ARIZONA ( 300,000 thousand in Copper plates- Headed to China ) BIG BUST by U.S Customs

Stolen Asarco plates were headed for China, DPS says

A.E. ARAIZA / ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Copper plates stolen from the Asarco mine in Hayden were on display Tuesday during an Arizona Department of Public Safety news conference. Copper recovered near Tucson was valued at more than $300,000. Another $1.25 million worth was seized in Los Angeles. "Our detectives just followed the money, which took them from Southern Arizona all the way to China," said the DPS director.

2012-11-14T00:01:00Z2012-11-14T08:07:58ZStolen Asarco plates were headed for China, DPS saysKimberly Matas Arizona Daily StarArizona Daily Star

10 hours ago • Kimberly Matas Arizona Daily Star

(41) Comments

A local investigation of copper theft has uncovered a large-scale operation to steal millions in unrefined metal and ship it to China.
Arizona Department of Public Safety investigators were tipped off to the thefts by security personnel at the Asarco mine in Hayden, about 70 miles northeast of Tucson. Mine security tracked flatbed trucks of copper plates to a ranch on state trust land in Marana, said Capt. Ken Hunter after a news conference Tuesday in Tucson.
The plates of unrefined copper, containing traces of gold and silver, measure 4 feet square and weigh between 820 and 880 pounds. They are valued at $3,488 apiece.
At the ranch, in the 6300 block of West Tangerine Road west of Twin Peaks Road, the plates were loaded into box trucks and driven to a Los Angeles seaport for shipment to Hong Kong, the DPS said.
There are only two facilities Asarco sends the plates for refining - Amarillo, Texas, and Hayden, Hunter said.
"This we should not see heading to California," he said, pointing to the flatbed of anodes displayed in the DPS parking lot.
DPS investigators pulled over a box truck on Interstate 10 just north of the Pinal County line on Sept. 27 and found 49 copper plates. A search of the property turned up another 56 plates, plus three tractor-trailer rigs and a forklift. Total copper recovered in the Tucson area was valued at more than $300,000, said Robert Halliday, director of the Arizona DPS.
Further investigation by the DPS and U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the seaport turned up another 359 stolen plates in six containers. Their total value: $1.25 million, according to authorities.
Customs officers stopped three of the containers from leaving the seaport a day before their scheduled departure and ordered the return of three others on ships that had already departed.
"Our detectives just followed the money, which took them from Southern Arizona all the way to China," Halliday said.
However, 240 stolen plates remain missing, DPS Capt. Ryan Young said.
Because the investigation is ongoing, Young would not comment on arrests made or the scope of the operation except to say: "It's a significant number of people involved."
The price of copper increased by more than 500 percent between 2001 and 2008, according to the FBI.
On its website, the agency stated: "The demand for copper from developing nations such as China and India is creating a robust international copper trade." Therefore, "the market for illicit copper will likely increase."

MEXICO ( Women go on HUNGER STRIKE to pressure Government ) The Missing

Tuesday, November 13, 2012 | Borderland Beat ReporterHavana Pura

Borderland Beat

Relatives of people who have gone missing in Mexico are camped out in front of the country’s Interior Ministry on hunger strike. Shannon Young reports.

The women began their hunger strike on Tuesday as part of a last-ditch effort to pressure the federal government to take action on the issue of disappearances before the current administration leaves office.
The cold early Monday became the seventh consecutive day of the hunger strike undertaken by a group of women fighting against impunity in Mexico where kidnapped family members are killed and have not received justice.

But the hunger strike isn’t the only effort to keep the issue of drug war victims in the public eye and on the government’s agenda ahead of the change of power.

Mexico’s drug war has produced a series of hard-to-fathom statistics. More than 60 thousand people have been killed in the past 6 years. Thousands of others have gone missing. And now – an extensive investigation by the newspaper Milenio reveals tens of thousands of unidentified bodies found on the streets or elsewhere were buried in mass graves dug by the government over the past 6 years.

