The latest raid in Riverside, CA on members of the La Familia drug cartel has resulted in the seizure of $3.4 million dollars, 730 pounds of meth, and more than 400 weapons from members of the organization.
As part of Project Coronado, dozens of raids like these have been conducted over the last couple of days in 19 states and have “involved more than 3,000 federal agents and police officers… resulting in the arrests of more than 300 people.”
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BBC News reports that French authorities have arrested a French nuclear physicist of Algerian descent on charges of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise.”
He was workng at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), “Europe’s main centre for the study of atomic physics…at the Cern laboratory which houses the giant Large Hadron Collider.”
Authorities have been quick to emphasize that his work “did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism.”
Officials noted that he had not been at work for most of the year, claiming illness, but he was in contact via email.
[J]udicial sources told the AFP news agency that agents had come across him during a separate inquiry into the recruitment of would-be Islamist militants who wanted to fight in Afghanistan.The physicist had exchanged messages over the internet with people known to be close to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQiLIM] and expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had “not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation”, one said.
For more on al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQiLIM] click here.
John Avlon, former chief speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani, poses this question in his CNN article about the increasing presence and impact of political fringe extremists in this culture.
This point is particularly prescient in an age where certain pro-Islamists seek to foster divisiveness in America. So much for “United We Stand.”
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