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But if a massive surface mining operation in the vicinity of your house poisons your water table, and if your well water runs brown with coal sludge and heavy metal particulate, well, that’s just the cost of doing business in America, a cost that will be paid by the Appalachians who only live there. It’s regrettable, at best. You can’t call the police and the state doesn’t want to know. And if you dare to take a picture of child’s exposure to that poison, if you have the nerve to walk into the halls of Congress and show them the obscenity that is a child that must wash herself with poison every day, they will call you a child pornographer. They will call the police.

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The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.

The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

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A man suffering from a toothache shot himself in the jaw with a gun in an effort to remove the troublesome tooth, Decatur police said.

Officers called to a home in the 2800 block of Locust Street Southeast at about 4:15 p.m. Monday arrived to find the man bleeding heavily from his mouth and his brother trying to stop the bleeding with a towel, said Lt. John Crouch, a police spokesman.

“The man was conscious and alert when officers arrived,” Crouch said. “He told them that he was tired of his tooth hurting and attempted to shoot it out.”