Mexico aims to make Baja safer for U.S. tourists

American tourists heading to Mexico’s Baja California state in the future can expect more police protection from a new task force, according to Mexican authorities. Officials from the Baja California cities of Tijuana, Ensenada and Rosarito gathered earlier this week to announce the creation of the task force, which will be made up of bilingual officers and which will be designed primarily to serve Americans

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Quick California fire burns oil fields, threatens homes

A rapidly moving fire in southwest California torched oil fields and threatened homes as it blazed southward Tuesday, a fire official told CNN. Nearly 130 firefighters battled the 300-acre blaze, which broke out Tuesday morning in Ventura County between the towns of Fillmore and Moorpark, Bill Nash of the Ventura County Fire Department told CNN

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Abilene: Where Porn Fought the Law and Porn Won

Not so long ago, a family driving across Kansas on well-traveled I-70 would encounter nothing racier than a pecan log and nothing more hyped than the “world’s largest prairie dog.” Then porn came to the freeway. The surprising thing is that officials in the Bible Belt state are taking the invasion lying down.

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Black politician targeted by German far-right

A black politician campaigning in eastern Germany has become the victim of a racist campaign by a far-right party. The National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) says it is trying to persuade Zeca Schall, a German citizen who came from Angola 21 years ago, to leave the country. Schall is a member of the Christian Democratic Union, the party led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and has been named as a CDU expert for the integration of minorities.

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India launches nuclear submarine

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched the country’s first locally built nuclear-powered submarine on Sunday. “Today, we join a select group of five nations who possess the capability to build a nuclear-powered submarine,” Singh declared in his speech at the eastern naval base of Visakhapatnam. Although he billed the submarine as an outcome of a public-private partnership, the Indian leader did mention Russia in his address

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Irving Picard at Center of Post-Madoff Storm

Bernie Madoff bankruptcy trustee, Irving H. Picard, may be the hardest working man in the collections business — and maybe one day the richest. Picard, the New York-based lawyer who could have easily doubled for actor Frederic March in film Inherit the Wind, is at the turbulent center of the post-Madoff world, a world that includes multi-billion dollar feeder fund lawsuits, multi-million dollar deals with international banks, and, less grand, the issuing of multi-hundred thousand dollar checks to the nearly 7,000 direct account holders caught up in Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme.

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