In this March 22 photo, Manami Kon, using Japanese hiragana characters she just learned, writes a letter for her mother who’s still missing after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami at the devastated city of Miyako, northeastern Japan. The 4-year-old Manami wrote, “Dear Mommy. I hope you’re alive. Are you okay?” It took about an hour for her to finish it. Twenty days after the disaster that hit Japan’s northeastern coast, her parents and a sister were still unaccounted for.
What were you doing when you were four years old? Did you think the world had ended?
Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation.
“He told me they have accepted they will all probably die from radiation sickness in the short term or cancer in the long-term.”
Priorities. Japan has some very dedicated and loyal people.
A federal magistrate has denied bond in a marijuana case involving the brother of a New Mexico mayor who faces gun smuggling charges.
Gilbert Espinoza faced a detention hearing Wednesday in Las Cruces after he was arrested on a charge of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute.
Who says the cartels aren’t inside our borders?
According to a criminal complaint, Border Patrol agents who stopped Espinoza on Saturday afternoon on Interstate 25 near Las Cruces found 113 pounds of marijuana hidden in the gas tank of his vehicle. The agents said they had become suspicious of how Espinoza answered their questions and called in a drug-sniffing dog.
Espinoza, who also is known as Gilbert Espinoza-Saenz, was turned over to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
Luna County Sheriff Raymond Cobos said Espinoza is the brother of Columbus Mayor Eddie Espinoza.
Eddie Espinoza was among a dozen people accused by federal authorities earlier this month of participating in a scheme to illegally buy guns in the U.S. and smuggle them to Mexico. The Columbus police chief and a trustee of the town near the Mexico border also are among those facing federal charges.
A federal probation officer filed a notice in court Tuesday that the government intends to petition to revoke Gilbert Espinoza’s supervised release in a 1996 drug case.
Court records show he was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release on charges of conspiracy to distribute marijuana and possession with intent to distribute marijuana.
As if BP’s reputation on the Gulf Coast couldn’t get any worse, the company is now scrambling to address the disappearance of a laptop containing thousands of names of victims from the last year’s massive oil spill.
The company announced Tuesday that an employee lost the laptop, containing 13,000 names and the personal information of individuals who made claims related to the Deepwater Horizon accident last April.
The password-protected laptop contained an expansive list that contained Social Security numbers, phone numbers and address of the individuals.
Wait a second, where the heck is the backup? And pray tell, why in the world was the information NOT encrypted?
In his speech tonight President Obush argued that his intervention in Libya was justified because “Qaddafi declared he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”
In other words, we went to war in response Qaddafi’s WMDs, his Words of Mass Destruction.
