HS News Daily

Demonstrators supporting the policemen who have been on strike for six days in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia clashed briefly Monday with soldiers posted around the regional parliament in Salvador, which is occupied by disgruntled cops.

The protesters, mostly relatives of the striking cops, tried to keep the military from completely cordoning off the Regional Legislative Assembly this morning, the Bahia state government said.

The soldiers had to shoot rubber bullets in the air and push the demonstrators back in order to move forward.

The demonstrators fear that the close to 600 troops and 40 Federal Police agents surrounding the assembly are trying to occupy the building to arrest the organizers of the strike, which has been declared illegal by the courts.

The state government said the line of soldiers is there to guarantee the free flow of traffic in downtown Salvador and to facilitate the seizure of 11 strike leaders who have warrants out for their arrest.

The cops on strike, who kicked off the protest last Tuesday with demands for a pay raise of close to 30 percent plus better working conditions, repeated Sunday their decision to continue the walkout until the Bahia administration agrees to negotiate.

The strike continued despite the authorities’ order that the officers go back to work.

Bahia has seen 87 murders since the strike began, almost double the usual number for the period, as well as looting, robberies and acts of vandalism that have locals terrorized and business at a standstill.

Gov. Jacques Wagner blamed much of the lawlessness on the police themselves and said he will not discuss their demands until they’re back on the job.

Wagner was backed by federal Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardoso, who visited Salvador on Saturday and warned that the leaders of the movement could be arrested for leading a protest that he considered “unacceptable.”

Bahia security has been bolstered with close to 3,000 army troops and National Security Force agents ordered in from other states.

The strike worries the authorities not only because of the rampant insecurity in the streets, but also for the possible economic impact it could have on Salvador, with thousands of tourists set to arrive for Carnival two weeks from now.

The Carnival festivities in the Bahia capital are among the most massively attended in all Brazil.

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Puerto Rico’s violent death toll so far this year exceeded 100 on Monday when a man was shot to death in Cataño, near San Juan, police said.

Marlon Rivera Torres was shot multiple times as he was riding along a highway in Cataño, and on Sunday night a 19-year-old man was also riddled with bullets and killed in the northern coastal town of Barceloneta.

The 100 violent deaths registered so far in 2012 amount to 36 fewer than had occurred last year by the same date.

Puerto Rico experienced the most violent year in its history in 2011 with 1,136 murders, or an average of more than three killings per day, an increase of 15 percent over 2010 and the highest figure since 1940.

Gov. Luis Fortuño has asked for more cooperation from authorities in Washington in battling the crime wave besetting the U.S. commonwealth.

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Human remains found on a sugarcane plantation in the northern district of Rio Lindo may be those of a family of five who disappeared in December, Honduran police said.

Detectives and personnel from the medical examiner’s office were already at the scene to begin the investigation, National Police spokesman Oscar Aguilar told journalists in San Pedro Sula, the main city in the north.

The press reported Dec. 2 on the disappearance of a couple and their three children as they were driving to Tegucigalpa from the Caribbean town of Puerto Cortes.

The family’s van was discovered in the central province of Comayagua, but the occupants were apparently intercepted by assailants traveling in two other vehicles.

Clothing and a bag were found with the remains in Rio Lindo, Aguilar said.

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Mexico’s Anahuac University of the Legionaries of Christ awarded an honorary doctorate to Israeli President Shimon Peres in a ceremony over the weekend in Jerusalem that noted his “noble contribution to world peace.”

During the solemn event held Sunday at a hotel in the city, the president of the institution, Jesus Quirce, presented Peres with the degree followed by the honorary biretta to “crown his studies and merits,” a doctoral medal and a pair of white gloves, “a symbol of the purity his hands must preserve and a sign of his eminence.”

All that symbolized the university’s “recognition of his distinguished merits and his noble contribution to world peace and to the universal friendship of all peoples,” according to the statement read by the vice president emeritus, Carlos Lepe.

