez Raudales, a veteran army commander whose men were given a crash course in policing strategy before their deployment last month. The maze of shanty homes - where dirt tracks pass for roads and open sewers run along walls daubed with gang graffiti and threats to kill informants - used to be a no-go zone for the security forces. The police were too scared, too ill-equipped, too inefficient and often too complicit in gang crime to venture there. Col Raudales has 100 troops under his command at the school, part of 1,000 military police involved in the crackdown. Speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, the school's headteacher welcomed their arrival in her classrooms, recounting how her pupils used to have to take shelter under their desks when gun battles erupted outside. One of the unit's first tasks upon being deployed to the district last month was to remove the corpse of a man shot 12 times in the head, but Col Raudales said there had been no deaths there since their deployment. "Our operations will continue until we clean crime from these areas," he insisted defiantly. That, however, is a formidable mission in a country of 8.5 million where 20 people are murdered a day, five times the rate in America's most violent large city, Chicago. Sandwiched between Nicaragua to the south and Guatemala to the north, Honduras has the dubious distinction of being the original "banana republic", a term coined by the American writer William Sydney Porter, known by his pen name O. Henry, who fled there in the 1890s to escape embezzlement charges. But while Porter used the phrase to describe a country in hock to unscrupulous fruit corporations, today it is a trade of a far more ruthless nature that dominates the landscape. Some 80 per cent of the cocaine that reaches US soil is now trafficked via Honduras, either spirited there by sea or flown into remote air strips carved out of the jungle in the inaccessible wilderness of the north-east. As US-led counter-trafficking operations have squeezed cartels to the south in Colombia and the north in Mexico, the drug gangs have turned to the country as an alternative staging post. Situated mid-way between the coca fields of the Amazon basin and the consumers of American cities, Honduras's location and geography has turned into a curse. The drugs are overwhelmingly smuggled through La Mosquitia, a sparsely-populated, lawless and near-impenetrable rainforest along the Nicaraguan border and Caribbean coast. Mexico's feared Zeta and Sinaloa cartels have teamed up with local drug-lords to run the multi-billion dollar smuggling operation. But they have also imported their ruthless rivalries. Senior Honduran military personnel privately acknowledge that they are waging a losing battle against the vastly better-resourced "narcos" – despite the backing of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Last week, this newspaper obtained photographs from a recent military operation in La Mosquitia that illustrate the scale of that challenge. The pictures show airstrips cut out of the jungle by bulldozer and the lights and lamps used for night-time landings. The pictures also show small planes that are burned and abandoned by the smugglers. The flights are usually one-way trips from Venezuela, ending in deliberate crash landings with the mission accomplished. The average payload is worth much more than the plane itself. While the drug dealers get rich, ordinary Hondurans suffer - not that many of those in the areas plagued by gangs are willing to speak out. An exception is Oscar Rivera, a teacher at another school visited by Col Lopez's men, who was one of the few locals willing to be identified during the Sunday Telegraph's tour of the area. The 51-year-old has been robbed several times, but counts that as the least of his worries during the recent crime wave. First his brother was stabbed to death during a home break-in. Then his 22-year-old son, a college student, was gunned down on his way home from buying a soft drink and bag of crisps from a street stand. "He gave them everything he had, but still they killed him," Mr Rivera said, his voice breaking. "It doesn't matter to the gangs where you live or die. Life is worthless to them. It's just so terrible to see someone you love so much taken away for a few cents." Such accounts are depressingly quotidian for Hondurans. Their morning newspapers provide daily diet of murder and mayhem illustrated by gruesome photographs of blood-soaked corpses. And at the city morgue, where a cloying sickly odour seeps into the street from the front office, a refrigerated trailer has been parked outside to handle the overflow of corpses awaiting autopsy by over-whelmed staff. The violence is most open and brutal in the hilltop barrios where grinding poverty comes with million dollar views. But it has also spread down into the city's middle-class neighbourhoods, now a network of guarded enclaves where private security officers man roadblocks on what were once regular city streets. Alongside the kidnappings, robberies, assaults and murder, there is also the all-pervasive imposition on small businesses, even schools, by gangs of so-called "war tax", the local term for protection rackets. And in an attack that shocked the city's affluent elite, gunmen this month opened fire on the daughter of the country's former president in an apparent kidnapping attempt. Donatella