“Twelve years ago, Portugal eliminated criminal penalties for drug users. Since then, those caught with small amounts of marijuana, cocaine or heroin go unindicted and possession is a misdemeanor on par with illegal parking. Experts are pleased with the results.”
“Red-faced police in the canton of Fribourg are admitting that 34 kilograms of hashish and marijuana seized by officers from drug offenders has been stolen from a warehouse. Police had stored 28.6 kilograms of hash and 4.8 kilograms of pot, seized from three different investigations, in a building in Châtillon, near the city of Fribourg. The drugs were likely stolen in late November or early December last year but the theft was only recently noticed, according to media reports. Cantonal police said they discovered that a metal bar on one of the windows at the rear of the warehouse had been sawn off on December 5th.”
http://www.thelocal.ch/page/view/drugs-seized-by-fribourg-police-stolen-from-warehouse
“The Kentucky Senate joined the House in approving a hemp regulation bill last night. This morning, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released a statement applauding the bill’s passage and promising to continue to push for a federal waiver from the Controlled Substances Act for future Kentucky hemp growers.”
http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/27/kentucky-legislature-passes-hemp-bill-ra
“Despite President Obama’s youthful flirtation with drugs, the Obama administration has repeatedly refused to acknowledge America’s turning tide in the so-called war on drugs. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that a majority of Americans now support legalizing marijuana use. This has become a more mainstream position in recent years as states began to decriminalize the drug, despite federal statute, and as more members of the medical community have affirmed the drug’s medicinal benefits, particularly for those battling chronic or terminal ailments.”
http://www.theroot.com/blogs/blogging-beltway/tea-partier-embarrasses-obama-drug-policy
“Barely able to walk even with a cane, Ghulam Rasool says he padlocked his front door, handed over the keys and his three cows to a neighbor and fled his mountain home in the middle of the night to escape relentless airstrikes from U.S. drones targeting militants in this remote corner of Afghanistan. Rasool and other Afghan villagers have their own name for Predator drones. They call them benghai, which in the Pashto language means the ‘buzzing of flies.’ When they explain the noise, they scrunch their faces and try to make a sound that resembles an army of flies.”
http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-villagers-flee-homes-blame-us-drones-061922800.html
“Officials in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana are moving forward on plans to refund $4.7 million in red light camera tickets. About 284,000 tickets were issued in the program until it was suspended over ethical concerns on January 27, 2010 — long before the Chicago scandal broke. In light of the early revelations of impropriety, a third of recipients threw their photo tickets in the garbage. Redflex had paid a 3.2 percent cut of the firm’s profit on each ticket issued to lobbyist Bryan Wagner, a former New Orleans city councilman, who in turn shared the funds with the wife of District Judge Robert Murphy.”
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/40/4062.asp
“Driving with hands on the wheel, arms extended, without passing other vehicles is not a crime in New York, a county judge ruled last week. St. Lawrence County Surrogate’s Court Judge Kathleen Martin Rogers found the US Border Patrol had been wrong to stop Corene M. Deer and Rachel C. Morgan, who were driving carefully at around 8pm on January 18, 2012 in the town of Gouverneur. Agent Brandon Carrier spotted Deer and Morgan’s white SUV and became suspicious when he saw the driver had more than one hand on the wheel and did not appear to be relaxed.”
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/40/4060.asp
“The track record of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program suggests that its officers’ suspicions of criminal activity are frequently less than reasonable, since they turn out to be right only 12 percent of the time. Forms officers fill out after these encounters rely heavily on all-purpose excuses such as ‘furtive movements’ and ‘high crime area’ to justify stopping people. As the number of stop-and-frisk encounters initiated by the NYPD grew from about 100,000 in Michael Bloomberg’s first year as mayor to almost 700,000 in 2011, the share of stops yielding guns fell from 0.38 percent to 0.033 percent. Bloomberg says that trend shows the program is working.”
http://reason.com/archives/2013/03/27/when-proactive-policing-becomes-harassme
“Federal law enforcement agents misled judges for years on what type of wiretaps they were carrying out when they requested permission for so-called ‘pen register’ searches, an email obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveals. Instead of collecting data on incoming and outgoing callers (among other general information), the ACLU said that agents commonly used a vehicle-mounted technology called the ‘stingray’ that intercepts all nearby communications in order to pinpoint the location of a particular signal. The ACLU argues that these devices in effect resulted in a de facto wiretap, when that was not yet authorized.”
“A U.S. Army veteran, who boasted on Facebook of his military adventures with Syrian rebels, was charged Thursday with firing rocket propelled grenades as part of an attack led by an al-Qaida group against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. According to an FBI affidavit, Harroun, who served three years in the Army before being medically discharged, was engaged in military action in Syria, siding with rebel forces against the Syrian government, from January to March of this year. Harroun is not charged with providing material support to a terrorist group, but instead conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction outside the U.S.”
http://news.yahoo.com/us-army-vet-charged-fighting-al-qaida-184044925.html