Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry said on Saturday he would get the US military involved in Mexico’s war with drug cartels, in comments likely to upset the Mexican government.
The remarks appear to be a new misstatement on foreign policy by the Texas governor who is struggling to hold on to the mantle of frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Perry said that as president, he would work with Mexico in the same way the US has worked with Colombia to combat drug cartels.
“The way that we were able to stop the drug cartels in Colombia was with a coordinated effort,” he said in a campaign speech in New Hampshire.
“It may take our military” working with the Mexican government to win Mexico’s drug war, he said.
The US military has advisers in Colombia who are involved mainly in training, logistical support and intelligence backup for the Colombian armed forces as they fight cocaine traffickers and leftist guerrillas.
However, there are no US armed forces in Mexico fighting the drug war and Mexico strongly opposes any US military involvement in its territory, although it has received more than US$1 billion in US aid to take on the cartels.
Perry has stumbled before on foreign issues. He gave a rambling answer during a debate between candidates last month to a question about what he would do as president if the Taliban got hold of nuclear weapons.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
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