The world’s most comprehensive legalized heroin program became permanent Sunday with overwhelming approval from Swiss voters who simultaneously rejected the decriminalization of marijuana.

The heroin program, started in 1994, is offered in 23 centers across Switzerland. It has helped eliminate scenes of large groups of drug users shooting up openly in parks that marred Swiss cities in the 1980s and 1990s and is credited with reducing crime and improving the health and daily lives of addicts.

The nearly 1,300 selected addicts, who have been unhelped by other therapies, visit one of the centers twice a day to receive the carefully measured dose of heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory.

From CNN:

Somalis are so desperate to survive that attacks on merchant shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean will not stop, a pirate leader promises.

“The pirates are living between life and death,” said the pirate leader, identified by only one name, Boyah. “Who can stop them? Americans and British all put together cannot do anything.”

The interview with the pirate was conducted in late August by journalists employed by the Somali news organization Garowe. The complete interview was provided to CNN last week and provides a glimpse of why piracy has been so hard to control in the region.

Read the series here.

From the LA Times:

The United States’ war on drugs has failed and will continue to do so as long as it emphasizes law enforcement and neglects the problem of consumption, a Washington think tank says in a report co-chaired by a former president of Mexico.

The former president, Ernesto Zedillo, in an interview, called for a major rethinking of U.S. policy, which he said has been “asymmetrical” in demanding that countries such as Mexico stanch the flow of drugs northward, without successful efforts to stop the flow of guns south. In addition to disrupting drug-smuggling routes, eradicating crops and prosecuting dealers, the U.S. must confront the public health issue that large-scale consumption poses, he said.

From the AP (via Google News):

Tourists who go abroad to abuse children should face the prospect of prosecution in their home countries if they are caught having sex with kids in nations with lax penalties, participants at a U.N.-backed conference concluded Friday.

Sweden already has such a law, and about 3,000 experts plus government representatives from 137 nations backed the concept at the Third World Congress against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents in Rio de Janeiro.

Their final declaration called for nations to establish laws allowing stiffer prosecution of child sex cases for perpetrators who take trips to nations with few or no penalties because they know they’ll face little if any retribution, said Nils Kastberg, UNICEF’s director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Many of these pedophiles tell each other, ‘Oh, don’t worry if something happens to you in that country, the worst that will happen is you’ll pay a fine,’” Kastberg said in a telephone interview.

Participants are now expected to go to their home countries and lobby governments for the law changes.

From the AP (via Google News):

Calderon’s sweeping crackdown on powerful drug cartels has in recent weeks been shaken by a nationwide corruption scandal.

The government revealed that top officials within the army, federal Attorney General’s office, and federal police had been allegedly bought off by Mexico’s most powerful drug gang, the Sinaloa cartel. On Thursday, officials said that almost half of Mexican police officers examined this year had failed background and security checks, a figure that rises to nearly 9 of 10 cops in the violent border state of Baja California, home to Tijuana.

But Calderon insisted he won’t back down, promising to weed out corruption within his administration, and said officials are working to create a “new generation of police.”

“To get rid of organized crime, we must first clean up our own house,” he said.

Since taking office on Dec. 1, 2006, Calderon has sent more than 20,000 soldiers to battle drug trafficking across Mexico, helping to seize of 70 tons of cocaine and 3,708 tons of marijuana, he said.

Cartels have responded with a bloody terror campaign, dumping beheaded bodies on public streets and tossing grenades into a crowd of Independence Day revelers in September. More than 4,000 people have died so far this year in drug-related violence.

From CNN:

Mexican authorities have detained the country’s former drug czar on suspicion that he may have accepted $450,000 a month in bribes from drug traffickers, Mexico’s attorney general said Friday.

Noe Ramirez Mandujano was in charge from 2006 until this August of the attorney general’s office that specializes in combatting organized crime.

Ramirez is accused of meeting with members of a drug cartel while he was in office and agreeing to provide information on investigations in exchange for the bribes, Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora Icaza said at a news conference Friday.

The arrest was part of an ongoing investigation called “Operation Limpieza,” or “Operation Cleanup,” the attorney general said. The operation targets officials who may have passed information to drug cartels.

From the BBC:

More than one tonne of ivory products has been seized in Africa’s largest-ever international crackdown on wildlife crime.

The operation, co-ordinated by Interpol and the Kenya Wildlife Service, led to the arrest of 57 illegal traders across five African nations.

The haul also included animal skins and hippopotamus teeth.

Interpol said that similar trans-national operations will be carried out worldwide to combat wildlife crime.

From the LA Times:

Barely three weeks since America elected its first black president, noose hangings, racist graffiti and death threats have struck dozens of towns across the country.

More than 200 such incidents — including cross burnings, assassination betting pools and effigies of President-elect Barack Obama — have been reported, according to law enforcement authorities and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups.

Racist websites have been boasting that their servers have been crashing because of an exponential increase in traffic.

And America’s most potent symbol of racial hatred, the Ku Klux Klan, is reasserting itself in a spate of recent violence, after decades of disorganization and obscurity.

From the NY Times:

The Alperon hit had dominated the news for days. A narrow strip of a country, Israel has a limited pool of celebrities. So when Mr. Alperon, referred to by many as Israel’s Tony Soprano, was killed at 54, the local news media went to town.

Immediately after the killing, Mrs. Alperon welcomed the country’s top crime reporters into the family home and wept bitterly on camera, begging for pity on her seven children, “young orphans who would no longer be able to say ‘Father.’ ” One son, 21, had appeared in a Tel Aviv court that morning, where he was arraigned on charges of threats and extortion. The Israeli Don, who had attended the proceeding, was blown up shortly after leaving the courthouse.

Mr. Alperon was a mobster, according to the police, the leader of an organized crime family known for racketeering. The family is said to have fought for control of markets ranging from illegal gambling joints, to bottle recycling, to sidewalk flower stalls.