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The Drug Enforcement Administration is seeing a resurgence of meth labs in the U.S., and they are showing up everywhere.

Drug violence is Mexico is shifting production from south of the border to north. (War is not good for meth production, it appears.) The labs are showing up in their familiar rural haunts, but also in suburban Atlanta and in the tony Laurel Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• Also plaguing rural communities are the emerald ash borer, the Asian long-horned beetle and the gypsy moth (above, in caterpillar form). The trio has been around for decades and they continue to ravage forests. The Washington Post tells all

•The New York Times reports that young Chinese with fresh college degrees are flocking to Beijing — where they can’t find jobs. There is a demand for laborers, but not for the well educated.

These young unemployed are being told to shift to more practical vocations, such as nursing or teaching. And they are told to leave Beijing for the provinces. 

• Thirty-three states have seen declines in hunting license sales over the last two years. The steepest decline was in Massachusetts, which had a 50% fall in hunting license sales. 

• A group of grass-roots Latino Republicans have formed to try to influence early presidential primaries. Somos Republicans are organized most strongly in the Southwest, but have opened a branch in Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register. 

• Rural Russia is being dominated by gangs, according to The New York Times.

Twelve people were murdered in a small town 700 miles from Moscow, part of what the newspaper said was an “epidemic of lawlessness in provincial Russia, a problem rooted in the collusion of bandits and corrupt bureaucrats.” 

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