The president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, 88, expressed his gratitude for the award in an address during which he slipped up in calling Mexican writer Octavio Paz, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature, “Octavia Paz.”

“You’re a great university. One hundred thousand students who can make a difference to the future of Mexico and to an even more widespread public,” Peres said.

“Mexico has a strong Jewish community and at your university there are many Jewish students, the Jewish holidays are observed, so your trip to Jerusalem is very moving for all of us,” he said.

Quirce had previously lauded Peres’ virtues, defining him as a “statesman, chief executive, strategist and moral leader” with a “vital career worthy of praise and emulation.”

The university president singled out the Israeli’s “ironclad social conscience” and his “incessant, tireless search for peace among peoples” as Peres’ “two most inspiring and honorable aspects among the almost innumerable positive aspects of his genius.”

The event, also attended by the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, Dorit Beinisch, did not take place at Anahuac University in Mexico as was always done previously because Peres’ “responsibilities” as head of state prevented him from making the trip, the center’s director of institutional development, German Campos, said before the ceremony began.

The seeds of this honorary doctorate were sown back in 1999, when Peres gave a masterful lecture at the university before 2,000 students in a first contact that left an “excellent mutual impression,” he said.

Anahuac, founded in 1964 and which today has 1,200 students enrolled at its principal campus in Mexico City, established three years after his visit a “Shimon Peres Peace Lecture” aimed at disseminating “a culture of peace,” he said.

The nation’s Public Education Secretariat recently ruled that books of the lectures, which deal with human rights, tolerance and the resolving of conflicts, be made available in all public libraries, Campos said.

Anahuac has 15 campuses, of which nine are in Mexico, one is the Finis Terrae in Santiago, Chile, another is Spain’s Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid, while there are two each in Italy and the United States.

The university has granted 20 honorary doctorates, the first of them to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Despite the bitter feelings prevalent in the Middle East conflict, the center isn’t worried that this honor will spark controversy in Mexico because Peres is “a very respected statesman,” Campos said.

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One indigenous person was killed and another three were injured when they stepped on landmines planted by leftist FARC rebels in the mountains of the southwestern Colombian province of Valle del Cauca, community leaders said.

The incident occurred Sunday as the victims were returning from visiting sacred sites of their community, Nilson Quitumbo, treasurer of the Orivac indigenous organization, told Efe on the telephone from Cali, the provincial capital.

Quitumbo said the landmines killed a 15-year-old boy and injured his brother and two other teenage relatives.

The victims belonged to the Altamira community, one of the 17 settlements grouped in the five administrative domains of the Paez people, Quitumbo said, adding that some 5,400 Indians of that ethnicity live in the area.

The Orivac spokesman said that these communities have suffered the devastation of armed conflict at least since 1998, with explosives going off, including anti-personnel mines that have left eight people dead including the latest fatality.

Another three Indians have lost limbs in the minefields, Quitumbo said.

“Minefields have always been planted by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). They make war on the Indian communities, which we condemn,” the indigenous leader said.

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Spanish singer Julio Iglesias on Sunday will give a free concert in the Argentine city of Tandil, where an audience of some 15,000 is expected, among them Buenos Aires provincial Gov. Daniel Scioli, authorities said.

The concert in Tandil, a mountain tourist center located 375 kilometers (232 miles) from the Argentine capital, will be the first of three shows Iglesias will present in Buenos Aires province to promote his latest album “1.”

The provincial government confirmed Scioli would attend on Sunday, after having met with Iglesias on Saturday.

The Spanish singer next Tuesday will appear at the Plaza Grigera in the nearby town of Lomas de Zamora, on the capital’s southern periphery, and next Saturday he will give a show at the Paseo Hermitage in the city of Mar del Plata, located 400 kilometers (248 miles) south of Buenos Aires.

