the drug cartels in mexico

The Zetas drug cartel gang has become the largest in Mexico after overtaking its rival Sinaloa, and now operates in more than half of country’s 32 states, a US security firm report says.
"By the end of 2011, Los Zetas eclipsed the Sinaloa Federation as the largest cartel operating in Mexico in terms of geographic presence,"  the Stratfor report published online on Tuesday said.
The Zetas operate in 17 states while the Sinaloa gang operates in 16 states, down from 23 in 2005, according to the US Assistant Attorney General's Office of Special Investigations into Organized Crime, cited in the Stratfor report.
Both these cartels have subsumed smaller groups, with Sinaloa now controlling much of western Mexico, while Zetas has reinforced its control over much of the east, the report said.
Thousands of people have died in rising drug-related violence since the government of President Felipe Calderon launched crackdown against the drug cartels five years ago.
Last year, the Mexican police were able to capture some of the senior Zetas operatives, including its founding member Flavio Mendez Santiago.
Violence is likely to continue as the government pursues its strategy, Stratfor said, underlining geographical shifts in violent areas in recent months.
Although violent, the decades-old Sinaloa gang preferred "to buy off and corrupt to achieve its objectives," while the Zetas, formed by ex-military personnel in the 1990s, "prefer brutality", the report said.
The report's authors anticipated a further spread of Mexican cartel activities in the Caribbean, Europe and Australia in 2012.

the secret assad emails

Bashar al-Assad took advice from Iran on how to handle the uprising against his rule, according to a cache of what appear to be several thousand emails received and sent by the Syrian leader and his wife.
The Syrian leader was also briefed in detail about the presence of western journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs and urged to "tighten the security grip" on the opposition-held city in November.
The revelations are contained in more than 3,000 documents that activists say are emails downloaded from private accounts belonging to Assad and his wife Asma.
The messages, which have been obtained by the Guardian, are said to have been intercepted by members of the opposition Supreme Council of the Revolution group between June and early February.
The documents, which emerge on the first anniversary of the rebellion that has seen more than 8,000 Syrians killed, paint a portrait of a first family remarkably insulated from the mounting crisis and continuing to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle.
They appear to show the president's wife spending thousands of dollars over the internet for designer goods while he swaps entertaining internet links on his iPad and downloads music from iTunes.
As the world watched in horror at the brutal suppression of protests across the country and many Syrians faced food shortages and other hardships, Mrs Assad spent more than £10,000 on candlesticks, tables and chandeliers from Paris and instructed an aide to order a fondue set from Amazon.
The Guardian has made extensive efforts to authenticate the emails by checking their contents against established facts and contacting 10 individuals whose correspondence appears in the cache. These checks suggest the messages are genuine, but it has not been possible to verify every one.

protests in moscow against vladimir putin

Thousands of Russians streamed through metal detectors for hours, past camouflaged trucks and under the whirring blades of a helicopter, to join a mass protest against Vladimir Putin's official return to the Kremlin.

They were furious and frustrated. Gone were the lighthearted slogans and costumes that had thus far marked the protests that exploded in Moscow in December and carried through Russia's presidential vote on Sunday.

A few held white flowers, a symbol of the peaceful movement. Their white ribbons, until now emblazoned with words like "For a Putin-less Russia", hung bare.
Many protesters had hoped to force Putin into a second round, proving that Russia's longtime leader had indeed lost the support of the heartland.
Instead they were met with an official result of nearly 64% for Putin, buoyed, election monitors say, by massive fraud. Russia's elections chief, Vladimir Churov, called the vote the "most honest in the world".
"It's not just about falsifications," said Ivan, 65, an office manager, explaining why he turned out on a workday to stand for two hours in wet, windy snow. "I want our country to be democratic. I want to be led not by crooks and thieves, but by normal people. I want society to democratise, to allow different parties to take part in elections, to allow different people into the presidential election. I want them to stop robbing the country."
To the 20,000 people who turned out for the protest, Putin wasn't a president, but a tsar. "These weren't presidential elections – it was a succession to the throne," read one large sign held high above protesters' heads.
Opposition leaders, taking to a stage constructed in the shadow of Alexander Pushkin, Russia's most revered poet, refused, one by one, to recognise a president they denounced as "illegitimate".
"I've heard that a lot of people are disappointed," opposition leader Alexey Navalny shouted from the stage. "Did you expect something different from these crooks and thieves? They robbed us."