Black Market

Those searching for answers to the question " Is medical marijuana good medicine? " will find few in Dr. David Sack's Times Op-Ed article.   On the one hand, Sack concedes, "Marijuana can effectively treat neuropathic pain, and it has been shown to improve appetite and reduce nausea," an acknowledgment substantiating the plant's therapeutic utility. However, he later warns that cannabis' ability to provide relief for certain other conditions, such as lupus and anxiety, remains unproven.

WASHINGTON - In the early-morning hours before he was arrested on suspicion of sending a poison-laced letter to the president of the United States, Paul Kevin Curtis was typing messages on his Facebook profile. Over the previous few days, the 45-year-old part-time singer had posted photos of fellow Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison impersonators, snapshots of buxom women and a certificate welcoming him to Mensa, a society for people with high IQs. At 5 a.m. Wednesday, about 12 hours before his arrest, he wrote, "I'm on the hidden front lines of a secret war. A war that is making Billions of dollars for corrupt mafia related organizations and people.

  At a small table in a hotel restaurant where elderly men drank coffee and played speed chess, Abu Ismail's phone rang. He picked it up and squinted at the caller ID. "Allo," he said. "A 16? How many? $2,000? If it's clean, bring it, yes. " With that, Abu Ismail bought one M-16 assault rifle for the Syrian rebellion. For months, arms merchants such as Abu Ismail have been buying black-market weapons in Lebanon for the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

These days, crime is a low-down dirty business, especially in  Albuquerque. Cheeky crooks are ripping off public toilets. More specifically, they're making off with the metal pipes that automatically flush the toilets. The thieves have reportedly entered fast-food restaurants and other businesses posing as plumbers, which gives them cover for the huge wrench needed to take apart the flush mechanism. According to authorities, the pipes sell for around $30 on the black market but cost businesses about $400 to replace.

Terminally ill cancer patients are turning to black-market distributors for an unapproved cancer drug in efforts to extend their lives, according to a report Thursday in the journal Nature. The compound, which is known as dichloroacetate, or DCA, has caused cancers to shrink in rats without producing side effects. But DCA, which has been around for years, has a chemical structure that cannot be patented, and no pharmaceutical company has shown interest in it as an anti-cancer medication.

In the last few years, Romania has gone from a virtual nonentity on the world-cinema map to a veritable factory of film-festival prize winners. The so-called Romanian New Wave got its first big boost with Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (2005), a nearly three-hour opus that chronicles the final passage of an old-timer (pointedly named Dante) through the circles of hell that constitute the Romanian healthcare system. (It opened in the U.S.

Dirty Pretty Things Audrey Tautou, Chiwetel Ejiofor Miramax, $30 British scribe Steven Knight received Writers Guild of America and Academy Award nominations for his first screenplay, a riveting, dark thriller set in the underbelly of contemporary London. Before "Dirty Pretty Things," Knight was known as a novelist and as creator of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Stephen Frears directed this art-house hit about the burgeoning trade of black-market body organs.

A higher fee to visit Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has created an illegal black market for entrance permits that is costing the park badly needed revenue. With the park's $20 entrance fees twice the price of two years ago, some park visitors are selling nontransferable permits, which are valid for seven days, to other visitors at a reduced rate.

Iraq, in an apparent crackdown on the black market, has announced the following decrees on Baghdad Radio: "Any employee, or person with a public service, or supplier of a fuel station who has abused his office . . . (to) obtain or seize amounts of fuel for personal use or for trade purposes . . . would be liable to a prison sentence of between two and three years and a fine of up to 3,000 dinars ($9,000)."

Algerian youths, angered at a police raid on a black market, rioted for six hours, burning two police vehicles and a municipal truck, Radio Algeria said Wednesday. Riot police were deployed to restore order in Tablat, 44 miles east of Algiers, on Monday night, the radio said. Rioting erupted when police seized goods worth $1.25 million from a black market store and detained the owner. The government launched a campaign in May to stamp out black marketeering.