 

As part of its investigation, Milenio sent out more than 470 public information requests to government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. It found the unidentified, unclaimed bodies of more than 24 thousand people have been buried in formal mass graves in Mexico over the last six years.

While that’s a staggering figure, it’s far below the real number of John and Jane Does buried nationwide. Six of Mexico’s 31 states did not provide data in response to Milenio’s requests.

Mexico has thousands of cases of missing and disappeared persons and victims’ relatives have become increasingly vocal about what they say is the government’s lack of political will to deal with the issue.

The Movement of Embroidery for Peace in Mexico announced that on Saturday, December 1, 2012, the last day of Felipe Calderón's term, it will mount exhibits of hundreds of handkerchiefs embroidered with the names of those killed, missing and threatened throughout the administration. These exhibits will be mounted not only in various Mexican cities but abroad. In a statement, the activists said that these pieces of cloth embroidered by bereaved families are "the true memorial to victims of the war against organized crime" and are the symbol with which they want to bid farewell to the Calderón presidency.

 

San Diego man ( Doing life in prison for murder- shot and killed by prison guards ) Susanville

Christopher A. Sanchez

A 23-year-old San Diego man who was fatally shot by prison guards while he was attacking another inmate was identified Tuesday as convicted murderer Christopher A. Sanchez, prison officials said.

Sanchez was serving a sentence of 85 years to life in prison for the 2009 murder of Marcella Peraza at an Encanto birthday party. He was also convicted of attempted murder for wounding a 19-year-old man.

He had fought with others outside the party, then later fired shots into a residential street, striking the victims.

Sanchez was serving time at High Desert State Prison in Susanville when he and another inmate attacked a third on Friday morning, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The victim was stabbed with an improvised weapon.

Sanchez and his accomplice ignored numerous orders from correctional officers to stop, and one guard fired at Sanchez, prison officials said.

The 29-year-old victim suffered numerous stab wounds and injuries to his head. The other attacker was not wounded. Authorities have not released their names.

IRAN ( JUSTICE for blogger -3 suspects arrested for his death )

Iran: Dead blogger's interrogators arrested

Source: Radio Zamaneh An Iranian website linked to the Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Monday that three of Sattar Beheshti's interrogators have been arrested in connection with the probe into the prisoner's death while in custody. "Following the firm orders from the head of the judiciary for a speedy probe into the case of Sattar Beheshti's death, three of the officials in charge of the prisoner's interrogation have been arrested and handed over to the armed forces court," the report indicates. Yesterday, the judiciary finally announced that it is looking into the death of Sattar Beheshti, the 35-year-old blogger who died days after he was arrested on October 30. The Report in Iran Website gives no further details, but in an interview with the Asr-e Iran website, the head of the Tehran Police force announced that the cyber police had been in charge of Beheshti's arrest. Hossein Sajedinia said that the blogger was arrested on the charge of committing cyber crimes. Beheshti reportedly wrote a letter describing details of his torture, and his fellow inmates in section 350 of Evin Prison, who saw him two days after he was arrested, have written another letter confirming that they saw signs of torture all over his body. Today, the head of Parliament's National Security Commission, which has struck a committee to look into the death of Beheshti, said preliminary information about the case indicates there was no sign of torture on the dead prisoner's body.

TEHRAN ( Iran says it did not KILL BLOGGER who died last week ) In JAIL for blogging

Jailed Blogger Not Tortured Before Death, Iran Says

 

Published: November 12, 2012     

TEHRAN — An influential Iranian lawmaker said Monday that a blogger who died last week while in captivity had not been tortured during interrogations.

      

 

“According to a preliminary report, no traces of beating were seen on his body,” the lawmaker, Alaeddin Borujerdi, told the semiofficial Islamic Students News Agency. However, Mr. Borujerdi, who heads the National Security and Foreign Policy Committees in Parliament, called for further investigation into the case, a rare instance in which Iran’s Parliament and judiciary followed up a human rights complaint that was first raised internationally.

