Police Chief Found Guilty of Massacre at Spanish Embassy in Guatemala

GUATEMALA CITY – A Guatemalan court on Monday found former police chief Pedro Garcia Arredondo guilty of murdering 37 people who burned to death on Jan. 31, 1980, at the Spanish Embassy in the country’s capital.The accused “used the means to ensure the deaths of those who were inside the embassy,” said the court during the reading of the conviction Monday afternoon.

Garcia Arredondo headed a command within the now defunct National Police and, according to the court ruling, he was the officer who gave the order to set fire to the diplomatic mission.

Argentina’s Fernandez Denounces Anti-Government Operation Behind Nisman’s Death

BUENOS AIRES – Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has claimed that an operation against the government was responsible for the death of public prosecutor Alberto Nisman, an accusation strongly criticized by the opposition, who called for removal of security chiefs.

In a letter titled, “The spies who were not spies. The questions that turned into certainties. The suicide that I am now convinced was not a suicide,” Fernandez said Thursday that Nisman was given false evidence to accuse the government of allegedly protecting Iranians suspected of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center which killed 85 people in 1994.

“They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead. This was sad and terrible,” Fernandez said, referring to Nisman.

“I don’t have proof, but I neither have doubts,” she added after underlining that it was a real political and judicial scandal.

According to the president, Nisman was brave to return from his vacations midway and make his accusations about the alleged cover-up “in order to make best use of the international turmoil generated by the terrorist attacks in France.”

“What he could not imagine was that time was not just running out for the ‘exposé of the century,’ but also for his own life,” she added.

Just days before, she had posted another note on social networking sites where she questioned the motives that led to a person to make the terrible decision of taking his own life.

Fernandez’s theory was backed Thursday by other members of the government, who in a public ceremony criticized a global attack by intelligence agents, judges, economic groups and opposition-backed media to tarnish the government.

“We strongly support our government,” said a statement written by Cabinet chief Jorge Capitanich, Defense Minister Agustin Rossi, Buenos Aires Governor Daniel Scioli and other high officials.

“If the president thinks that Nisman was murdered, she needs to remove Security (Ministry) chiefs,” said legislator Ernesto Sanz of the opposition.

“This is very serious. She moves from supporting a suicide hypothesis to (one implying) murder. This must have consequences,” he told reporters.

Francisco de Narvaez of the Frente Renovador party said that with this tragedy, the president did not have the right to intervene in the independence of the judiciary.

The change in the official version of the events adds up to multiple security lapses detected during the investigations after the special prosecutor in the AMIA bombings was found dead, with a bullet in his head, in his apartment in Buenos Aires last weekend.

Though Nisman had received threats and was provided with 10 policemen for his security, no one was guarding the front portion of his apartment, but were around the apartment building and neither of them were on duty 24 hours a day.

Additionally, apart from the main entrance and the service entrance to his apartment, a third entrance was also found through a narrow corridor housing air conditioning equipment.

Reports of Nisman’s death emerged Monday, hours before he was scheduled to appear before Congress to present his charges against Fernandez, based on telephone conversations between Argentine spies, for covering-up Iranian links to the AMIA bombing.

Two Mexican Soldiers Die in Ambush

MORELIA, Mexico – Two Mexican soldiers were killed Friday when suspected members of a drug cartel ambushed an army patrol in the western state of Michoacan, authorities said.

The attack took place shortly after sunrise in a rural area near the town of Ecuandureo, the state Attorney General’s Office said.

Assailants armed with assault rifles opened fire on troops traveling in two pick-up trucks. Two soldiers died at the scene and two others were taken to a hospital with injuries, the AG’s office said.

The patrol repulsed the attack, but the aggressors got away.

Authorities suspect the ambush was carried out by gunmen from the Caballeros Templarios drug cartel in retaliation for the death of one of the group’s leaders, Rafael Orozco, in a clash with state police on Wednesday.

Mexico’s No. 2 public official, Government Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chang, announced Thursday that President Enrique Peña Nieto had decided to eliminate the post of federal commissioner for security and development in Michoacan.

He shared the news during a public hearing in Morelia, the state capital, to review the strategy the federal government has followed since intervening in Michoacan a year ago amid conflict between organized crime and vigilante groups.

Osorio Chang referred to recent criticism he said was aimed at “politicizing” the status of commissioner Alfredo Castillo ahead of the June 7 gubernatorial and legislative elections in the western state.

The federal intervention in Michoacan met with some success initially, including the arrest of leading figures in the Templarios cartel and the incorporation of many of the vigilantes into an army-controlled Rural Force.

But violence flared in the state again last month, when 11 people died in an incident involving rival factions of the Rural Force

White House says chance of Iran nuclear deal '50/50'

The White House on Friday admitted that the chances of reaching a deal to curb Iran's nuclear program were only 50 percent, AFP reported.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said: "The likelihood of success in these diplomatic talks are at best 50/50."

The comments come as U.S. Lawmakers from both parties vowed at a Senate hearing on Wednesday to press ahead with legislative plans for new punitive measures against the Iranian regime if no deal on nuclear issue is achieved.

Democratic lawmaker Robert Menendez said during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing: "The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran.

"And it feeds to the Iranian narrative of victimization when they are the ones with original sin."

Meanwhile, the nuclear talks between the Iranian regime and the U.S. resumed in Switzerland on Friday.

Two days of meetings between the Iranian regime’s deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and top US negotiator Wendy Sherman began Friday morning in Zurich, a US spokesman told AFP.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who met last week in Geneva and then again in Paris with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif to discuss the nuclear negotiations, also returned to Switzerland Friday.

