All Blog Posts (670)

The Board of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, meeting in Düsseldorf, Germany, on 7 June 2010, called on the President of Honduras, Porfirio Lobo, to decisively act to resolve the murders of journalists in the country. Six journalists have been killed in Honduras in just ovfer a month, making the small Central American country one of the…

Call me obsessive. I don't care. Five years ago, the Natalee Holloway disappearance was, in my mind, just another media feeding frenzy masquerading as journalism. Now I ask: for all the attention the case got, how much interest did the U.S. government take in the plight of a missing (likely murdered) U.S. citizen and her family?

Five years since, and families of the missing are still left on their own to invent the wheel when a loved one disappears outside their country's borders. It…

Looking considerably less cool than he did in Aruba or when he was caught on videotape bragging about disposing of Natalee Holloway's body, Joran van der Sloot was paraded before an auditorium full of reporters, according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Moist-eyed and looking stunned... and wearing a green bulletproof vest, his hands cuffed behind him, the 22-year-old Dutchman…

Joran van der Sloot -- a Dutch national and suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway and the murder last month of a young woman in Peru -- faces an arrest warrant on charges of extortion and wire fraud in Alabama, according to this article on CNN.com. U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance says van der Sloot allegedly tried to extort $250,000 from an individual in exchange for the location of the remains of Alabama teen…

A UK Dad whose eight-month-old son was kidnapped has launched a desperate plea for help on Twitter after busy police ignored his plight, according to this article in the Daily Mail Online. Martin Perry, 32, made the anxious appeal via the micro-blogging site after Tristan was snatched from a nursery near Bangkok, Thailand, nearly two…

BBC Caribbean calls last December’s hanging of convicted killer Charles Elroy Laplace as “one of the single most powerful acts against rising violent crime in the Caribbean,” according to this article. In a feature headlined “Declaring war on violent crime,” the BBC also noted that while there were just…

First images of Joran in custody

This just in

Dutch national Joran van der Sloot, twice arrested in the mysterious disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway, has been named the prime suspect in the death of a young Peruvian woman found dead over the weekend in a Lima hotel, according to…

Beth Holloway has created the Natalee Holloway Resource Center, named for her daughter who went missing during a high school graduation trip to Aruba, according to this Associated Press article. The center will be based at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in downtown Washington. The nonprofit…

Mexico does not object to U.S. plans to station troops along the border between the two nations, as long as the soldiers do not arrest Mexicans trying to get into the United States, President Felipe Calderon said on Thursday. U.S. President Barack Obama, reacting to drug violence in northern Mexico, said Tuesday he would send 1,200 more National Guard troops and ask for an additional $500 million to secure the almost 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.…

My heart leapt when I saw this article, sent to me by my brother, Ed Dunsavage. The subject field in Ed's e-mail said, "I wish we'd had this a year ago."

As wonderful an advance as this NASA system is, it would not have helped us find Joe because Joe did not have a personal locator beacon…

The Caribbean's biggest cruise lines including Carnival and Royal Caribbean say they plan to go ahead with calls in Jamaica this week despite growing unrest in the country's…

At least 27 people, almost all civilians, have died in gun battles in Jamaica, police have said, as the hunt continues for a suspected drug lord, the BBC reports. A state of emergency has been in place in parts of Kingston since Friday, when several police stations were attacked. The fighting has intermittently blocked the road to Kingston's airport and forced some flights to be cancelled. The U.S.…

The New York Times reports that President Obama will send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and increase spending on law enforcement, yielding to demands from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers there that border security be tightened. Calls to send troops to the border mounted after the shooting death of a rancher in southern Arizona on March 27; the police suspect the rancher was killed by…

This just in:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/middle_east/10157188.stm

A blog post in ArizonaCentral.com: "Arpaio Says No to Mexico Travel. How About Honduras?"

While I know the suggestion is made with tongue firmly planted in cheek as a reference to a junket the sheriff's team apparently made to Roatan on the Arizona taxpayer's dime, Honduras IS being heavily promoted as a tourism destination and precious little media attention is being paid to the tourists and expats (as well as…