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Friday, January 6, 2012

Mexico drug lord pleads guilty to U.S. trafficking (Reuters)

SAN DIEGO, Calif (Reuters) ? Once powerful Mexican drug lord Benjamin Arellano Felix pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court on Wednesday to drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering charges.

Arellano Felix, 58, was the head of the feared Tijuana cartel run by his brothers and operated on the Mexico-U.S. border near San Diego until his capture in Mexico in early 2002.

He was extradited to the United States last April, and prosecutors said his guilty plea marked the demise of the violent cartel that dominated smuggling on the California-Mexico border in the 1980s and 1990s.

"Arellano Felix led the most violent criminal organization in this part of the world for two decades. Today's guilty plea marks the end of his reign of murder, mayhem and corruption," U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said.

"His historic admission of guilt sends a clear message to the Mexican cartel leaders operating today: The United States will spare no effort to investigate, extradite and prosecute you for your criminal activities," she added.

As part of a 17-page plea agreement, Arellano Felix admitted smuggling tons of cocaine and marijuana into California and conspiring to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.

He also agreed to forfeit $100 million in profits under the plea deal, which is expected to land him 25 years in federal prison when he is sentenced on April 2.

"It was a favorable deal to my client who faced a minimum of 40 years and a maximum of 140 years under the extradition agreement," defense attorney Anthony Colombo Jr. said.

CARTEL A SHADOW OF FORMER SELF

President Barack Obama's administration has worked closely with Mexican President Felipe Calderon in his army-led battle to crush warring drug gangs in a conflict that has claimed more than 46,000 lives since late 2006.

At the height of his power in the 1990s, Arellano Felix smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars in narcotics through a 100-mile wide corridor stretching from Tijuana, south of San Diego, to Mexicali, south of Calexico.

But after the death and capture of many of its leaders over the past decade, including three of Benjamin Arellano Felix's brothers, the Tijuana cartel, also known as the Arellano Felix Organization, is a shadow of its former self.

Arellano Felix's brother Ramon, the cartel's flamboyant enforcer, died in a shoot-out in 2002. Francisco Javier is serving a life sentence in U.S. federal prison after being captured on a fishing boat in 2006, and Eduardo is in jail in Mexico awaiting extradition.

With the downfall of the Arellano Felix brothers, the rival Sinaloa cartel run by Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, has largely taken over the cartel's valuable turf in Tijuana.

Appearing before U.S. District Judge Larry Burns at the hearing, Arellano Felix was neatly groomed and dressed in an orange jumpsuit.

He said he took medication for migraine headaches, but when asked by the judge if it affected his decision to plead, he replied, "no."

Among the former kingpins serving time in U.S. jails is former Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas, who was extradited to the United States by Mexico in 2007 and is serving a 25-year sentence in Texas without chance of parole.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120105/us_nm/us_crime_usa_mexico_kingpin

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Argentine president awake, OK after cancer surgery

Supporters of Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez hold her portraits as they wait outside the hospital for news of Fernandez's surgery for thyroid cancer in Pilar, Argentina, Wednesday Jan. 4, 2012. Argentina's presidential spokesperson Alfredo Scoccimarro said Wednesday that the surgery took 3.5 hours and that doctors removed the entire thyroid gland, without any complications during the surgery. Also, that the president's doctors predict a speedy recovery and that she should stay in the hospital for 72 hours. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

A supporter of Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez holds on to a portrait of Fernandez as she waits outside the hospital for news of Fernandez's surgery for thyroid cancer in Pilar, Argentina, Wednesday Jan. 4, 2012. Argentina's presidential spokesperson Alfredo Scoccimarro said Wednesday that the surgery took 3.5 hours and that doctors removed the entire thyroid gland, without any complications during the surgery. Also, that the president's doctors predict a speedy recovery and that she should stay in the hospital for 72 hours. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Rosa Calderon holds a picture of Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez that reads in Spanish "Be strong Cristina" outside the hospital where Fernandez will undergo surgery for thyroid cancer in Pilar, Argentina, Wednesday Jan. 4, 2012. The 58-year-old leader has papillary thyroid carcinoma, and her doctors said it was detected before it spread, so her condition should curable without chemotherapy. Vice President Amado Boudou will be in charge during the operation on Wednesday and for 20 days as she recovers. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