The shows coincide with the launching of the second volume of “1,” which contains 14 songs and on which Iglesias rerecords some of the many hits he has had in his lengthy musical career.

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Four players from Colombia’s Once Caldas soccer team are being accused by a woman of raping her, the Manizales-based team said.

The Attorney General’s Office said Friday it was opening an investigation of players Jefferson Cuero Castro, John Fredy Pajoy and Carlos Rivas.

Once Caldas management did not reveal the identity of the fourth player, but team officials confirmed that the players were temporarily removed from the roster by coach Pompilio Paez.

A woman, identified as Luisa Fernanda Oviedo Zea, 18, provided “serious, credible and convincing” testimony about the alleged rape, AG’s office spokesman Nestor Armando Novoa said Friday.

The incident occurred on Wednesday after the Libertadores Cup match in which the Colombian team tied in Manizales 2-2 with Brazil’s Internacional, Novoa said.

There is evidence showing that the players are innocent, their lawyer, Aristides Betancourt, said.

“We will demonstrate that she (the accuser) made herself available to have sexual relations with other completely different people whose names I cannot give due to confidentiality,” the attorney told reporters.

Once Caldas is “willing to cooperate with the authorities so that the investigation can be carried out without delay and so that the material facts in the case can be clarified as quickly as possible,” the team said in a statement.

The case involving the Once Caldas players arises at the beginning of the week when the officials of the Boyaca Patriotas, a team that recently ascended into the First Division, expressed their support for Paraguayan player Marcos Lazaga, who is facing legal proceedings in Chile for alleged rape.

An Argentine woman accused Lazaga of raping her, although that did not prevent the officials of the Colombian team from moving forward with the negotiations to sign him for the current season.

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About 1,000 animal rights activists staged a protest over the weekend in Mexico City to demand an end to bullfighting, a deep-rooted tradition in Mexico.

The majority of the people who took part in Sunday’s protest showed up at a plaza on the Paseo de la Reforma partially clothed and with simulated blood smeared on their bodies.

The animal rights activists spent about an hour lying on the ground completely silent to simulate the slaughter of bulls, while other protesters chanted slogans against bullfighting.

Animal rights activists are trying to convince lawmakers in Mexico City to ban bullfights, AnimaNaturalis president Leonora Esquivel told reporters.

Mexico City is home to the Plaza Monumental, which can seat 40,000 people and is considered the world’s largest bullfighting ring.

The Plaza Monumental opened on Feb. 5, 1946, with a card that featured bullfighters Luis “El Soldado” Castro, Manuel “Manolete” Rodriguez and Luis Procuna.

The capital should become the “vanguard city” in doing away with bullfights in Mexico, following the example of the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia, Esquivel said.

Most Mexicans oppose bullfighting, according to Esquivel, who did not provide any statistics to support her statement.

Dozens of people out for a Sunday stroll in the capital stopped by to take a look at the protesters and listen to their message.

About 9,000 bulls are slaughtered every year at rings in Mexico, where bullfighting dates back to the 16th century, AnimaNaturalis says.

Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador are the Latin American countries where bullfighting is most deeply rooted.

Chile, however, banned bullfighting shortly after it gained its independence from Spain in 1818, but rodeos, another target of animal rights activists, are popular in the South American country

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Venezuela’s interior minister announced that early Monday morning police arrested the people who briefly abducted Mexican Ambassador Carlos Pujalte and his wife on Jan. 29.

Among those arrested is “the head of the criminal band who participated in the ambassador’s kidnapping,” Tareck El Aissami said.

He said five other people involved in the couple’s abduction have been fully identified and are being sought by Venezuelan security forces.

“From the moment when we learned of the deeds, we have not rested ... We have identified those who participated in the kidnapping,” the minister told Union Radio.

Pujalte and wife Paloma Ojeda were kidnapped shortly after midnight when they left a reception in a residential neighborhood in northern Caracas.