U.S. Senators press ahead with legislative plans against Iranian regime

U.S. Lawmakers from both parties vowed at a Senate hearing on Wednesday to press ahead with legislative plans for new punitive measures against the Iranian regime if no deal on nuclear issue is achieved.

Top administration officials also disclosed at the hearing that the international talks with the Iranian regime over its nuclear program may extend beyond an end-of-June deadline.

The clash over the nuclear talks came as U.S. will meet with the Iranian regime’s representative, Friday and Saturday in Zurich.

Democratic lawmaker Robert Menendez said during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing: "The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran.

"And it feeds to the Iranian narrative of victimization when they are the ones with original sin."

During the hearing, he also told Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken: "The bottom line is they get to cheat in a series of ways — and I'll call it cheat, you won't — but they get to cheat in a series of ways."

And Mr Menendez added: "Iran is clearly taking steps that can only be interpreted as provocative. It seems that we're allowing Iran to shuffle the deck and deal the cards in this negotiation and that we're playing dealer's choice. Frankly, that's not good enough. We need to get into the game."

Mr Obama's democratic ally Senator Tim Kaine also expressed concern that the US is ignoring Tehran's lies over its nuclear program, adding: "This is not a negotiation about Iran dismantling a nuclear weapons program, yet the number of centrifuges being contemplated in this deal is not consistent with a purely civilian program."

Iran: Enforced women veiling now a ‘source of friction’, regime admits

NCRI – The Iranian regime's strict women's dress code has become a source of friction between the people and the regime, the commander of Morality Police has admitted.

Colonel Mohammad Massoud Zahedian said 'improper veiling' had now become a 'security issue that threatened’ the regime.

He told a group of clerics at a seminar on 'the Hejab and chastity' in the city of Qom on Sunday (January 19): "Improper dressing and avoiding wearing the veil is one of the oldest issues in Islamic society and for police today this issue is a point of friction between the rulers and the body of the society.

"And many of those avoid the dress code have themselves grown up in religious families. This issue of improper veiling has turned to a security issue that is threatening our society."

"The Hawza (the seminaries), Seda and Sima (the official radio and television network) and the State Security Forces (police) must do their utmost to make address the Hejab (the regime’s dress code) as an important social issue.

"Mixed gender parties where the Hejab is not worn are on the increase in Tehran, and this is a source of serious concern."

Imported satellite TV equipment was also a threat to the country's chastity, he said.

Colonel Zahedian added: "The anti-social function of the social networks in the country is another threat to chastity because it creates behavioral changes that will lead to changes in thinking, and create a structural change in the Islamic system that threatens chastity.

"The majority of those we confront regarding being improperly veiled and dressed are born in the 1980s… What has gone wrong?"

He also told the seminar that his forces had identified and arrested 30 underground fashion shows and arrested all those involved.

In the seminar, Cleric Mohammad Reza Zaibai-Nejad, the director of a center for research on family issues, said: "If you ask the police what people's reaction is to being told they are improperly veiled, they protest. This indicates that what we are doing is not working."

"If we counter public opinion with harsh methods and stand against the whole of society, nothing will be achieved.

"Today’s generation is different from the one or two generations before. Their threshold for being provoked has become much lower, and their threshold for fulfilment has become much higher. They become angry very easily.

"If they do not achieve their goal in the cultural arena, it will outbreak in the political field."

He also warned: "If we lower the measures that have been taken, society will become more emboldened and corruption will expand, and if we become too harsh society will collapse."

“The widespread rejection of compulsive veiling in Iran is a collective statement against the regime,” representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) has stated.

Mrs Soona Samsami wrote in article in The Hill: “The mullahs have turned the voluntary dress code in Islam into a very strict rule. As a consequence, a clear way of expressing opposition against the theocracy, even for Muslim women, has been to defy their misogynist rules.”

“Compulsory veiling and the systematic suppression of women by the Iranian regime shows that they politicized Islamic fundamentalism and extremism in the region long before the Islamic State (ISIS).”

The remarks by the regime officials admitting to their failure exposes “the face of a weak and desperate theocracy unable to curb increasing social opposition to its rule - led by women.”

Drone carrying 6 pounds of meth, falls in Tijuana

 Unmanned aircraft, (Drone) falls in Zona Rio

For the last year or so, drones, unmanned aircraft, have crept into our lives.  Drones are routinely spotted on beaches, over sporting events and suburban neighborhoods. At a party or gala event, it is not unusual to glance up and see the somewhat eerie sight of a remote device, recording all the unaware people below.

Though in the midst of a legal battle at the Federal level,  many unmanned aircraft related businesses have emerged locally, as well as nationally.  In real estate, journalism, marketing and other fields, drones are being used commercially.  For recreation, those who can afford one, use it as a hobby, navigating the beaches and scenic areas of the city, captu

ring images and uploading to social media sites.

Yesterday, in Zona Rio, Tijuana, the eyes fell from the sky, carrying 6 pounds of methamphetamine, assumedly headed across the San Ysidro border.  The drone was a 'Spreading Wings S900', with 6 propellers and lithium batteries.  This drone model retails for about $1500.  It may become more common to see these type of smuggling attempts take place, as smaller traffickers seek cost efficient, reliable ways to cross product. 

At maybe 2,000 a pound, the crystal will wholesale for maybe 2800-3000 a pound once on the US side.  At 3k a pound times six, thats a roughly 6k profit, minus the 1500 or so for the drone.  It may  become an accepted way to bypass the line, with it's many hassles, variables and watchful eyes.  

Authorities believe the drone crashed because of the weight of the crystal packages, it may take trial and error, but with the cheap price of methamphetamine and relative cheap cost of drones, it will easily be done.