A supporter of Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez wears a hat with her picture and a pin of her husband, Argentina's late President Nestor Kirchner, outside the hospital where she will undergo surgery for thyroid cancer in Pilar, Argentina, Wednesday Jan. 4, 2012. The 58-year-old leader has papillary thyroid carcinoma, and her doctors said it was detected before it spread, so her condition should curable without chemotherapy. Vice President Amado Boudou will be in charge during the operation on Wednesday and for 20 days as she recovers. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

A picture of Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez behind a statue of Jesus sits at the entrance to the hospital where Fernandez will undergo surgery for thyroid cancer in Pilar, Argentina, Wednesday Jan. 4, 2012. The 58-year-old leader has papillary thyroid carcinoma, and her doctors said it was detected before it spread, so her condition should curable without chemotherapy. Vice President Amado Boudou will be in charge during the operation on Wednesday and for 20 days as she recovers. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) ? Argentina's president was awake and recovering Wednesday after a 3.5 hour operation to remove her cancerous thyroid gland.

Cristina Fernandez's surgery went without complications and all her vital signs were good, her spokesman Alfredo Scoccimarro announced, prompting cheers and applause from supporters gathered outside the hospital.

Doctors had expected a routine surgery and predicted a complete cure without chemotherapy, since preoperative tests showed the cancer had not spread beyond a nodule on the right side of her thyroid gland.

Vice President Amado Boudou was put in charge shortly before the operation, and will remain as the country's constitutional leader for 20 more days while Fernandez takes medical leave, the presidency said.

Fernandez, 58, was found to have the cancer shortly after beginning her second four-year term as Argentina's leader last month, her doctors said. The surgery at Hospital Austral in suburban Pilar, north of the capital, was led by Dr. Pedro Saco, a veteran Argentine oncologist who specializes in cancers of the head and neck.

Experts say thyroid removals are about as routine as cancer surgeries can be, although the process is not without risk: surgeons must take care not to damage a nearby nerve that guides the vocal cords, or to remove the adjacent parathyroids, which regulate the body's calcium supply.

Patients should generally take care to relax their necks after surgery. Temporary hoarseness is common, and in rare cases, permanent voice changes can result. Patients also must swallow radioactive iodide for several days to destroy any cancerous remnants and provide for clearer images to detect any additional cancer, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

After surgery, patients take medicine ? levothyroxine sodium ? for the rest of their lives to replace a hormone that the thyroid glands produce. Blood tests every six to 12 months to measure thyroid levels also are recommended.

Most thyroid specialists agree that removing the entire gland is the best course, according to Dr. Jennifer Ogilvie, an assistant professor of surgery at New York University's Langone Medical Center who has performed about 1,500 similar operations.

Fernandez's doctors said the tumor had not metastasized or spread beyond the nodule, but Ogilvie said there is no way to know before surgery whether microscopic bits of the cancer have developed elsewhere in the gland. Also, when the entire thyroid is removed, levels of a protein called thyroglobulin should drop to zero, and simple blood tests thereafter can show whether cancer cells that also produce the protein have reappeared.

The president should not have to worry about a scar, Ogilvie said: "Most doctors do very small incisions, which we hide in a skin crease, a little fold in the neck, so it shouldn't show. The scars have gotten a lot better."

And while the plan is for her to remain hospitalized for up to 72 hours, most patients recover quite quickly.

"There's no reason why a patient can't go back to work in a week or two," Ogilvie said. "We don't feel like we're torturing our patients at all by sending them home the next day."

Fernandez is one of several sitting South American leaders to be diagnosed with cancer. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has been treated in Cuba and Presidents Fernando Lugo of Paraguay and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil have been treated at Sao Paulo's Sirio Libanes Hospital.