Micheletti, 21, was leaving a gym when her car was blocked by three men in another vehicle who shot at the driver's side. Her bodyguard returned fire and the target escaped with minor injuries. Her father Roberto was appointed president after a 2009 coup, although the assault was not believed to be political. "These people are so brazen that they will even go after the daughter of a former president and her guards," said a Honduran businessman who drives around the city with a pistol tucked into his belt and an armed assistant. "This country is turning into the perfect zombie apocalypse. We are sliding into the world of failed states." For Col Raudales and his men, the greatest challenge is winning the confidence of a cowed people as they hand out flyers urging locals to call a confidential tip-line to report on criminals. "We are here to help you and maintain public order," it explained. "Don't be afraid." But the reality is that people are extremely afraid. And it was often what the locals did not say that was most illuminating. "It's quiet here, very quiet," insisted one street vendor, unconvincingly, as he tried to avoid eye contact. "The gangs are watching us all the time and we know that after the military police leave, they will still be here," said a middle-aged woman, stopping briefly. While the main driver of Honduras' breakdown in law and order has been the drug trade, another factor has been the rampant corruption and the weakness of the institutions of state. It is little surprise, then, that the security crisis is dominating the campaign trail for next Sunday's presidential elections. And the two frontrunners in a five-person field with no clear favourite offer dramatically different solutions. Juan Hernandez, the candidate for the ruling conservative National Party, is running on a traditional law-and-order ticket and has pledged to strengthen the military police presence on the streets. That puts him at loggerheads with his main rival, Xiomara Castro, the former first lady whose husband, Manuel Zelaya, was deposed in the 2009 coup and who is running for her husband's old job for Libre, a new leftist coalition. Talking to The Sunday Telegraph amid a throng of adoring supporters after a raucous election rally, she vowed to create a community police force to tackle the violence and concentrate the military in the country's border areas to fight the drug smuggling. "The military police units are part of a mistaken strategy by this government," she said, wearing her trademark cowboy hat and red bandanna. "It's not necessary to create new repressive groups. We will prevent insecurity in Honduras by giving opportunities to the young people so they don't have to associate with the gangs. "And we have to organise people to defend themselves with community police who don't hide behind masks and sunglasses, so that we know who they are, that they know our families, that there is a relationship between each citizen and the police." With memories of death squads still strong and security forces routinely accused of human rights abuses, her opposition to the new military police units strikes a chord with supporters. But after decades in which the "banana republic" has done much to live up its literary reputation, many Hondurans are sceptical that any president can make a difference to their lives. Elba Ordonez, who ekes out a living selling the fruit for which the country was once famous, was recently robbed of her taking by armed men as she waited for a bus. Her only focus was the daily grind for survival, she said. "I'm not following the politics," she added. "I have to work." source: BI

Mother banned her from school grounds for the way she smells.

An Albuquerque mother says her daughter's elementary school principal banned her from school grounds for the way she smells. Kerri Mascareno was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in August, and while she's undergoing chemotherapy to shrink her tumor, she's also struggling with the administration at Tierra Antigua Elementary. According to Mascareno, the school's principal, Robert Abney, told her last week that she could no longer visit the school: "He just said he knows this is going to hurt my feelings and he understands where I'm coming from because his mother had breast cancer and she had the same exact smell and I can no longer be in the school and that with me being in the school that I made his employees ill," she said. She claims that when she moved outside, the principal went to his window and told her to move farther away. "He just said that he would have to ask me to sit in my car because he could smell me through the window," Mascareno said. According to reports, Abney refused to answer questions Wednesday and directed all questions to the school district's spokespeople. But Mascareno showed the local news an email from Abney telling her she would be allowed to go to the school's upcoming Thanksgiving lunch if she and her daughter sat in Abney's office instead of the cafeteria. After reporters questioned the principal, Mascareno received a Wednesday evening phone call saying she could eat in the cafeteria. But the Thanksgiving lunch was held on Thursday and Mascareno decided not to attend, instead choosing to spend the day at home with her daughter Lynsey. "It's precious," Mascareno said. "Every little time is precious being with them." SOURCE:GAWKER