Monthly Archives: August 2008

Link Suspected in UC Santa Cruz Attacks

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Something tells me the land lord below may stop renting to college kids altogether:

SANTA CRUZ – The owner of a Riverside Avenue home raided in connection with last weekend’s animal-rights firebombings targeting UC Santa Cruz scientists said Friday he suspects two college students who resided there may have some involvement in the case.

Frank Male, who has owned the yellow, three-bedroom Victorian for 11 years, said he rented the house in January 2007 to four students, but only two of them, a young man and his girlfriend, have been living there during the past couple weeks. The other two, both female UCSC students, left after the summer break started.

Male said he has no direct evidence that the man and woman – who told him they attended UCSC and Cabrillo College – are involved in animal-rights activities or were the target of a search warrant executed by the FBI and Santa Cruz police Thursday.

The Sentinel is not identifying the students because they have not been named as suspects. Attempts to reach them have been unsuccessful.

Police reported early in the week that the residents of the house at 724 Riverside Avenue – which was also raided in February after an attempted home invasion at a scientist’s residence – were not the focus of the probe but remained “persons of interest.”

That “home invasion” was a violent attack on a child’s birthday party by six masked thugs which ended with the woman’s husband being assaulted as he bravely chased the scum off his property. This new attack, which was really an attempted murder, is obviously thought by authorities to have been perpetrated by the same people they served a warrant on before.

So understand the situation here. There are a bunch of moonbats who attacked a scientist’s family and they lucked out by not getting arrested after the cops raided their house. They then plan more heinous crimes to celebrate their good fortune, like burning a family alive, before taking off. Sounds like someone dropped the ball on this one because these people are extremely dangerous and should have been in jail after the first attack.

And they have support from the local radicals who came out in force in an attempt to intimidate law enforcement:

About a dozen masked college-age people gathered as plainclothes officers wearing latex gloves took boxes and bags of evidence out of the house and put them into two Suburbans. Some of the onlookers took photos or videos while officers worked.

The message clearly being we’re going to find out who you are and target you next. Why they weren’t detained and questioned I’ll never understand, but if you think they won’t attempt to burn somebody alive in solidarity you just don’t know your hippies.

Michelle Malkin has more.

Outspoken Mexican General Relieved of His Post for Telling the Truth

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Leftists on both sides of the border are ecstatic at the ousting of Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito from his posting in lawless Tijuana. The General had been critical of the corruption of public officials and the inefficiency of local police in dealing with the powerful Mexican Cartels.

Toward the end of his tenure he was known for making waves with public missives lambasting the authorities and for giving the hard pressed citizens of Tijuana the option of reporting crimes to the military rather than risk running to the corrupt police. In other words, he was just what the Mexicans needed, the Patton of the drug wars. From SFGate:

An outspoken general who urged residents to call the Army when they witnessed a murder or drug deal in this crime-stricken border city was ousted Friday after repeatedly chastising police for being corrupt.

As the army’s top officer in northwest Mexico, Gen. Sergio Aponte Polito publicized a phone number to field the public’s pleas for help, and on Sunday he gave the news media his latest 5,700-word bombshell letter complaining about bad cops.

Such public provocations are extremely out of character for military leaders in Mexico — and may have cost the popular Aponte his job.

[…]

Aponte was reassigned to the Mexico City-based Supreme Military Tribunal and replaced by Gen. Sergio Magana Mier, who was most recently the Army’s top commander in Guerrero state. The Defense Secretary said such rotations are common in a press release that also announced transfers of five other generals and dozens of lower-ranking officers.

But the general’s fate reflects larger questions in Mexico about how to control drug-fueled violence, which has soared in the years since President Felipe Calderon moved to openly confront the cartels that move cocaine into the United States. Some Mexicans see the police as corrupt and the army as the only hope. But others fear soldiers are overstepping their authority and abusing their power by raiding the homes of suspected criminals.

Aponte led many of the 20,000 troops Calderon dispatched to retake wide swaths of Mexico that were taken over by drug trafficking. And he pushed limits by asserting a dominant crime-fighting role for soldiers in a city where police are considered too ineffective or corrupt to call. He named his phone-in campaign “Nosotros, si vamos,” or “Yes, we respond.”

“What he’s doing is completely unprecedented,” Roderic Camp, an expert on the Mexican military at Claremont McKenna College, said recently.

The jowly, silver-haired 64-year-old general speaks in severe tones and writes as if he’s inscribing his epitaph. In his latest missive, he declared that he was relieved of four previous assignments because he denounced ties between drug traffickers and public officials, and openly challenged the defense ministry to support him this time.

Looks like standing up for the good people of Mexico has consequences. Read the rest of the article and see how leftist academics shill for the drug lords by trying to vilify a man who was simply trying to give the people of Mexico a fighting chance.

h/t Crime Scene KC

Lorenzo Espinoza is a Hero

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On a couple of other posts about people cravenly standing by and allowing someone who needed their help to die I’ve been getting comments to the effect that everybody would act that way so I should, as one put it in an email, “shut the f%&# up” before he shuts me up though it should be noted I’m still waiting on that. This story I caught on Breitbart should be a good answer to the “it’s normal to be a coward” meme that has become so common on the Internet.

Russia Moves Troops into Georgia, Worst Fighting in That Region “In Years”

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georgian-girls-cry-while-reading-wounded-list.jpg
(From AFP: Georgian girls cry reading list of the wounded)

Separatist rebels firing rockets into Georgian APCs initiated what may well be a war between the former Soviet republic and Putin’s increasingly aggressive Russia which is supporting the South Ossetia rebels. It is said to be the fiercest fighting in that region in years:

MOSCOW — Fighting in the border region between the former Soviet republic of Georgia and a breakaway Georgian enclave escalated sharply Friday morning to its highest level in years.

Georgian officials said their troops had made a significant incursion into the breakaway region, South Ossetia, in response to what the officials contended were provocations from over the border, including shelling. The Georgian officials said they had taken up positions outside the capital of the enclave, Tskhinvali.

At least 25 civilians and troops were killed in the fighting that started Thursday, officials from both sides said.

The move by the Georgian troops followed a day of attacks by both sides, as well as an offer from the Georgian president to agree to a cease-fire.

The Georgian side suggested that its troop movements were not intended as the beginning of an all-out push to retake the enclave, but were rather a defensive effort to prevent shelling from the other side.

[…]

In the violence this week, separatist fighters from South Ossetia used rocket-propelled grenades to blow up a Georgian armored personnel carrier, killing two soldiers and wounding six others, said Shota Utiashvili, a Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman. As many as eight Georgian civilians were killed Thursday in a mortar attack on Avnevi, a village in the border region, he said.

On the South Ossetian side, about 15 people were killed, according to the South Ossetian separatist government Web site. Another 20 were wounded when villages came under fire from Georgian positions, said Tamara Keleksayeva, a spokeswoman for the separatist government.

Potentially complicating matters, about 300 volunteers from Russia have arrived in South Ossetia to aid in the fight, she said.

Even the leftist Times admits that the Russian support for South Ossetia is a tit-for-tat response to the Western countries’ recognition of Kosovo independence. Russia has long allied itself with the anti-Independence Serbs and threatened to support similar breakaway movements located in pro-Western countries if the West supports Kosovo.

The Independent has some blow by blow reports on the violence, including the likely inflated numbers of civilian casualties.

CNN Europe and Fox have more on the fighting.

Registan has a good post on the situation and what it means to the world. Gateway Pundit is following.

Putin says it’s war and Georgia is appealing to the U.S. for help. They sent troops to Iraq to help us, will we support our allies in their time of need?