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There is an address in Cheyenne, Wyoming -- 2710 Thomes Avenue -- where 2,000 companies are based. But it is not a skyscraper. Or even an office complex. It is a basic, 1,700-square-foot brick house. And it is the subject of an investigative report by Reuters called "A Little House of Secrets on the Great Plains."

One of the reporters on the project, Brian Grow, says it looks like a typical home -- until you go inside. "Lo and behold, the corporate suites for the companies that are registered at that address are in fact cubbyhole mailboxes, floor to ceiling in the main room," Grow tells Guy Raz, host of All Things Considered.

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/02/137573513/shell-game-2-000-firms-based-in-one-simple-house

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Why is there so little looting in Japan? The explanation is a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations. The Japanese legal structure rewards honesty more than most. The high rates of recovery have less to do with altruism than with the system of carrots and sticks that incentivizes people to return property they find rather than keep it. If you find an umbrella and turn it in to the cops, you get a finder's fee of 5-20% of its value if the owner picks it up.

If they do not pick it up within six months, the finder gets to keep the umbrella. Japanese learn about this system from a young age, and a child's first trip to the nearest police station after finding a small coin, say, is a rite of passage that both children and police officers take seriously. At the same time, police enforce small crimes like petty theft, which contributes to an overall sense of security and order. Failure to return a found wallet can result in hours of interrogation at best, and up to 10 years in prison at worst.

Japan has an active and visible police force of nearly 300,000 officers across the country. Cops walk their beats and chat up local residents and shopkeepers. Police are posted at ubiquitous kobans, police boxes manned by one or two officers, and in cities there is almost always a koban within walking distance of another koban. A survey in 1992 found that 95% of residents knew where the nearest koban was. Police are good at their jobs: The clearance rate for murder in 2010 was an unbelievable 98.2%.

At the same time, members of the Yakuza are also enforcing order. All three major crime groups -- Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai, and Inagawa-kai -- patrol the streets to make sure looting and robbery does not occur. The Sumiyoshi-kai claims to have shipped over 40 tons of humanitarian aid supplies nationwide and that is probably a conservative estimate. One group has even opened its Tokyo offices to displaced Japanese and foreigners who were stranded after the first tremors disabled public transportation.

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that." I put down my notebook. "Just that?" "That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft.

One has to think about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

Gunmen kidnapped a 28-year-old woman who was the sole police officer in the Mexican town of Guadalupe, close to the violent northern border city of Ciudad Juarez. Unidentified gunmen set Erika Gandara's home ablaze before abducting her. She was the last police officer in Guadalupe after her colleagues either resigned and fled or were killed. Guadalupe, population 9,000, is in an area used by traffickers to smuggle drugs into the United States. The town is just up the road from the town of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, where a 20-year-old college student and mother named Marisol Valles took over as police chief in October.

Alcohol is more dangerous than illegal drugs like marijuana, according to a new study. British experts evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a whole.

Researchers analyzed how addictive a drug is and how it harms the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families, and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.

Heroin, crack cocaine, and crystal meth were the most lethal to individuals. When considering their wider social effects, alcohol, heroin, and crack were the deadliest. Overall, alcohol outranked all other substances, followed by heroin, and crack. Marijuana, ecstasy, and LSD scored far lower.

The study was paid for by Britain's Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and was published online Monday in the medical journal, Lancet. Experts said alcohol scored so high because it is so widely used and has devastating consequences not only for drinkers but for those around them.

http://www.latimes.com/sns-ap-eu-med-dangerous-alcohol,0,4283007.story

Como trabajadores de la información queremos que nos expliquen qué es lo que quieren de nosotros, qué es lo que pretenden que publiquemos o dejemos de publicar, para saber a qué atenernos.

Ustedes son, en estos momentos, las autoridades de facto en esta ciudad, porque los mandos instituidos legalmente no han podido hacer nada para impedir que nuestros compañeros sigan cayendo.

Es por ello que, frente a esta realidad inobjetable, nos dirigimos a ustedes para preguntarles, porque lo menos que queremos es que otro más de nuestros colegas vuelva a ser víctima de sus disparos.

Ya no queremos más muertos. Ya no queremos más heridos ni tampoco más intimidaciones. Es imposible ejercer nuestra función en estas condiciones. Indíquenos, por tanto, qué esperan de nosotros como medio.

Esta no es una rendición. Se trata de una tregua para con quienes han impuesto la fuerza de su ley en esta ciudad, con tal de que respeten la vida de quienes nos dedicamos al oficio de informar.

http://www.diario.com.mx/notas.php?f=2010/09/18&id=6b124801376ce134c7d6ce2c7fb8fe2f

Nathan Pugh, described by authorities as a career criminal, walked into a Dallas bank -- where he's a customer -- on Monday, 26 July 2010, and pushed a note through the window to the teller that read "this is not a bag of food," referring to the Whataburger bag he was holding. The note claimed that the bag was actually a "bom."

The teller remained calm and told Pugh, 49, that she would need his ID in order to give him any money. He handed her his debit card from the bank. When he demanded $2,000, the teller then said she would need a second form of identification to take out that much money. Pugh then handed her a Texas ID card while she hit a silent alarm.

Pugh settled for the $900 in the till, put it in his shirt pocket, and turned to exit. He was greeted by two Dallas police officers standing near the door and took a hostage -- a woman holding a child. He ordered the woman to put down the baby and "if she didn't cooperate, he would kill her." The feisty mother wrestled him to the ground.

Mr Lee died of liver cancer at the age of 73. The 108-car funeral procession conveying his body to a crematorium included a Rolls Royce hearse, Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. Female models carried signs announcing each delegation. It was believed to be the island's biggest ever gangster funeral, with more than 20,000 attending and lines of spectators stretching for more than a mile.

http://mafiatoday.com/general-breaking-news/politicians-gangsters-mix-at-funeral-for-taiwan-mafia-boss/

Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, who is seen running with an Iraqi child in his arms in a video posted by WikiLeaks of a July 2007 massacre of civilians in Baghdad, talked to the World Socialist Web Site about the impact of this and similar experiences in Iraq.

McCord and another former member of the company addressed an open letter to the Iraqi people, in which they insisted that "the acts depicted in the video were everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how US-led wars are carried out in this region."

My platoon leader yelled at me for [evacuating a wounded child from the scene]. He told me to "stop worrying about these motherfucking kids and start worrying about pulling security." So after that I went up and pulled security on a rooftop.

Our rules of engagement were changing on an almost daily basis. But we had a pretty gung-ho commander, who decided that because we were getting hit by IEDs a lot, there would be a new battalion SOP [standard operating procedure].

He goes, "If someone in your line gets hit with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherfucker on the street." We were just sitting there looking at each other like, "Are you kidding me? You want us to kill women and children on the street?"

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/emcc-a28.shtml