Re "Putting a lid on L.A.'s pot dispensaries," Editorial, Sept. 24 The Times is right to call on the City Council to limit the number of marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles but not ban them outright. The Union for Medical Cannabis Patients has spent several years studying court decisions in this field and how they should be applied locally. We have shown the City Council and Planning Commission draft ordinances that would provide adequate regulation and survive any legal challenge.

Hallie Beaune and Christina Perozzi   have several ambitions for Saturday's LA Craft Beer Crawl downtown. One is to improve upon the traditional drink order of heartbroken country stars: a shot and a beer, repeated as necessary. "A shot and a beer is a pretty well-known order, but the beer is always crappy," Beaune said. As professional beer sommeliers under the mantle of the Beer Chicks, this naturally wouldn't suffice. So at the crawl, they're hosting a panel on high-end beer and whiskey pairings to remedy that.

Desperate? Clever? Too little, too late? It's hard to know what to make of the news that Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry, has taken credit for the "WAKE UP!" "protest" that took place outside an Apple store in Sydney, Australia, last week. "We can confirm that the Australian 'Wake Up' campaign, which involves a series of experiential activities taking place across Sydney and Melbourne, was created by RIM Australia," the company told The Age. Even before it was revealed who was behind the "protest," caught on video by Australian video blogger Nate Burr and viewed around the world, it was clear that it was a marketing stunt.

CAIRO — They trundle like a lost parade, rolling metal cylinders through the dust beneath the broken cliffs rising above the City of the Dead. Mothers in sandaled feet hurry girls along to buy cheap propane cooking gas. Boys haul cylinders on slanted motorcycles, others balance them on their heads or fasten them to donkeys. The cylinders multiply, bobbing in the fortuneless air, which fills with ping and clatter and the angry whispers of waiting. "I have five sons. My husband is dead.

What would a world without free enterprise look like? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says the answer is as close as your local theater, where the "The Hunger Games" shows the perils of big government. The dystopian future nation of Panem, in which the movie is set, highlights the dangers of a lack of free trade, innovation and competition, the business group said. That would be economic competition, not the fight-to-the-death contest that gives the blockbuster movie its name.

  At a small table in a hotel restaurant where elderly men drank coffee and played speed chess, Abu Ismail's phone rang. He picked it up and squinted at the caller ID. "Allo," he said. "A 16? How many? $2,000? If it's clean, bring it, yes. " With that, Abu Ismail bought one M-16 assault rifle for the Syrian rebellion. For months, arms merchants such as Abu Ismail have been buying black-market weapons in Lebanon for the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Five suspects have been arrested on suspicion of stealing computers, tires and other merchandise to sell on the black market in Los Angeles, the FBI said. All the arrests were made Wednesday, FBI spokeswoman Laura Bosley said. She said Ervin Ronald Amiel, 50, and Talal Khodr Khaled, 49, were taken into custody in Los Angeles. Juan Luis Villalobos, 35, was arrested in Seattle; David Vigil, 35, in Denver; and Machum Halpert, 43, in New Jersey.

"Plunder!," airing on "Frontline" tonight (9 p.m., Channels 28 and 15; 10 p.m., Channel 50), poses one of the art world's stickiest questions: Who owns a nation's cultural heritage? The nation that produced it and may have abused it, or foreigners who take the treasure out of context and reap great profits from it but sometimes take better care of the art than the country of origin? "Frontline" argues in favor of the country of origin but presents an evenhanded view of the problem.

As Southern California awoke to the wreckage from a recent massive windstorm, music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr. was assessing a different sort of devastation in his band room at South Gate High School . Thieves had pried open a door and torn the room apart while hunting for a specific instrument. "All they took were tubas," Gonzalez said. Losses included an upright concert tuba and a silver sousaphone - or marching-band tuba - worth a combined $13,000. Several weeks earlier, band members at Centennial High School in Compton experienced a similar shock when they found that eight sousaphones were missing.

All but three guns in a cache of weapons stolen earlier this month from an unguarded building used by the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT unit remain missing and may have been sold or traded on the black market, police said Friday. Police arrested two men on suspicion of committing the heist and three others for allegedly possessing the recovered weapons, said Cmdr. Andrew Smith. Much to police officials' dismay, however, the rest of the roughly 30 weapons stolen were not found in the suspects' possession.