Doctors at Sirio Libanes said Wednesday that former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had his first outpatient radiation treatment for throat cancer, sessions that he's expected to continue each weekday for up to seven weeks.

Supporters waiting anxiously outside the hospital where Fernandez underwent treatment waved flags, carried handmade signs that said "Be Strong Cristina" and built small shrines to the populist leader, who won re-election with a 54 percent landslide in October. Many carried pictures showing Fernandez and her late husband, former President Nestor Kirchner, who died of a heart attack in 2010.

Boudou, her former economy minister, is expected to work closely with Fernandez's other Cabinet members while she recuperates at her home in Calafate, in far-southern Argentina, and make no major policy changes. Argentina all but shuts down anyway for the summer holidays in January and February, so her diagnosis and surgery came at a relatively calm time.

___

Follow Michael Warren on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mwarrenap

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-01-04-LT-Argentina-President's-Health/id-43012e1d51794974a6124c15bacd4fdc

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Thursday, January 5, 2012

Iran says has way to work around EU oil ban threat (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) ? Iran has ready alternatives to a threatened European Union embargo on its oil and increased pressure from Washington, and intends to keep up exports of some 2.3 million barrels per day (bpd) this year, a senior Iranian oil official told Reuters.

EU governments have reached a preliminary agreement to ban imports of Iranian crude to the European Union but have yet to decide when such an embargo would be put in place, EU diplomats said on Wednesday. ]

Tehran had already considered different routes if that were to happen, S. M. Qamsari, International Director of the National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC), said by telephone from Tehran shortly before the announcement.

"We could very easily replace those customers," said Qamsari. Some, but not all, of any displaced volume could move into China as well as other Asian countries and Africa, he said. Iran was unlikely just to store crude on tankers as that was only a short-term solution.

He said he expected shipments would remain unchanged this year.

"We've got very high demand from our lifters, so we have the same quantity (just above 2.3 million bpd) in our term contracts," Qamsari said.

Roughly 30 percent, or just under 700,000 bpd, of Iran's oil steams west of Suez, he said. More than half that volume is shipped to Europe, roughly 200,000 bpd moves into Turkey and the remainder is routed into Africa.

The International Energy Agency estimates Iran exports about 450,000 bpd to the European Union.

(Reporting by Peg Mackey; editing by James Jukwey)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/energy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120104/wl_nm/us_iran_eu_oil

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wpreview: Argentina's Fernandez Fires 36 Military Officers http://t.co/6iCBZuiw #leadingindicators

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Arab League says Syria monitors are helping (Reuters)

BEIRUT (Reuters) ? The head of the Arab League has said its peace monitors are helping to ease a violent crackdown on anti-government protests in Syria, but urged President Bashar al-Assad's government to carry out a peace plan in full.

Meanwhile army defectors whose armed insurgency has threatened to overshadow the peaceful popular uprising captured dozens of members of the security forces by seizing two checkpoints Monday, the opposition said.

Army defectors also clashed with security forces at a third checkpoint, killing and wounding an unspecified number of troops loyal to Assad, opposition activists said.

Assad is struggling to defeat a popular uprising and avoid becoming the latest leader to be toppled by "Arab Spring" revolutions, after those of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

After nearly 10 months of violence in which the United Nations says more than 5,000 people have been killed, mostly unarmed civilians, an Arab League monitoring mission has spent the past week assessing Assad's compliance with a peace plan.

Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby said Monday that Syria's military had now withdrawn from residential areas and was on the outskirts of the cities, but gunfire continued and snipers were still a threat.

"The latest telephone report said there is gunfire from different places, which makes it hard to say who is shooting who," Elaraby said in Cairo. "Gunfire should be stopped and there are snipers."

"We call upon the Syrian government to fully commit to what it promised."

PEACE PLAN

The League's plan calls for Assad to pull troops and tanks from the streets, free detainees and talk to his opponents.

Elaraby said the monitors had secured the release of 3,484 prisoners and succeeded in getting food supplies into Homs, one of the centers of the violence. "Give the monitoring mission the chance to prove its presence on the ground," he said.