Pujalte, an attorney and career diplomat, and his wife were held by their four male and “heavily armed” captors for four hours but they were then released in the Las Mayas sector in western Caracas.

An official with the Mexican Embassy in Caracas told Efe that when the ambassador’s vehicle turned up in the Chapellin area, near the spot where the kidnapping took place, authorities were alerted and an investigation was launched.

Several hours after the release of the couple, the Venezuelan government announced in a communique the beginning of a search to capture the kidnappers.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government acknowledged the contribution of the Venezuelan authorities in the locating and release of the envoy and it called for an “exhaustive investigation” of the facts in the case.

Pujalte’s kidnapping came two months after the Chilean consul in Caracas, Juan Carlos Fernandez, was shot, beaten, threatened and held hostage for two hours.

Venezuela has a homicide rate of 48 per 100,000 residents and Caracas is considered one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America.

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Josefina Vazquez Mota was selected as the presidential candidate of Mexico’s governing National Action Party, or PAN, in a primary election held over the weekend.

Vazquez Mota, a former social development secretary and education secretary, won Sunday’s election by a wide margin over rivals Ernesto Cordero and Santiago Creel, PAN officials said.

Vazquez Mota garnered 54.6 percent of the vote, while Cordero got 38.4 percent and Creel received 6 percent, with 89 percent of the ballots counted, PAN chairman Gustavo Madero said.

Some 1.8 million PAN members were eligible to vote in the primary election.

Vazquez Mota, an economist, businesswoman and politician, is aiming to become Mexico’s first female president.

She will face Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto and former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is the candidate of a leftist coalition, in the July 1 general elections.

The PRI, which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000, is trying to regain the presidency after two straight losses to the conservative PAN.

Vazquez Mota will be “Mexico’s first female president,” Madero said during an appearance with the candidate and her two rivlas at PAN headquarters.

The candidate wasted little time taking aim at Peña Nieto, who is leading in the polls among likely voters.

The primary election opens “the path to defeat the real adversary of Mexico,” Vazquez Mota said, referring to the PRI candidate.

Peña Nieto represents “a return to systemic corruption and impunity,” Vazquez Mota said.

The PAN candidate, however, did not mention Lopez Obrador, who is running third in the polls.

“The time has come to close a chapter and open another. To build the most powerful campaign team,” Vazquez Mota told hundreds of supporters gathered at PAN headquarters.

“This is the time for unity, the time to come together,” Vazquez Mota said.

Vazquez Mota has vowed to fight corruption, calling for life prison terms “for politicians who cut deals with organized crime groups.”

She has also proposed expanding scholarship programs and reforming the labor code to add 400,000 people annually to the formal labor market.

In 2000, Vazquez Mota became the first woman to head the Social Development Secretariat, and she served as education secretary from 2006 to 2009.

Some 80 million Mexicans will be eligible to vote for a new president, 628 legislators and thousands of other officials in the general elections.

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Eighteen people are now confirmed dead in a shipwreck over the weekend off the northeastern Dominican Republic, while rescue teams continue to search for dozens of people missing in the accident, officials said Monday.

The small boat, which was carrying more than 70 illegal immigrants bound for Puerto Rico, sank early Saturday.

Eight survivors have been accounted for, but up to 20 people may have made it ashore alive, Hato Mayor province emergency management chief Luis Armando Frias told Efe.

Some survivors may not have been reported missing by relatives who feared they might be arrested, Frias said.

The vessel’s stern began breaking up due to strong waves and the weight of the passengers, causing it to sink off the coast of the northeastern province of Samana and the eastern province of Hato Mayor, survivors said.

Navy cutters, a private plane, emergency management office personnel and a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter based in Puerto Rico resumed the search and rescue operation early Monday, Frias said.

People smugglers charged between 30,000 and 40,000 pesos ($770 and $1,025) to get the Dominicans into neighboring Puerto Rico, survivors said.

