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what Liberty Reserve was all about.
• "The only liberty that Liberty Reserve gave many of its users was the freedom to commit crimes, as it became a popular hub for fraudsters, hackers, and traffickers," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Tuesday in announcing charges against seven people in a $6 billion scheme that he billed as possibly the largest money-laundering scheme even seen in the United States.
• "The coin of the realm ... was anonymity -- multiple layers of anonymity," he added. "As alleged, Liberty Reserve was deliberately structured and operated in a way to help other criminals remain anonymous, untraceable and untouchable."
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Amid mass shootings, US gun debate overlooks those coping with daily violence
• LARGO, Maryland (AP) -- Florena Carter's shattered life didn't make national news.
• Her son was killed on his 28th birthday in 2009. Carter's brother pulled the trigger. Her father shot himself soon afterward.
• The horrifying family tragedy became one more private story in America's plague of gun violence. That year, 9,146 other people nationwide lost their lives in shootings.
• The vast majority died in the type of daily gun violence that does not grab national headlines in the same way as the December massacre of 20 young children and six teachers at an elementary school in Connecticut, or the mass shooting last July in a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 people and wounded 70.
• Those attacks became the focus of a bitter national debate over guns, which culminated with the defeat in the Senate of several proposals backed by President Barack Obama to tighten gun control laws, including banning military-style assault weapons and expanding background checks to stop criminals and the mentally ill from buying firearms.
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