Marijuana a growing problem in Oregon forests

Unlike domestic pot operations of years past, many of the plantations now growing on federal land are operated by Mexican drug-trafficking organizations who are well-financed and well-armed, the sheriffs said. "The longer it goes on, the harder it will be for us to overcome," Winters told Walden. "They are better funded than us ... There are more of them than there are of us." In fact, the U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center's 2010 national drug threat assessment released in February reported that the number of plants removed from public land grew more than 300 percent from 2004 to 2008, primarily from pot gardens operated by Mexican drug cartels. The pot growers favor public land because of its remoteness and because it can't be seized or traced to an owner, the report said...more

Seems any productive use of federal lands is either illegal, or the legal uses are being slowly constricted and eliminated.

Mendocino public land at center of pot war

Mendocino County officials say they're determined to take back public lands from armed marijuana growers, with or without declaring a state of emergency requested by concerned citizens earlier this week. “I've had it. We're going to get the illegal growers out of the national forest,” said Mendocino County Supervisor John Pinches. Sheriff Tom Allman said he's already working on a plan for a large-scale attack on the illegal growers in the Mendocino National Forest. Armed pot growers are keeping hikers, hunters, fishermen, equestrians and cattle ranchers from utilizing land that belongs to the public, county residents said. People who live near and use the forest land are demanding that something be done. On Tuesday, they called on supervisors to declare a state of emergency and bring in the National Guard to help clear the forest of dangerous intruders. “It's an armed invasion of American soil,” said Ann Marie Bauer, a fifth generation rancher in Round Valley. Suspected pot growers have fired over her head to scare her away while she was moving cattle on forest land the family leases. She said she is afraid to retrieve a group of cattle that is grazing down a trail where she knows marijuana has been growing. The gun-toting invaders, many of them Mexican nationals, are cultivating massive amounts of marijuana on public land for Mexican cartels, law authorities contend...more

There's an easy way to stop this. Make these guys do a NEPA analysis of their operation and they will give up and go away.

Officials: Wolf kills 100-pound dog in Utah

A wolf attacked and killed a dog that was guarding sheep near the Wyoming border, the Utah Department of Agriculture confirmed Wednesday. The wolf killed the dog a week ago on private lands in the Chalk Creek area east of Coalville, Department of Agriculture spokesman Larry Lewis said. Lewis said the 100-pound Great Pyrenees was no match for the wolf, which injured a second guard dog in the same attack. The other dog was missing for several days but turned up Wednesday nursing injuries from the attack, he said. Wildlife officers were able to confirm the wolf kill by collecting fur from the scene, and a livestock herder reported that he saw a wolf limping away from the attack, Lewis said. The wolf is still on the loose. An effort to trap it was unsuccessful. Lewis said he couldn't identify the sheep herder or landowner because they don't want publicity that could draw tourists or vigilantes to their ranch. Government trappers, meanwhile, confirmed another report that one or two wolves killed a 350-pound calf earlier this week near Hardware Ranch Wildlife Management Area, 15 miles east of Hyrum in Cache County. The calf's mother was found dead for unknown reasons — there was no evidence it was attacked by a wolf, Lewis said. The trappers determined it was a wolf kill from the condition of the calf carcass, said Kevin Bunnell, mammals program coordinator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources...more

Global Warming, R.I.P

In a remarkable monograph, Roy W. Spencer presents hard evidence that 75% of the observed warming since the start of the 20th century is due to natural processes. He offers a detailed model describing how one of these processes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), operates in the real world. Most importantly, he demonstrates that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a minor contributor to a global climate largely insensitive to man-made CO2. Thanks to this highly skilled climatologist and his The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled The World's Top Climate Scientists, we can now taunt the often corrupt and overtly political planetary high priests with this: PDO means AGW is DOA. Written in a style that should be attractive to both warming newcomers and scientists from other fields, the volume's appearance is not a welcome event for the world's strident purveyors of global warming orthodoxy...more

