MEXICO CITY — Many of the mug shots of drug traffickers that appear in the Mexican press show surly looking roughnecks glaring menacingly at the camera. An anticorruption investigation unveiled last week in the Mexican capital, however, made it clear that not everybody enmeshed in the narcotics trade looks the part.

There was a gray-haired, grandfatherly type who was pushing 70, as well as an avuncular figure with a neatly coiffed goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon his nose. Some of the five men who found themselves on the front pages of newspapers on their way to jail wore suits, which made them look more like bureaucrats than bad guys.

Among the greatest challenges in Mexico’s drug war is the fact that the traffickers fit no type. Their ranks include men and women, the young and the old. And they can work anywhere: in remote drug labs, as part of roving assassination squads, even within the upper reaches of the government.

It has long been known that drug gangs have infiltrated local police forces. Now it is becoming ever more clear that the problem does not stop there. The alarming reality is that many public servants in Mexico are serving both the taxpayers and the traffickers.

The men in suits, it turns out, were both bureaucrats and bad guys, officials say, corrupt employees high up in an elite unit of the federal attorney general’s office who were feeding secret information to the feared Beltrán Leyva cartel in exchange for suitcases full of cash.

Their arrest, and the firing of 35 other suspect law enforcement officials, represents the most extensive corruption case that this country, which knows corruption all too well, has ever seen. And it raises a question that is on the lips of many Mexicans: how does one know who is dirty and who is clean?

“I’m convinced that to stop the crime, we first have to get it out of our own house,” President Felipe Calderón, who has made fighting trafficking a crucial part of his presidency, said in a speech on Tuesday, after the arrests were announced.

That house is clearly dirty. There is ample evidence that Mexicans of all walks of life are willing to join the drug gangs in exchange for cash, including farmers who abandon traditional crops and turn to growing marijuana and accountants who hide the narco-traffickers’ profits.

There was sporadic evidence in the past that such corruption extended into high-level government offices. An army general who commanded Mexico’s anti-drug unit was arrested and convicted in 1997 after the discovery that he was working for a drug lord on the side. In 2005, a spy working for a drug cartel was discovered working in the president’s office and accused of feeding traffickers information on the movements of Vicente Fox, then the president.

But the abundance of law enforcement officials now believed to be on the take has made Mr. Calderón’s drug war all the more difficult to execute. Traffickers often know beforehand when raids are going to occur. Sometimes dealers plant their people on the teams that carry out the raids to act as saboteurs.

The traffickers’ networks are not foolproof. Mr. Calderón’s government did manage to capture Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, a cartel leader, in January even though the group was receiving inside information. What appears to have happened, officials say, is that the army carried out the raid without involving the attorney general’s office, inadvertently keeping the corrupt officials out of the loop.

The cartel’s leaders, who operate out of Sinaloa State and have been implicated in the killing of a top police commander in Mexico City, were described in local press accounts as being furious that their government moles had not informed them of the raid.

Still, the reach of the drug networks is so extensive that even winning a court conviction against a kingpin is not always enough to claim victory.

Many prison wardens and guards have shown themselves to be corrupt, allowing prominent detainees not only to operate their crime networks from their cells, but also to use their illicit drug proceeds to be as comfortable as possible behind bars, paying for everything from pizza to prostitutes. The cartel leaders sometimes even use their money to escape. The most notorious case was in 2001, when Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the country’s most wanted drug lord, managed to slip out of a maximum security prison in a laundry cart.

The porous nature of Mexican penitentiaries has prompted Mr. Calderón to increase the number of transfers of drug lords to the United States prison system. The United States has already filed the paperwork to extradite one of the officials accused last week of corruption. The official, Miguel Colorado González, 68, was a top manager in the government organized-crime office known by the Spanish acronym Siedo.

Mr. Calderón is not the first president to try to root out corruption. President Ernesto Zedillo reorganized the nation’s federal police at least twice; each time traffickers quickly infiltrated the force and bought off leading officials. His successor, Mr. Fox, tried and failed to clean up law enforcement as well.

Mr. Calderón’s efforts have been sustained enough that the traffickers have begun a vicious counterattack; so far this year, about 4,000 people — including police officers, soldiers, criminals and civilians — have been killed in an extraordinary wave of violence linked to organized crime.

The latest corruption scandal has prompted President Calderón’s attorney general to order a restructuring and purging of his office, and specifically of Siedo, which was formed from another agency that was shut down after being infiltrated by drug spies.

The government has ordered more lie detector tests for officials in delicate posts, beefed-up background checks and better salaries for underpaid police officers. But the amount of cash that the traffickers throw around — which Jorge Chabat, a security analyst, calls “enough money to buy part of the state” — makes government salaries seem laughable. Clearly, the government cannot compete peso for peso.

In some cases, finding out who has strayed from the straight and narrow should be a simple matter of following the money. Mr. Colorado González is reported to have bought four luxury vehicles in one year. Expensive jewelry was found in his home. His bank account was bulging.

In Tuesday’s speech, a clearly frustrated Mr. Calderón said that the fight to clean up Mexico depended on citizens putting their country first and respecting the law above all else. He suggested that the small bribes so often demanded by the officer on the beat, and accepted by the public as normal, for infractions real and imagined, were not disconnected from the government official receiving millions of dollars in drug profits.

“We need a stronger society, a society that lives the principle of legality with conviction, that encourages, promotes, spreads and educates its children with values,” Mr. Calderón said. In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.
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 RIYADH

Saudi Arabia's Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz on Wednesday launched the construction of the first women-only university in the conservative Islamic state.

