Brazilians wary over renewed mass beach robberies

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) -- With the tropical sun blazing from a near cloudless sky and waves lapping at golden sand, it seemed like a perfect day at the beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Then dozens of marauding youths descended en masse, snatching beach bags and cellphones, ripping gold chains from necks and setting off sandy stampedes by panicked beachgoers.

Such mass beach robberies were once a hair-raisingly frequent occurrence, but they had largely disappeared in recent years as this notoriously dangerous city got markedly safer - a trend credited to a galloping economy and police operations that wrested control of more than 200 "favela" hillside slums from the drug-dealing gangs that controlled them.

But the "arrastoes," or "big drags" as they're known in Portuguese, are back.  More

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