So Long to the Dusty Trail

Why couldn't we have had the EPA in the Great Depression? If they had issued their proposed "no dust" regs in 1930, we would have been spared the decade of human suffering from sustained drought and agricultural devastation in the Dust Bowl. Of course, then John Steinbeck wouldn't have had a reason to write The Grapes of Wrath. What a wonderful notion: federal regulators, by simple rule-making fiat, saving us from the natural world. Farm and road dust -- largely minerals comprising silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium and sodium, with a variety of organic compounds thrown in -- has always been with us, especially in the modern era. But now the EPA, living in a dust-free but not idiot-free zone inside the Beltway, insists that the rest of us live in a biosphere bubble, inoculated from anything that might fail the Good Housekeeping test...more

Climate Change: How Adapting to Warming Could Make It Worse

Positive feedback cycles—they're what keeps climatologists up at night. The term describes the way that certain ecological responses to a warming climate can further accelerate warming, creating a feedback cycle that can spiral out of control. Take the billions and billions of tons of methane buried beneath the Arctic permafrost. Methane is about 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but fortunately, those vast stores in the Arctic are locked beneath frozen soil, for the most part unable to escape and add to the greenhouse effect. But as the planet—and especially the Arctic—continues to warm, some of that permafrost will melt, potentially leaking methane into the atmosphere and amplifying global warming. And the warmer it gets, the more Arctic permafrost will thaw and the more methane will be released—so on and so on. But as the planet itself reacts to warming, so will we. People will move away from the coasts as sea level rises, or shift agriculture to the north as the land we farm now becomes too hot and too dry to be productive. Human influence on the planet will shift as we adapt to warming—and we may end up doing even more damage to the Earth than climate change itself. That's the warning raised by in a new paper published in the August 6 edition of Conservation Letters...more

Texas Defies EPA on Regulation of Greenhouse Gas

Texas officials warned U.S. EPA this week they won't change or reinterpret their air pollution laws to comply with federal greenhouse gas regulations, arguing that the Obama administration's climate rules are illegal. EPA plans to begin regulating stationary sources of greenhouse gases next January and asked states to inform the agency by this week whether they would need to change state laws or regulations to comply with federal policies. But Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan Shaw and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) blasted EPA for unlawfully attempting to force states to "pledge allegiance to its rules." The dispute marks the latest in a series of altercations between the Obama EPA and Texas as federal officials have moved to overhaul the state's air permitting program. "On behalf of the state of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions," the Texas officials say...more

Minerals Service Had a Mandate to Produce Results

For decades, Washington and Louisiana were joined in the quest for red-jacket days, and the minerals agency was expected to provide them. Washington got oil and royalty fees; Louisiana got jobs; and the agency got frequent reminders of the need to keep both happy. Seldom do regulators work in a place so dependent on the industry they oversee. From the top of Louisiana’s tallest building (One Shell Square) to the bottom of its largest aquarium (with a sunken rig), oil saturated the state’s culture long before it covered its marshes. It is prized as a source of jobs and as a source of tax revenue. While Floridians stage protests to prevent drilling, Louisianians stage a Shrimp and Petroleum Festival to “prove that oil and water really do mix.” When Mr. Oynes’s wife, Rena, won a teaching award, it was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute. Across South Louisiana, regulators have grown up hunting and fishing — and working on oil rigs — with the people they oversee...more

Los Payasos - BP Scores Stimulus Cash

The federal government is giving a joint venture involving oil giant BP millions of dollars in stimulus money to build a power plant on farmland near the tiny Kern County town of Tupman, even as the company faces heavy government pressure and a criminal probe into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP is benefiting from a $308 million federal grant over several years for the cutting-edge power plant on cotton and alfalfa fields seven miles from the western edge of Bakersfield. More than half of the money, $175 million, is coming from stimulus funds. The rest is coming from another federal program. The stimulus portion alone ranks as the second biggest award in California to a corporation and among the largest in the country benefiting private interests, according to data reported to the government by stimulus recipients...more

Let's see. Investigate them and fine them with one hand, while you're passing them government handouts with the other.

Our government clowns at work.

