Well folks, the sands of time are about to run out for 2011. It’s been an interesting year with some great highs and the occasional low! May I take this moment to thank you ALL for your support, your encouragement, your brickbats, your time – and here’s to a GREAT 2012 to you and your families.
I’ve posted on here numerous times about operation Fast & Furious, The Justice Departments Illegal Selling of guns to the Mexican Drug Cartels to increase the number of U.S. sold guns at crime scenes. This operation led to the death of Border Patrol Agent Bryan Terry. Whenever I speak of this operation I always say two Law Enforcement agents have been killed.
Let me tell you about the first one Jaime Zapata. Officer Zapata was killed in Mexico. He was ambushed by members of the Drug Cartel.
Zapata, 32, was a native of Brownsville, Texas, and attended the University of Texas at Brownsville, where he graduated with a degree in Criminal Justice in 2005.
Zapata then joined ICE in 2006. The rising special agent was assigned to the Office of the Deputy Special Agent in Charge in Laredo, Texas, where he served on the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Unit as well as the Border Enforcement Security Task Force. He most recently was detailed to ICE’s attaché office at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Zapata was only to be in Mexico temporarily before he was to return to home Texas
U.S. Special Agent Jaime Jorge Zapata was shot and killed in the line of duty, reportedly by members of the notorious drug cartel, Los Zetas, while driving between Monterrey, and Mexico City on a four lane Mexican highway. FOX News has confirmed that Zapata and another other ICE agent, Victor Avila, were targeted by the Mexican gunmen because they were U.S. law enforcement, according to an American official. Zapata and Avila were ambushed at a cartel checkpoint by the hit men dressed in camouflage and armed with machine guns. Avila survived but was wounded and hospitalized with two gun shots to his leg.
” The agent said, you know, ‘We’re Americans, we’re diplomats,’ and the response from the drug cartels was bullets,” U.S. Rep.Michael McCaul of Texas, who was briefed on the incident, said to the Houston Chronicle.
“They put an AK-47, as I understand it, into the crack in the window and just began to fire away,” McCaul said.
Zapata was killed by a weapon purchased at Carters Country in Houston. An ATF jurisdiction outside of the Phoenix ATF office. Yet the story is identical to Fast & Furious.
Murders are up again this year in Philadelphia, and the city still has the highest homicide rate of the nation’s 10 most populous cities, according to stats provided by each city’s police department. At the same time, fewer murders are getting solved.
With a few days left in the year, the city’s homicide tally stood at 324 Wednesday, including the eight victims allegedly killed in previous years by West Philly abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Last year, 306 people were killed, and the year before, 302.
But despite the jump in homicides this year, city officials prefer to focus on the past. When they compare numbers, they go back to 2007, when murders in Philly were at the five-year high of 392. Looking at it that way, they get a 17 percent decrease in the murder rate from 2007 to 2011.
Police spokesman Lt. Raymond Evers said the department compares this year’s tally with 2007′s to see long-range trends. “It’s hard to get a trend between two years,” he said.
But John Coleman, shopping at the Uceta market yesterday, wasn’t buying the spin.
“They lyin’,” said Coleman, 25.
New York’s rate is 6.1, and even notorious Los Angeles’ is only 7.8, though rates for some smaller cities – like Detroit, New Orleans and St. Louis – are much worse than Philly.
Numbers aside, officials have no unexpected explanations for what’s driving the trends. Some observers point to demographics.
Black citizens comprised 84 percent of homicide victims from January to June 2011, according to police statistics. Evers said he expects that trend will remain consistent once numbers are crunched through December.
Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey laments the state’s lack of strong gun control. Firearms were used in nearly 82 percent of the city’s murders this year. Although shootings dropped more than 3 percent, more injuries ended in death, Ramsey said.
He makes this statement knowing NOT ONE murder was committed by a LEGAL GUN OWNER. Out of the solved murder cases ALL perpetrators had ILLEGALLY obtained Firearms, and the unsolved murders consist of a majority of drug related homicides. So as usual the answer to dealing with violent criminals is disarm Law Abiding Citizens.
“Greater Manchester Police is also working very hard to bring the family over to Manchester as soon as possible.
“For reasons beyond the family’s control, it is unlikely they will be able to do so until early next week so the force is putting plans in place to send officers to India to offer support.”