The Princess Noura bint Abdul Rahman University for Girls will offer courses in subjects like medicine, pharmacy, management, computer sciences and languages that women find difficulty in studying in normal universities where strict gender segregation is enforced.

"We hope you will be able to open this modern university when it is finished in two years time in continuation of your support for the process of modernization and development," Finance Minister Ibrahim al-Assaf said in a speech addressing the king at the site outside Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia's powerful religious establishment has in the past resisted efforts to widen education for women and put them in the workplace, but King Abdullah is pushing social reforms to increase women's employment.

The country of 25 million has state schools for girls and some private colleges for women.

The government has tried to reassure Saudis over the past two weeks that modernization schemes are on track after fears of a global economic slowdown helped push oil prices down to under $70 a barrel from double that three months ago.

Despite the U.S. ally's famed riches, many areas are underdeveloped with a lack of roads, sewage system and schools.

No cost for the university was given by state media.

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A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.

The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.

The proposal will raise further alarm about a “Big Brother” society, as it follows plans for vast databases for the ID cards scheme and NHS patients. There will also be concern about the ability of the Government to manage a system holding billions of records. About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated 3 billion e-mails are sent every day.

Home Office officials have discussed the option of the national database with telecommunications companies and ISPs as part of preparations for a data communications Bill to be in November’s Queen’s Speech. But the plan has not been sent to ministers yet.

Industry sources gave warning that a single database would be at greater risk of attack and abuse.

Jonathan Bamford, the assistant Information Commissioner, said: “This would give us serious concerns and may well be a step too far. We are not aware of any justification for the State to hold every UK citizen’s phone and internet records. We have real doubts that such a measure can be justified, or is proportionate or desirable. We have warned before that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Holding large collections of data is always risky - the more data that is collected and stored, the bigger the problem when the data is lost, traded or stolen.”

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “Given [ministers’] appalling record at maintaining the integrity of databases holding people’s sensitive data, this could well be more of a threat to our security, than a support.”

The proposal has emerged as part of plans to implement an EU directive developed after the July 7 bombings to bring uniformity of record-keeping. Since last October telecoms companies have been required to keep records of phone calls and text messages for 12 months. That requirement is to be extended to internet, e-mail and voice-over-internet use and included in a Communications Data Bill.

Police and the security services can access the records with a warrant issued by the courts. Rather than individual companies holding the information, Home Office officials are suggesting the records be handed over to the Government and stored on a huge database.

One of the arguments being put forward in favour of the plan is that it would make it simpler and swifter for law enforcement agencies to retrieve the information instead of having to approach hundreds of service providers. Opponents say that the scope for abuse will be greater if the records are held on one database.

A Home Office spokesman said the Bill was needed to reflect changes in communication that would “increasingly undermine our current capabilities to obtain communications data and use it to protect the public”.

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Home to hundreds of the world's loftiest mountains, including Everest, the Himalayas take their name from a Sanskrit word meaning "the Abode of Snow." But parts of these lofty mountains were once sun-kissed isles glistening in a now-vanished sea.

That's according to an upcoming study that highlights this geological reminder of impermanence on Earth.

"The islands are actually tipped on their sides," says the University of Houston's Shuhab Khan, lead author of the study scheduled for release in the October Geological Society of America Bulletin. "So you can walk — it's incredible — from the bedrock to the seafloor sediment of these islands."

What scraped the islands off the seafloor and lifted them up to the top of northern Pakistan was the collision between the continental crusts of India and Asia. Khan and his colleagues show the collision that built the Himalayas came 50 million years ago in their analysis, which ties together satellite maps, field geology, mineralogy, chemistry and magnetic dating data from the Kohistan-Ladakh bloc, the one-time archipelago dating to the time of the dinosaurs.

The collision of India with Asia continues to this day, with the Indian subcontinent essentially diving beneath the Asian one, lifting up the Tibetan plateau. Geologists have long agreed the Kohistan bloc islands represent the contact point between the two continents, but until now they weren't certain how they made their journey to the Himalayas.

To answer the question, Khan and his colleagues travelled to Northwestern Pakistan, examining rocks from volcanic mountains bordering the Kohistan bloc and from the bloc itself. Magnetic studies of volcanic rocks reveal the compass orientation of metals inside them when they were last molten, which in turn tells geologists how close the rocks were to the Earth's magnetic north pole when they erupted from volcanoes.

For the Kohistan rocks, the magnetic results indicate the islands were on or near the equator, basking in the long-gone Neotethys Ocean, when something crashed into them. Since Asia's southern continental crust edge starts 1,800 miles north of the equator, that means it must have been India doing the bulldozing. Dating of zircon stone spat out by these eruptions set the date of the island's demise at 61 million years ago.

So the islands packed onto the leading edge of India and then, as shown by more zircons from the northern side of the bloc, slammed into Asia about 50 million years ago. Because the islands were made of lighter crust material, they didn't descend under Tibet but tumbled sideways as they stayed on the surface, sandwiched between a big rock and a hard place.

"Both sides of the bloc are known for world-class gemstones, which is the last evidence of the collision, in a way," says Khan. Rubies found north of the former island bloc are colored red by chromium from the former seafloor. Emeralds found south are colored green by beryllium once trapped in sea water. "They are famous, and they are still being mined today," Khan says.

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