The homemade boat sailed early Friday from Maria Trinidad Sanchez province, which is adjacent to Samana.

The bodies of six men and five women were recovered on Saturday from the Caribbean Sea, the navy spokesman said.

Thousands of Dominicans try to reach the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico every year, preferring to risk their lives rather than continue living in poverty in their homeland.

Many migrants drown each year on the treacherous journey across the 100-kilometer (62-mile) Mona Passage on the rickety wooden boats known as “yolas.”

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In Spain, thousands of African immigrant girls are facing the danger of becoming victims of female genital mutilation, an ancestral practice that sub-Saharan immigrants have brought with them and which several non-governmental organizations and public agencies are fighting to eradicate.

Senegalese, Malian and Nigerian girls, among others, are the ones whose traditions include removing the clitoris and vaginal labia as part of the ritualistic passage to adulthood, to maintain good hygiene, keep them chaste and desirable to males, according to their beliefs.

Monday is the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation, a practice internationally recognized as a human rights violation.

According to figures from the World Health Organization, or WHO, every year 5 million girls suffer the partial removal of their external genitals.

Although no official figures exist for Spain, experts at Barcelona’s Autonomous University calculate that some 10,000 girls are at risk of genital mutilation, all of them originally from one of 27 countries in the world - most of them in the sub-Saharan region - where the practice is widespread.

“When you see a genital mutilation for the first time, you remain in a state of shock,” said Catalonian assistant regional police inspector Rosa Negre, who is heading the operation to eradicate the practice in the northeastern region of Spain.

In charge of the Citizens Attention Unit in Gerona, Negre participated in the drafting of a pioneer action plan coordinating the work of educators and health, police and judicial personnel to protect girls in Spain.

“We’re all devoted to the girls and paying close attention to their progress - doctors, nurses, teachers - insofar as when we suspect a change, we act,” Negre said regarding the functioning of the program in which last year judicial proceedings were opened against 25 families in Gerona and the possibility of genital mutilation for 36 girls was prevented.

“Threatening (the parents) with the law and jail doesn’t work. You have to convince the mothers and fathers that genital mutilation is bad for the health of their daughters, that it’s an attack on their integrity and that it has deep physical and psychological consequences,” Negre said.

Negre has not only conducted seminars, conferences and discussions, but she has also personally visited the homes of immigrants and gone on vacation with them to their countries of origin along with their daughters.

She urges them to sign a document in which they commit themselves to ensuring that their daughter will return to Spain intact and warning them that the Spanish Criminal Code establishes penalties of between six and 12 years in prison for people found guilty of performing, consenting to or facilitating genital mutilation, even if it is performed outside Spain.

Proof of that is the sentence of six years in prison the Teruel court imposed last November on the father of a girl who was subjected to genital mutilation at the age of eight months in Gambia, a country in which 80 percent of girls are subjected to the practice.

Casilda Velasco, head nurse, professor of nursing and volunteer at Medicus Mundi Andalucia, has worked for 30 years in Africa and knows very well the influence of the older people there.

She recalled the case of a family from Burkina Faso in which the parents had stopped the genital mutilation of their 18-year-old daughter, but one weekend when they returned to their village “the old women of the town took her and did it to her by force.”

“Elderly African women have a great deal of importance and (exert much) social pressure to mutilate the girls, even though they live in Spain,” Bombo N’dir, a Senegalese activist who has lived in Spain for 13 years and is the vice president of the Awareness Team against Female Genital Mutilation, or EQUIS, said.

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Cuba has begun to employ a new technology to produce white sugar, a measure that improves its quality, avoids the refining process and reduces the cost of manufacture, local media reported Sunday.

The technology, which to date had never been used in the island’s sugar industry, uses a sulfur salt produced in Guatemala that - once dissolved in water - directly adds to the bleaching, according to official daily Juventud Rebelde.

The procedure replaces the method of “sulfurizing” the sugarcane juice via the combustion of sulfur, which is very damaging to the environment, the report says.