Horse rancher challenges fence law

A Blanchard horse rancher's fight over the arcane state law on fences has been rebuffed by every court he's turned to, but La Verne Koenig's beef about a century-old North Dakota law has some state lawmakers saying his complaint might have merit. A jury in May found the 59-year-old Koenig guilty of allowing livestock to run at large because authorities said he failed to maintain a legal fence on his spread near Blanchard in southeastern North Dakota. Koenig was ordered to pay $5,400 for injuries allegedly inflicted on a neighbor's horse by one of Koenig's horses. Koenig has filed a laundry list of complaints about the case, including his claim that a creek and a ditch should have qualified as a legal fence - per a state law that has been on the books for more than 100 years. While Koenig appears to have little chance in the courts, some lawmakers believe there's something wrong about a law on fences that was enacted when Theodore Roosevelt was president. "There is a whole section on this and it's all 100-year law," said state Sen. Randy Christmann, R-Hazen, himself a rancher and fence mender. "It is so dated. It talks about standards for what's an acceptable fence, and they're nothing like how we build our fences nowadays." The law lists several fences considered to be legal, including a smooth wire fence with five wires, and a barbed wire fence with three wires. Other legal fences include a 4½-foot structure of rails, timber, boards, stone walls or any combination, and all "brooks, rivers, ponds, creeks, ditches or hedges," provided they are approved by county "fence viewers."

Fugitive Ahwatukee cow has the law on her side

Atakulov said that after the heifer was released into a corral in June, it struggled with ranch hands, broke down a fence and ran off toward the South Mountain preserve. It has been running ever since, becoming the talk of bemused Ahwatukee Foothills residents and a source of irritation for their Phoenix City Council representative. "It just jumped over the fence," Atakulov said, gesturing toward South Mountain. "I don't know how it is surviving out there." Apparently, the young female cow is surviving pretty well. Since late June, the shiny black bovine with large horns has been spotted munching grass and sipping from fountains in Ahwatukee Foothills, lounging under trees in South Mountain Park and drinking from a stream near a small south Phoenix resort. And, as the heifer slips in and out of Ahwatukee Foothills to nibble lawns, it also is eluding capture by slipping between the lines of state and city authority. Even if she tramples anyone's prized bushes or hits a motor vehicle, the law is on her side. Arizona's Open Range Law, crafted to protect the state's cattle industry, makes it illegal for anyone to simply go out and capture or otherwise harm a cow...more

Song Of The Day #375

It's Swingin' Monday and Ranch Radio has been told the Crayola Cowboy is a fan of Artie Shaw. Since this is for Mr. Etcheverry, we'll give you a double dose of Artie Shaw from 1936. First up is his swingin' version of It Ain't Right, followed by some softer swing on My Blue Heaven. The tunes are available on Chronological Classics #0855 and #0866. You can also catch the Crayola Cowboy on facebook by going here.

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

The husband sitter

by Julie Carter

Word recently came that the Husband Sitter had left town and Ineta was back in the spotlight as the fulltime recipient of her spouses attention. The demands were wearing her patience thin.

"What's a husband sitter?" you ask.

What would normally seem to be an awkward situation when Ineta's ex-husband and her current husband, Daryl, re-instituted their long-standing friendship. In reality, it was a convenient brotherhood on many levels.

Ineta's definition of a husband sitter is: Constant companion to validate every comment, complaint, and action of the husband. Who better to do that than an ex-spouse of the current wife?

Daryl and the Husband Sitter were team ropers. Daryl had a flourishing but time-consuming business to run, so he needed help to keep his considerable collection of rope horses ridden and tuned as well as seeking a steady practice partner.

Putting the Husband Sitter on the payroll to do that job made perfect sense, as least to Daryl, and certainly to the Sitter, who preferred that to any structured, "real" job. You recall that I mentioned that he's a team roper.

Only someone with Ineta's sense of humor could look at the situation, laugh at it and actually enjoy the fact that Daryl had a friend to go play with, leaving her some freedom to do other things.

After all, as she pointed out, the Husband Sitters job description including being available at all times to keep the husband company.

The Husband Sitter was in charge of all the "honey-do chores" the husband couldn't or wouldn't do and no errand was too menial for him to accomplish.

