President’s marijuana comments prompt calls for review of federal enforcement policy
SAN FRANCISCO — President Barack Obama says he won’t go after pot users in Colorado and Washington, two states that just legalized the drug for recreational use. But advocates argue the president said the same thing about medical marijuana — and yet U.S. attorneys continue to force the closure of dispensaries across the U.S.
Welcome to the confusing and often conflicting policy on pot in the U.S., where medical marijuana is legal in many states, but it is increasingly difficult to grow, distribute or sell it. And at the federal level, at least officially, it is still an illegal drug everywhere.
Obama’s statement Friday provided little clarity in a world where marijuana is inching ever so carefully toward legitimacy.
That conflict is perhaps the greatest in California, where the state’s four U.S. Attorneys criminally prosecuted large growers and launched a coordinated crackdown on the state’s medical marijuana industry last year by threatening landlords with property forfeiture actions. Hundreds of pot shops went out of business.
Police search for
clues in murder-suicide on Vegas Strip
LAS VEGAS — Police on Saturday continued their search for a motive in a murder-suicide at a busy Las Vegas Strip casino Friday night in which a man shot and fatally wounded a woman and then killed himself as gamblers fled in terror.
The incident unfolded about 8:30 p.m. near the front entrance of the Excalibur hotel-casino as a gunman shot the woman, who was a vendor at Excalibur’s concierge desk for the travel website Vegas.com. The man then turned the gun on himself and died at the scene. The woman was pronounced dead later at a hospital, police said.
The gunman and the victim were not identified, and a police spokesman said the relationship between the two wasn’t immediately clear.
5 militants killed in attack on Pakistan base
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Islamist militants fired rockets and detonated a car bomb outside an air base Saturday night in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing four civilians and wounding more than 40, officials said.
Troops shot dead five attackers wearing suicide vests when they tried to penetrate the facility, where the same runway is used by commercial jetliners and military aircraft.
A military statement said the civilian casualties occurred when the insurgents blew up an explosive-laden car next to the perimeter wall of the airfield, causing several nearby houses to collapse.
Earlier, two rockets damaged the wall, while another exploded outside a government building near the airport.
Divided Egypt
casts first votes
on its constitution
CAIRO — Polarized Egyptians voted Saturday on whether to accept a controversial, Islamist-backed constitution that, while expected to pass, only hardened divisions between those who believe ratifying the document will bring stability and those who think it will further divide an already fragile nation.
Preliminary results released immediately after the polls closed showed voters approved the constitution by 65 percent, according to parties supporting the constitution and monitors counting the vote.
The opposition claimed instead they had won with 65 percent, which members of the president’s alliance, the Muslim Brotherhood denied. But the ballots were not expected to be completely counted until today, at the earliest, and there is still a second day of voting next weekend.
Conservative party favored as Japan
voting begins
TOKYO — Japanese were voting today in parliamentary elections that were expected to put the once-dominant conservatives back in power after a three-year break — and bring in a more nationalistic government amid tensions with China.
Major newspapers were predicting the Liberal Democratic Party, led by hawkish former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, would win a majority of the seats in the 480-seat lower house of parliament, although surveys also showed many voters remained undecided just days before the election.
By wire sources
