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THE FORGOTTEN HIPPOS OF PABLO ESCOBAR

CHRIS KRAUL, LA TIMES, COLUMBIA - Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar's
pleasure palace, a 5,500-acre estate where the notorious drug lord
reigned over million-dollar cocaine deals, parties with underage girls
and visits by shadowy men of power. . . He built a bullring, an
airstrip, an ersatz Jurassic Park with half a dozen immense concrete
dinosaurs. He stocked a private wild animal park with hundreds of
animals, including elephants, camels, giraffes, ostriches and zebras. He
installed four hippos in one of the estate's 12 man-made lakes.

Today, Hacienda Napoles is in ruins, taken over by jungle foliage and
bats. The sprawling Spanish-style mansion has been gutted, scavenged by
treasure hunters looking for stashes of gold and cash buried under the
floors. Escobar is long gone, cut down in a hail of police gunfire. But
the hippos are still here. . .

The hippos were never claimed because they were too large and ornery to
move. Now the original four have multiplied to 16 and, far from starving
to death, as some expected, they have learned to forage like cows. In
fact, local authorities say they represent a safety hazard — and are
standing in the way of plans to redevelop the late drug lord's estate.
At night, several of them emerge from their watery habitats and roam for
miles looking for grass to munch on. Three months ago, a male hippo was
shot to death by ranchers after he wandered three miles from the rest of
the herd to a neighboring stream.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hippos20dec20,0,5373140.
story?coll=la-home-headlines

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FBI MISSING NEARLY A QUARTER OF FILES RELATING TO LEAK INVESTIGATIONS

JOSH GERSTEIN, NY SUN - The FBI is missing nearly a quarter of its files
relating to investigations of recent leaks of classified information,
according to a court filing the bureau made last week.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the FBI said it
identified 94 leak investigations since 2001, but that the investigative
files in 22 of those cases "are missing" and cannot be located. "There
is no physical slip of paper on the shelf which indicates that the file
has been charged out to a particular FBI employee, so therefore there is
no way of knowing where the file may actually be," an official in the
bureau's records division, Peggy Bellando, wrote in a December 22
declaration.

"That's an amazing number," an academic who has studied the FBI's
record-keeping procedures, Athan Theoharis of Marquette University, said
in an interview yesterday. "These are very sensitive investigations. ...
They could be called to account for whether they are monitoring
reporters. These are records that should be handled very well."

http://www.nysun.com/article/45755

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BRAZILIAN PASSENGERS STRIKE BACK AT OVERBOOKED AIRLINES

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE - Brazilian holiday travelers incensed
about an overbooked flight stormed an airport tarmac to prevent a
commercial jet from taking off, and a tourism industry leader said two
months of chronic flight delays have created a "disaster" for tourism in
Latin America's largest country.

Wednesday's protest happened after a group of about 30 travelers with
tickets from Sao Paulo to the northeastern city of Recife waited more
than 40 minutes aboard an airline transport bus outside a Tam Linhas
Aereas SA jet at one of Sao Paulo's two airports, Brazil's Globo TV
reported.

When the crew closed the jet's door because the plane was full, some of
the passengers got off the bus in an attempt to stop the plane from
leaving. Police removed them from the tarmac, but the flight was delayed
for more than two hours. Last week, Brazilians invaded runways at
several jammed airports plagued by delays just before Christmas.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/28/america/LA_GEN_Brazil_Flight_Delays.php

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