He tuned and trained the rope horses; saw to it that they were fed, vetted, shod and ready to haul.

He frequently chauffeured Daryl's rig and horses to ropings that were days and statelines away, meeting Daryl at a nearby airport when his private plane landed.
Other times, he was steady company for Daryl on all the long road trips.

Evening television was a bonding sport for Daryl and his Sitter. They liked to watch the same cop shows, Westerns and hours of RFD TV. Like two kids at a matinee movie, they'd sit and laugh or discuss the programs as they aired.

The Sitter also provided for a ready and willing breakfast, lunch and dinner partner. He was available to be a constant drinking companion and conversations about the "old days" could be repeated frequently without a note of "I've already heard that."

In deference to a testosterone related malady that causes exaggeration and expansion of the feats related in the "old stories," the Sitters job required that he never doubted the facts as presented. He also knew there would be only one storyteller and it wasn't him.

The benefits for Daryl were many. He had a built-in "Wife Complaint Department."
Since the Husband Sitter was on the payroll, he automatically always agreed and usually limited his comments to, "I know what you mean."

When the drinking partnership was in play, the Sitter could be known, to Daryl's delight, to add a few observations of his own.

Details of the broken partnership are sketchy, but Daryl seems to be content not to have to complain about his former Sitter, which sounded much like his complaints about his wife. A pattern may be emerging.

Much to Ineta's relief, already a new Husband Sitter is in place and this time, one that has not shared any "family" history.

The concept of a Husband Sitter isn't really as unusual as it may sound. Tell the story a few times and you'll almost always get a return story of equal or better value.

Human nature is entertaining when we step back and let ourselves look at ourselves.

Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net . For those interested, Walmart will soon offer a "husband sitter" section located next to household goods.

A pardon for the notorious Billy the Kid?

Billy the Kid is dead and probably doesn't care, but a pardon for the cold-blooded killer may be in the offing.

Gov. Bill Richardson, called a "Billy the Kid buff," is looking at an old promise by another governor, and not the Kid's reputation, in deciding whether to issue a posthumous pardon, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

No matter that Billy the Kid has been in the ground since 1881. That hasn't dimmed interest in the cattle-rustling outlaw. Tourists, especially from Europe, are fascinated with Billy the Kid, born Henry McCarty, but also known as William H. Bonney and Henry Antrim. He died at the hands of Sheriff Pat Garrett when he was only 21.

New Mexico's tourism website even has a travel guide to Billy the Kid territory.

"His nickname carries a lyrical quality that still gallops across the high plains of our imagination," according to the text next to the only known photograph of Bonney.

"If he does anything, [Richardson] will review the promise made by Lew Wallace to Billy the Kid," Alarie Ray-Garcia, Richardson's communications director, said Thursday, a day after the governor met with descendants of Garrett.

The Garrett family and others oppose the pardon. Besides arguing that Billy the Kid was an incorrigible killer, they want to make sure Pat Garrett is absolved of wrongdoing related to the killing and a Bonney jail escape.

Jarvis Patrick Garrett, 51, two other grandchildren and two great-grandchildren of Pat Garrett met for an hour with Richardson.

"People had forgotten that Pat Garrett was one of the first individuals to bring law and order to Lincoln County," Jarvis Garrett said.

This latest chapter in the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid has more twists than a lariat.

Popular history has Bonney gunning down 21 men, but many historians say the number was closer to nine. According to other legends, Bonney did not die at Garrett's hands and is not buried in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He went to Texas and became known as "Brushy Bill" Roberts, they say.

Poppycock, the Garretts argue.

They asked Richardson to sign a petition signed by 100 people that reads, "Whereas we the undersigned accept and agree the traditional history of Sheriff Pat F. Garrett and Billy the Kid (William Bonney), and believe that Billy the Kid died at Pat F. Garrett's hand. Therefore we oppose a postphumous (sic) pardon for Billy the Kid as Brushy Bill Roberts."

Garrett killed Bonney on July 14, 1881, in Fort Sumner weeks after Bonney escaped from a jail. The sheriff, legend has it, was hiding in the dark and shot Bonney when he entered a room.

