Britons are among thousands of tourists fleeing Guadeloupe after full scale urban warfare erupted on the French Caribbean island.
Trouble broke out on the island earlier last month after protesters began rioting over high prices and low wages.
But the situation escalated this week after protesters began turning on rich white families as they demanded an end to colonial control of the economy.
Protesters were now targeting 'all white people', with the media in mainland France describing the situation as virtual civil war'.
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Drug Violence Spins Mexico Toward Civil War
A shootout in a border city that leaves five alleged drug traffickers sprawled dead on the street and seven police wounded. A police chief and his bodyguards gunned down outside his house in another border city. Four bridges into the United States shut down by protesters who want the military out of their towns and who officials say are backed by narcotraffickers.That was Mexico on Tuesday.
What is most remarkable is that it was not much different from Monday or Sunday or any day in the past few years.
Mexico, a country with a nearly 2,000-mile border with the United States, is undergoing a horrifying wave of violence that some are likening to a civil war. Drug traffickers battle fiercely with each other and Mexican authorities. The homicide rate reached a record level in 2008 and indications are that the carnage could be exceeded this year.
Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, calls it "a sickening vertigo into chaos and plunder."
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Reporting from Columbus, N.M. -- The day began gently here on the U.S.-Mexico border. The cold, starry sky gave way to the orange smile of a sunrise.
But less than three miles south, in the once-quaint Mexican town of Palomas, a war is being waged. Over the last year, a drug feud that has killed more than 1,350 people in sprawling Ciudad Juarez has spread to tiny Palomas, 70 miles west, where more than 40 people have been gunned down, a dozen within a baseball toss of the border. More -- no one knows how many -- have been kidnapped, and the Palomas police chief fled across the border last year and has asked for political asylum.
Robert Odom, a former town trustee, warned that the town was pushing its luck. "So far, knock on wood, it's been narco-traffickers attacking their own people," he said. "But it's only a matter of time before it spills over here."
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As drug cartels continue to terrorize Mexico, Texas officials are planning for the worst-case scenario: how to respond if the violence spills over the border, and what to do if thousands of Mexicans seek refuge in the United States.Katherine Cesinger, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, said a multi-agency contingency plan is being developed, and it will focus primarily on law enforcement issues, including how to handle an influx of Mexicans fleeing violence.
"At this point, what we're focusing on is spillover violence," Cesinger told FOXNews.com Thursday. "The immediate concern, if any, would be that."
More than 5,300 people were killed in Mexico last year in connection to criminal activity, and some experts predict things will get worse. Along with Pakistan, Mexico was identified in a Department of Defense report last year as a country that could destabilize rapidly.
If that were to happen, officials are concerned that the drug violence could cross the Rio Grande into southern Texas.
"Worst-case scenario, Mexico becomes the Western hemisphere's equivalent of Somalia, with mass violence, mass chaos," said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "That would clearly require a military response from the United States."
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NEW YORK – President Obama affirmed in an interview with a Spanish-language radio show that his administration is preparing to push for a new round of "comprehensive immigration reform."
The White House confirmed to WND Obama was a guest on the Univision show "Piolin por la Manana," or "Piolin for the morning," hosted by Eddie "Piolin" Sotelo. A transcript of the interview, however, was not posted on the White House website.
"And then we've got to have comprehensive immigration reform," Obama told the radio audience, according to a transcript. "It's going to take some time to move that forward, but I'm very committed to making it happen."
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