But many Syrian opposition activists are skeptical that the mission can put real pressure on Assad to halt the violence.

Sunday, the Arab Parliament, an 88-member committee of delegates from each of the League's member states, called for the monitors to leave Syria, saying their mission was providing cover for unabated violence and abuses by the government.

Two people were killed by gunfire in Homs Monday, and the bodies of another two were handed over to their families, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Security forces killed a farmer in Douma, on the northeastern edge of Damascus, as they carried out raids searching for suspects wanted by authorities, it said.

TAKING RISKS

Kinan Shami, a member of the Syrian Revolution Coordinating Union activists' group, said from Damascus that people were taking huge risks by gathering in cities where Arab League monitors were expected, in the hope of talking to them.

"People expected them in Daraya yesterday on New Year's Day and thousands went to the main square, raised the Independence Flag on a mast and gathered around it. Security forces shot at them and killed two protesters," Shami said.

"The people are trying to show the monitors the repression and are risking their lives to meet them because everywhere they go the monitors are surrounded by security... Other than getting arrested and beaten or killed, they could easily face endless counts of treason and communicating with foreign powers."

But Issam Ishak, a senior member of the main opposition Syrian National Council, said the monitors must be given a chance. "Their presence is helping further erode the fear factor and is encouraging the expansion of the protests."

The reported attacks on military checkpoints came three days after the anti-government Free Syrian Army said it had ordered its fighters to stop offensive operations while it tried to arrange a meeting with the Arab League delegates.

Rami Abdelrahman, director of the Observatory, said Monday's operation had taken place in the northern province of Idlib. It was not immediately clear how many people had been killed or captured by the rebels.

The government bars most foreign journalists from operating in Syria, making it difficult to verify witness accounts. Assad blames the unrest on foreign-backed armed Islamists who officials say have killed 2,000 security personnel.

The state news agency SANA said a worker at a school in the city of Hama had been killed by armed men who captured her three days ago after her husband, who worked at the same school, refused their demands that he leave his job.

SANA also said a journalist working for state radio had died Monday from wounds sustained when gunmen shot him several days ago in Daraya, in Damascus province.

(Additional reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman; writing by Mark Trevelyan and Kevin Liffey; editing by Jon Boyle)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120102/wl_nm/us_syria

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Couple arrested after Utah and Nevada crime spree (Reuters)

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) ? A couple wanted for a crime spree through Utah and Nevada that saw an elderly pair slain in their home and a woman shot in the head was arrested on Tuesday wandering in the desert, authorities said.

Suspects Logan McFarland, 24, and Angela Marie Hill, 25, were spotted by the pilot of a sheriff's plane in a remote area of Elko County in northern Nevada, Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Jim Phelps told Reuters.

The duo were walking in the desert after they evaded highway patrol officers on Saturday in a car chase and later crashed their stolen Volkswagen Jetta, he said.

Once the couple was spotted from the air on Tuesday, officers on the ground moved in to make the arrest.

"They gave up without incident because they were dehydrated and very tired," Phelps said. "We positively identified them by their scars and tattoos, so we're 100 percent confident that we have the suspects."

The U.S. Marshals Service said the couple began a crime spree on Thursday when they killed an elderly couple at their home in Mount Pleasant, Utah, 85 miles south of Salt Lake City.

"We believe the motivation there was robbery," Phelps said, adding that the couple stole a car and later drove to northern Nevada, where they tried to carjack a woman in West Wendover, Phelps said.

The woman was shot in the head but managed to drive away, Phelps said. That victim has been treated at a hospital and was expected to survive, he said.

The couple later managed to steal a Volkswagen Jetta in Wells, Nevada, on Saturday, where they also got into the car chase with highway patrol officers that led to their flight into the desert on foot, Phelps said.

McFarland and Hill were being held on suspicion of kidnapping and attempted homicide in connection with the attempted carjacking in Nevada, and were expected to face additional charges as well, he said.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/crime/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120104/us_nm/us_crime_couple

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Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool (Powerlineblog)

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