Chicago Sun-Times: Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee. Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.
Last year: Investigators handed 26 items, including clothes, phones and cameras, to transit workers, “explaining that they had found the lost articles on a train or bus.” But, the report states, “Three months or more after these items were placed in the system, we recovered only three from the Lost Property Unit at 34th Street. The whereabouts of the other 23 articles is unknown.” Last year: The report said that the transit agency’s lost property unit received more than 8,000 items each year and that only about 18 percent wound up back in the hands of their owners.
From CQ Politics: Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.
Apparently speaking a foreign language in an airport is now deemed suspicious, and grounds for questioning you and making you miss your plane.
US air marshals in Vegas have revealed that they have a quota: they have to report at least one suspicious person a month.