Iran’s judiciary also confirmed the death of the blogger, Sattar Beheshti, 35, acknowledging that five bruises were found on his body, but said the cause of death was still being investigated. He was held in the Kahrizak police prison south of Tehran, where three people died during the antigovernment protests in 2009.

“His body showed no fractures of bones, nor did his skull,” a judiciary spokesman, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, told reporters at his weekly news conference on Monday. He added that a doctor in Evin prison, where Mr. Beheshti was held temporarily before being transferred to Kahrizak, had reported that the blogger was “extremely exhausted” and had recommended a psychiatric evaluation.

The death of Mr. Beheshti, a government critic who was regarded as a relatively minor figure among Iran’s bloggers, has provoked outrage among both opponents and supporters of Iran’s leaders. Foreign-based opposition media have said he was tortured to death, while officials and pro-government bloggers were upset that state news media initially ignored the matter, creating a long silence that made the authorities appear indifferent.

The judiciary spokesman said Mr. Beheshti was arrested on Oct. 30 upon the request of Iran’s cyberpolice, known here as FATA.

Since its establishment in January 2011, FATA has arrested several bloggers who had been critical of Iran’s leaders, and also a group of youths who had created a “hot or not” contest on Facebook rating profile pictures of boys and girls.

Mr. Beheshti’s Web site, “My Life for My Iran,” criticized Iran’s financial contributions to the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. On his Web site Mr. Beheshti posted pictures of Lebanese youths having parties alongside images of Iranians living in poverty.

A day before his arrest, Mr. Beheshti published a post saying that officers had warned him in a telephone call that his “mother should soon don a black shroud because you refuse to shut your big mouth.” But, he added, “I will not remain silent even at the moment of my death.”

Victoria Secret ( NATIVE American groups lash out at war bonnet ) Cultural stereotyping

The annual Victoria's Secret fashion show taped last Wednesday caused a minor stir last week — but not because of any sexy underwear on display.

Model Karlie Kloss (pictured at left) set off some controversy when she walked the runway wearing a Native American headdress (also called a war bonnet), a culturally insensitive faux pas that led the company to pull the footage of the offending outfit from its planned Dec. 4 broadcast.
Several Native American groups called the lingerie company out for the blunder. Native Appropriations, a blog covering imagery of indigenous cultures, accused the retailer of "egregious cultural appropriation, stereotyping, and marginalizing of Native peoples." Ruth Hopkins, a columnist for a Native American news site, wrote that "after years of patronage and loyalty to the Victoria's Secret brand, I am repaid with the mean-spirited, disrespectful trivialization of my blood ancestry and the proud Native identity I work hard to instill in my children." Putting a headdress on a white model is particularly offensive, she wrote, because among the Sioux tribe, war bonnets are exclusively worn by men, with each feather symbolizing an act of valor.

CALIFORNIA ( 2 are Dead after eating soup with poisonous MUSHROOMS )

• Enlarge PhotoAmanita phalloides

Two residents of an elderly care center are dead and four people are in the hospital after a caregiver allegedly served soup made from poisonous wild mushrooms.

The deceased victims are 86-year-old Barbara Lopes and 73-year-old Teresa Olesniewicz, who lived at the Gold Age Villa in Loomis, Calif., according to the Sacramento Bee. A caregiver reportedly foraged mushrooms on the grounds of the senior living center before using them in a meal.

The poisonings are believed to be accidental, and the caregiver who allegedly prepared the soup is one of the people hospitalized, Sheriff's Lt. Mark Reed told the Associated Press. The three others hospitalized were elderly residents of the Gold Age Villa.

The variety of poisonous mushrooms that were used in the soup is yet unknown, but Dr. Todd Mitchell, a Santa Cruz, Calif., doctor who is reportedly consulting on treatment of one of the patients, told NBC News that the patient is suffering from amatoxin poisoning. [10 Most Common Poisonous Plants]