Well, I was planning to travel to the Maldives in 2012 until I read this;
The Maldives government has ordered all spas in resorts to be closed after protests by an Islamist party which claimed they were being used as a front for prostitution. The tourism ministry told all resort hotels across the islands to shut their spas and health centres with immediate effect.
“An Islamic party has been agitating against spas hoping to embarrass the government,” a senior government figure told the AFP news agency. Last week the opposition Adhaalath party, a conservative religious movement, staged a protest in the capital Male against such spas, arguing that they were being used as brothels. The party’s website features an article criticising “lustful music”.
I have been to many Spas and the idea that they are for “prostitution” beggars belief but tells you plenty about the mindset of the Islamists concerned.
It gets worse;
However, despite its idyllic, laid-back setting, Islamic fundamentalism has been on the rise in the Maldives in recent years. There have been anti-semitic protests recently about the transport ministry’s decision to allow direct flights from Israel, while a restaurant that hung up Christmas decorations last year was also targeted. Last year, a Western couple were abused during their “Islamic blessing”as pork-eating “infidels” and “swine”. ”A growing number of Maldivian students are going to study in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan where they are learning a radical Wahhabi interpretation of Islam,” Dr Hassan Saeed, the country’s former attorney-general, said when he resigned in 2007.
So, Maldives may be about to crossed off the list. Tourists will not pay £££thousands to go to luxury resort with no Spa. Never mind global warming, Islam will sink the Maldives.
Let me provide you with the headline;
People celebrating the New Year will enjoy higher temperatures than Morocco and Madrid as Britain’s second warmest winter on record ends on a high.
How interesting that the Met Office can provide us with this information. Winter is December, January and February and as I write this we have not even reached the end of December. So I’m wondering how the Met Office is able to make such a claim? January and February earlier this year were marked by Arctic like temperatures across the UK so…….how can the Met declare that this is the “second warmest winter”? Answers on a postcard..
As the race for the Republican presidential nomination hots up, the candidates have been dropping hints about their possible running mates. Newt Gingrich today said he would ‘certainly’ consider asking Sarah Palin to join him on the ballot, while Mitt Romney was accompanied on a campaign stop this morning by Chris Christie, the popular Governor of New Jersey. Both those GOP heavyweights were thought of as potential candidates for the top job before announcing that they did not intend to run.
Sorry, there was no one more supportive of Palin than me until it became quite clear that she is all about …herself. Yes, her instincts on many issues are good and I would align with them BUT to be honest I would be just as happy never to hear from her again. The moment comes and then it goes. Plus, I don’t think Gingrich will beat Romney, be that a good thing or otherwise.
Anyone disagree with this? Am I being unfair to Palin? Has Gingrich actually got a chance?
The UK media is full of details concerning those who have been honoured in the New Year Honours.
As you know, I oppose the Honours system on principle and find the idea of conferring Honours on Media celebrities particularly nauseating. When I was on the BBC Radio last night I did point out that I am not a fan of the Honours and that I blame the media for hyping the whole thing up. Looking through the list of Honours, I see some millionaire sportsmen have been rewarded along with well paid actors and actresses have got their trinkets. And then, to balance, a few cleaner ladies and other specimens from the other end of the social ladder. This is also a bit odd insofar as how good a dinner lady or cleaner do you have to be to get an Honour and on what basis, exactly.
I WAS pleased that Ronnie Corbett got a reward for all the years of good humoured laughter he gave us although I think a Knighthood would have been better (Good Knight for him!) I was also pleased to see Steve Lillywhite rewarded. He was married to Kirsty MacColl and produced some of her stuff. I note that in the LOCAL New Year Honours. the usual list of establishment ciphers get their rewards. Utterly sickening.
This made me smile… well, it IS the silly season!
A 12-year-old boy got a shock when he tried out the new iPhone 4S in a shop it answered: ‘Shut the f*** up, ugly t***.’
Charlie Le Quesne had been trying out the new gadget’s Siri voice assistant system in a Tesco branch in Coventry when it came out with the string of profanities. The obscene response came after he had asked the phone: ‘How many people are there in the world?’
After they complained to the store manager, apologetic shop workers agreed to unplug the phone and remove it from the display. Staff believe that pranksters tampered with the phone’s set up to make it come out with the foul language. Siri always refers to the phone user by name, using information kept in the iPhone’s contacts system. Whoever had sabotaged the phone had entered the seven-word phrase as the phone user’s name, so that Siri blurted it out whenever it answered a question.