Garrett himself was gunned down in 1908 at age 57.

Richardson "agrees with the heart of the petition," but is asking his legal department to look at it, Ray-Garcia said.

But the petition doesn't affect the Lew Wallace matter.

Mark Lee Gardner, author of "To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West," called for a pardon in an op-ed piece last month for the Los Angeles Times.

According to Gardner and other historians, Billy the Kid wrote to Wallace, then the New Mexico territory's governor, asking him to honor a deal. Wallace had promised to grant Bonney amnesty for his role in shooting Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and other "misdeeds" if he agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating another murder. The pardon didn't happen. The Garretts argue Bonney decided to flee house arrest, making the pardon moot.

"Still, regardless of Billy's crimes, the motives of Richardson or the hollowness of posthumous justice, it all comes back to Wallace's promise. A deal is a deal, and 129 years doesn't change that. Billy is owed a pardon," Gardner wrote.

Bill Garrett, 72, of Alamogordo, New Mexico, said he opposes the pardon. His grandfather was Pat Garrett's brother.

"I am very passionate about this," Garrett said. "He [Bonney] was a killer."

Garrett, who was not at Wednesday's meeting but has written to Richardson, said Wallace did not exonerate Bonney.

"I think he might be better off doing something else," Bill Garrett, a retired bailiff, said of Richardson.

Richardson has been interested in Billy the Kid officially since 2003. "He thought it would be interesting to review this promise by Lew Wallace," said Ray-Garcia.

A sheriff, a deputy and others got involved and moved to have the bodies of Bonney and his mother exhumed for DNA testing to prove they are buried at the Fort Sumner Cemetery. But a judge ruled against the efforts.

Richardson wasn't interested in that aspect and the group's interest in whether Bonney became "Brushy Bill" Roberts, Ray-Garcia said. Ray-Garcia disputed contentions that the sheriff was following orders from Richardson.

According to a letter the Garretts wrote to the governor, Richardson declared support in 2003 for reopening the investigation of Bonney's death.

The investigation cited probable cause for allegations that Garrett killed an innocent victim instead of Bonney and that person is buried in the outlaw's grave, the Garretts said. There also were allegations the sheriff was an accomplice of Bonney in the murder of two deputies in April 1881 and the rustler's subsequent escape.

"This is an abomination as well as an inexcusable defamation of a great man," the letter said of the claims.

Ray-Garcia said Richardson, who leaves office in five months, had nothing to do with the probable cause claims. "The governor told them [the Garretts] that Sheriff Garrett was an honorable man."

She also denied state money went toward the investigation.

Former Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan was among those involved in the investigation. He opposes the pardon, saying Billy the Kid "was nothing but a glorified cop killer," but said there are many questions about the circumstances of his death and Garrett's conduct.

He said he raised the probable cause questions so that an investigation would glean what really happened with Garrett and Bonney.

"Nobody wants to know the truth," Sullivan said Thursday.

Jarvis Garrett and others in the family said they will continue their campaign to clear Garrett, who they said enjoyed a little gambling.

They are hoping Richardson won't issue a pardon.

"If Billy the Kid was living amongst us now, would you issue a pardon for someone who made his living as a thief and, more egregiously, who killed four law enforcement officers and numerous others?" the Garrett family wrote Richardson.

Author Gardner said there is a reason for an abiding interest in Bonney and curiosity about whether he actually died in the dark and did not escape.

"If you have a folk hero die, you want him to go out with a blaze of glory."

CNN

The ruling elite called

I just got off the horn with the Ruling Elite. We had an emergency conference call and to tell you the truth, they ain't happy. You little people are not responding the way you are supposed to...These damn bloggers, with their facts and critical thinking, are throwing a wrench into the gears. Obama and his crack team are working round the clock to lock down the internet, but it will take time...The worshippers of Keynes, that rule the country, are pissed off at you. Don't you realize that government spending of your money, borrowed from the Chinese, with the bill passed to your grandchildren, was supposed to reinvigorate your animal spirits...Here is the message from the ruling elite to you ignorant masses: Debt got us into this mess and it sure as hell is going to get us out...more

You better read this to find out how you're screwing up.

