February 11, 2009 3:58 PM
- Text
U.S. Guns Fuel Bloody Mexican Drug Wars
(CBS)
The Skinny is Keach Hagey's take on the top news of the day and the best of the Internet.
The U.S. isn't the only country struggling with the effects of what's coming illegally over the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Washington Post reports that 100 percent of drug-related killings in Mexico are carried out with smuggled American weapons, according to Mexican police. About 2,000 enter Mexico each day, according to a Mexican government study.
The guns are "crucial tools in an astoundingly barbaric war between rival cartels that has cost 4,000 lives in the past 18 months and sent law enforcement agencies in Washington and Mexico City into crisis mode," the Post reports.
Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms hope that some of the money will be used to give Mexican police chiefs greater access to U.S. databases for gun traces. Right now, the traces can only be made through federal police headquarters in Mexico City. That takes so long that many local cops don't bother.
They get into Mexico stuffed into the baggy pant legs or hidden in the trunks of "ants," or gunrunners -- often aided by corrupt customs officials. The weapons are often bought legally at gun shows in Arizona and other border states where loopholes allow criminals to stock up without background checks.
Guns are now flooding into the country in part because of the cartel war, and in part because of the ease of buying high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons ban was not renewed in 2004, according to an ATF official.
The American taxpayer must now mop up the bloody results of the ban's demise: President Bush has promised $500 million in U.S. aid to help Mexico battle drug cartels, who are formidable precisely because of their steady supply of AK-47s and grenade launchers that were made In the U.S.A.
U.S. Has Talked Big On Darfur, But Has Done Very Little
There's been enough hot air emanating from the Bush administration over the crisis in Darfur in the past few years to warm the climate a few degrees.
But the Washington Post takes a long, hard look at those promises this morning, and find them coming up very short.
A year and a half after President Bush called for international troops on the ground to protect innocent Darfuris and repeatedly described the situation there as "genocide," the situation on the ground remains unchanged. More than 2 million displaced Darfuris have been unable to return to their homes. Despite a renewed United Nations push, the international peacekeepers have yet to materialize.
In spite of his passionate rhetoric, Bush has been ineffectual on two fronts: unable to mobilize either his bureaucracy or the international community.
Every time the president says he wants to take some direct action in Darfur, his aides block him, pointing out the folly of the U.S. being seen as invading another Muslim country. And then there's the elephant in the room: the U.S. has no strategic interests in Sudan.
"Advisers say Bush came to accept, albeit grudgingly, the arguments against using U.S. military assets - especially the possibility that they might attract al Qaeda," the paper reports.
But Bush's efforts to get other military assets onto the ground to help the strained African Union troops have gone nowhere, according to the paper.
"Overall," concluded John Bolten, the former U.N. ambassador to the United Nations. "Sudan is a case where there's a lot of international rhetoric and no stomach for real action."
Big Law Firms Turn Out To Be Embarrassingly Full Of White Men
Big law firms are getting graded on diversity by a bunch of law students at Stanford, the New York Times reports, and many are failing.
Students are handing out "diversity report cards" ranking firms on how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have, and then asking elite schools to restrict recruiting by those at the bottom of their rankings.
In New York, a third of the big firms have no black partners, and an overlapping third no Hispanic ones. Half the firms in Boston have no black partners, and three quarters no Hispanic ones.
"This is 2007," said Michel Landis Daubner, a law professor at Stanford and the adviser for the project, called Building a Better Legal Profession. "If you can't find a single black or Hispanic partner, that's not an accident."
The students also found relatively few female partners in New York, ranging from 7 percent at Fulbright & Jaworski to 23 percent at Morrison & Foerster.
Those numbers are "a bit of canary in the coal mine," said Deborah Rhode, another Stanford law professor. "The absence of women as partners often says something about how firms deal with work-family issues."
A NOTE TO READERS: The Skinny is available via e-mail. Click here and follow the directions to register to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.
The U.S. isn't the only country struggling with the effects of what's coming illegally over the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Washington Post reports that 100 percent of drug-related killings in Mexico are carried out with smuggled American weapons, according to Mexican police. About 2,000 enter Mexico each day, according to a Mexican government study.
The guns are "crucial tools in an astoundingly barbaric war between rival cartels that has cost 4,000 lives in the past 18 months and sent law enforcement agencies in Washington and Mexico City into crisis mode," the Post reports.
Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms hope that some of the money will be used to give Mexican police chiefs greater access to U.S. databases for gun traces. Right now, the traces can only be made through federal police headquarters in Mexico City. That takes so long that many local cops don't bother.
They get into Mexico stuffed into the baggy pant legs or hidden in the trunks of "ants," or gunrunners -- often aided by corrupt customs officials. The weapons are often bought legally at gun shows in Arizona and other border states where loopholes allow criminals to stock up without background checks.
Guns are now flooding into the country in part because of the cartel war, and in part because of the ease of buying high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons ban was not renewed in 2004, according to an ATF official.
The American taxpayer must now mop up the bloody results of the ban's demise: President Bush has promised $500 million in U.S. aid to help Mexico battle drug cartels, who are formidable precisely because of their steady supply of AK-47s and grenade launchers that were made In the U.S.A.
U.S. Has Talked Big On Darfur, But Has Done Very Little
There's been enough hot air emanating from the Bush administration over the crisis in Darfur in the past few years to warm the climate a few degrees.
But the Washington Post takes a long, hard look at those promises this morning, and find them coming up very short.
A year and a half after President Bush called for international troops on the ground to protect innocent Darfuris and repeatedly described the situation there as "genocide," the situation on the ground remains unchanged. More than 2 million displaced Darfuris have been unable to return to their homes. Despite a renewed United Nations push, the international peacekeepers have yet to materialize.
In spite of his passionate rhetoric, Bush has been ineffectual on two fronts: unable to mobilize either his bureaucracy or the international community.
Every time the president says he wants to take some direct action in Darfur, his aides block him, pointing out the folly of the U.S. being seen as invading another Muslim country. And then there's the elephant in the room: the U.S. has no strategic interests in Sudan.
"Advisers say Bush came to accept, albeit grudgingly, the arguments against using U.S. military assets - especially the possibility that they might attract al Qaeda," the paper reports.
But Bush's efforts to get other military assets onto the ground to help the strained African Union troops have gone nowhere, according to the paper.
"Overall," concluded John Bolten, the former U.N. ambassador to the United Nations. "Sudan is a case where there's a lot of international rhetoric and no stomach for real action."
Big Law Firms Turn Out To Be Embarrassingly Full Of White Men
Big law firms are getting graded on diversity by a bunch of law students at Stanford, the New York Times reports, and many are failing.
Students are handing out "diversity report cards" ranking firms on how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have, and then asking elite schools to restrict recruiting by those at the bottom of their rankings.
In New York, a third of the big firms have no black partners, and an overlapping third no Hispanic ones. Half the firms in Boston have no black partners, and three quarters no Hispanic ones.
"This is 2007," said Michel Landis Daubner, a law professor at Stanford and the adviser for the project, called Building a Better Legal Profession. "If you can't find a single black or Hispanic partner, that's not an accident."
The students also found relatively few female partners in New York, ranging from 7 percent at Fulbright & Jaworski to 23 percent at Morrison & Foerster.
Those numbers are "a bit of canary in the coal mine," said Deborah Rhode, another Stanford law professor. "The absence of women as partners often says something about how firms deal with work-family issues."
A NOTE TO READERS: The Skinny is available via e-mail. Click here and follow the directions to register to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.
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