Group items tagged

More than 60 percent of the cartels' revenue -- $8.6 billion out of $13.8 billion in 2006 -- came from U.S. marijuana sales, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Now, to stay competitive, Mexican traffickers are changing their business model to improve their product and streamline delivery. Well-organized Mexican cartels have also moved to increasingly cultivate marijuana on public lands in the United States, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center and local authorities. This strategy gives the Mexicans direct access to U.S. markets, avoids the risk of seizure at the border and reduces transportation costs. Unlike cocaine, which the traffickers must buy and transport from South America, driving up costs, marijuana has been especially lucrative for the cartels because they control the business all the way from clandestine fields in the Mexican mountains to the wholesale dealers in U.S. cities such as Washington. "It's pure profit," said Jorge Chabat, an expert on the drug trade at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City.

a portrait began to emerge Thursday of an unpleasant stickler for the rules who often clashed with researchers and considered the mice cages his personal fiefdom. Co-workers told police that Clark was a "control freak" who viewed the laboratory and its mice as his territory, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press

20 deaths, including two in the state of Baja California Norte, which borders California. The Mexican cases include five health- care workers, the Ottawa-based agency said in an e-mail today. Tests in Mexico found patients were infected with H1N1 and type-B influenza strains and the parainfluenza virus, the agency said. In the U.S., doctors discovered a new strain of H1N1 swine influenza in patients in San Diego County and Imperial County, California, and in San Antonio, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said today. "It will be critical to determine whether or not the strains of H1N1 isolated from patients in Mexico are also swine flu," Donald Low, an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, told the Canadian Press. Canada's National Microbiology Lab received 51 specimens from Mexico yesterday and will be testing them for a range of pathogens, the public health agency said.