The daily also reported that the sugar produced with this method can be sold for a higher price than either crude or standard refined sugar on the world market and that its use is spreading rapidly.

Rigoberto Toledo, the director of the Melanio Hernandez sugar refinery in central Sancti Spiritus province, the first to use the new technology, said that using it they will be able to optimize the production process and avoid refining the raw sugar, a situation that will reduce production costs.

That refinery is scheduled to produce between 15,000 and 17,000 tons of white sugar during the current harvest, all of which will be destined for local consumption.

Cuba is carrying out its current sugar harvest at a time when it is in the midst of restructuring the sector by replacing the Sugar Ministry with the Sugar Agro-industry Business Group with the aim of achieving more efficient management, employing new technologies and generating exports to finance its own expenses.

According to government forecasts, this harvest should see a 20 percent rise in sugar production, after the country in 2011 experienced a slight recovery and after the drastic plunge in the sugar harvest registered in 2010, the worst in 105 years.

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Former dictator Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, who has been in prison in Panama since last December, was transferred on Sunday to a hospital in this capital with a diagnosis of “hypertension with the possibility of a cerebral hemorrhage,” the government announced in a communique, although initial medical exams performed on him there found that his condition was “normal.”

Noriega, who will be 78 on Feb. 11, was moved “from his cell in the El Renacer Penitentiary Center - located about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the capital - to the Santo Tomas Hospital” in Panama City after a diagnosis of hypertension and a possible stroke, according to a National Police communique citing a member of the prison’s medical staff.

Panama’s health minister, Franklin Vergara, reported that Noriega was subjected to a series of exams that determined his condition was “normal,” but he will be kept under observation for at least 24 hours to see how his situation evolves.

The former general “is conscious, oriented, he has not had any injury with any effect. After the 24-hour observation the angioresonance (test) will be repeated (to determine) if he has any vascular problem that may be permanent,” Vergara told reporters in the capital.

Noriega, who was the de facto leader of Panama from 1983 to 1989, was returned on Dec. 11 to the country after serving 21 years in U.S. and French prisons for drug trafficking and money laundering.

Deposed in 1989 by a U.S. invasion, the former general faces in Panama a total sentence of 60 years behind bars for assorted crimes ranging from murder and human rights violation to deforestation.

The Government Ministry announced on Dec. 14 that a medical examination revealed Noriega was suffering from arterial hypertension, cerebrovascular accident (i.e. stroke), peptic ulcers and allergic rhinitis.

The former strongman’s attorneys have said that he should be placed under house arrest - rather than continue to live in a prison cell - due to his advanced age and poor state of health, a request rejected by relatives of his regime’s victims.

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Mexico’s government said a “vaccine” against heroin addiction, which it patented this week, will be ready for human use in roughly five years.

During a working visit to the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, Health Secretary Salomon Chertorivski said all the laboratory experiments have already been carried out on rats and “the next step is testing on humans.”

The vaccine must undergo a “normal development process” and therefore at least another five years of work will be required before it can be used by human beings, Chertorivski told reporters Friday.

“We can be very proud of our scientists at the National Institute of Psychiatry because they’ve achieved something that hasn’t been achieved in other areas of the world,” the minister said.

“And it’s not only heroin; that’s what’s been patented so far but we’re advancing rapidly on (programs against addictions to) cocaine (and) methamphetamines.”

During his visit, Chertorivski supervised the quality of medical care, as well as progress in anti-addiction programs, in Ciudad Juarez.

The health minister announced Wednesday during the launch of a technology transfer network for addiction treatment that “Mexico has now succeeded in patenting the first vaccine against heroin use and we’re working on more” for other addictive substances.

The network, inaugurated by U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, is a technological platform that will improve efforts to combat drug addiction and which has received $18 million from the Merida Initiative, a U.S.-funded regional plan to battle drug cartels and organized crime.

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