There is also a 10 point plan for you to get back in the good graces of the ruling elite.

Song Of The Day #374

The Gospel song on Ranch Radio this Sunday morning is John, John, John by Anita & Helen Carter.

National Insecurity

There’s a country that earlier generations might not recognize in which the national government’s criminal investigative agency can execute its own warrants without court approval; present them to private companies and demand information about people who are not necessarily suspected of criminal wrongdoing; and — if that were not enough — forbid those companies from telling anyone — not even the target of the investigation. The country I have in mind is not a Latin American banana republic or a Middle Eastern dictatorship. It’s the United States of America. The warrant-like orders requiring no judge’s signature are called national security letters. In the last nine years the FBI, Defense Department, and CIA have issued well over a hundred thousand national security letters. The FBI has exceeded even the broad powers granted by Congress, and that overreach continued for years after it came to the attention of bureau lawyers. Nevertheless, it doesn’t go far enough for President Obama, who campaigned against Bush administration civil-liberties violations like warrantless wiretapping. Obama wants Congress to expand the scope of national security letters even more...more

Appeals court limits use of GPS to track suspects

A federal appeals court ruled for the first time Friday that police cannot use a Global Positioning System device to track a person's movements for an extended time without a warrant, clearing the way for the Supreme Court to decide the privacy impact of the new surveillance technology in products from cellphones to vehicle-navigation systems. The decision, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, created a split with federal circuit courts in New York and California that have upheld warrantless GPS-tracking of a vehicle by law enforcement. Feeding the national debate, a half-dozen state courts have issued conflicting rulings, while police across the country embrace GPS tools in hunting drug dealers, sexual predators and violent criminals. In striking down the drug conviction of Antoine Jones, former co-owner of a District nightclub called Levels, the D.C. court said the FBI and District police overstepped their authority by tracking his movements round-the-clock for four weeks, placing a GPS monitoring device on his Jeep after an initial warrant expired. U.S. Circuit Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, writing for a unanimous and ideologically diverse panel that included judges David S. Tatel and Thomas B. Griffith, said such surveillance technology represents a leap forward in potential government intrusion that violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. "A single trip to a gynecologist's office tells little about a woman, but that trip followed a few weeks later by a visit to a baby supply store tells a different story," Ginsburg wrote. He added, "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups -- and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."...more

New York Lawsuit Seeks Injunction Against Restrictive Gun Licensing Law

Fresh off gun rights activists’ major victory in Chicago, The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has joined a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which demands a permanent injunction against a state law that requires applicants for gun permits to demonstrate “good cause.” "American citizens should not have to demonstrate good cause in order to exercise a constitutionally-protected civil right," said SAF executive vice president Alan Gottlieb. "Our civil rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, should not be subject to the whims of a local government or its employees,” he added. “Our lawsuit is a reminder to state and local bureaucrats that we have a Bill of Rights in this country, not a ‘Bill of Needs’,” he stressed...more

Mexico confirms car had explosive device aboard; 9 headless bodies found

Investigators said Friday there was an explosive device aboard a car that blew up outside police headquarters in the border state of Tamaulipas, the second car-bomb attack against law enforcement in less than a month. Authorities are still working to determine what explosives were used, who planted the bomb and how it was detonated, according to a state police spokesman who was not authorized to be quoted by name. No one was hurt by Thursday's blast in a parking lot outside a police station near Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, but two police vehicles were damaged. On July 15, a car bomb killed a policeman, a doctor and a kidnap victim used as a decoy in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas. A drug gang has been blamed for that attack. Also Friday, authorities in the western state of Sinaloa announced the discovery of nine bodies in a clandestine grave believed to be linked to drug gangs. The bodies were found in a pit in the coastal city of Mazatlan, said Martin Gastelum, a spokesman for the Sinaloa state prosecutors' office. An anonymous tip led police to the site. Four of the bodies were missing their heads, and the victims appear to have been killed anywhere from a month to a year ago...more