Elizabeth Llorente
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For the second time this month, Venezuela has been hit by a massive power outage, forcing students and workers to stay home Tuesday.
The outage struck as Venezuelans were still reeling from the last one, which left many of them without access to uncontaminated running water or other basic necessities. The latest blackout affected 21 of the country’s 23 states.
As he did with the first outage, President Nicolas Maduro attributed the outage to sabotage by his opponents, including the U.S. government.
"A macabre, perverse plan constructed in Washington and executed with factions of the extreme Venezuelan right," Vice President Delcy Rodriguez declared on state television, describing it as an "electromagnetic" assault.
A man stands outside his home during a power outage in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, March 25, 2019. A new power outage spread across much of Venezuela on Monday, knocking communications offline and stirring fears of a repeat of the chaos almost two weeks ago during the nation’s largest-ever blackout. (AP)
Officials said the "attack" had been controlled, but their assurances, similar to ones the last time around, did little to calm the anger of residents in Caracas who filled traffic-clogged streets as they walked home after subway service in the capital was suspended. Their patience grew increasingly thin when a second outage struck late into the night, leaving neighborhoods pitch black.
On social media, Venezuelans reported outages in Caracas and much of western Venezuela. Some said residents were banging pots and pans in the darkness in a sign of the nation’s mounting tensions. The latest outages come as President Nicolas Maduro tries to keep his grip on power amid a revived opposition movement and punishing economic sanctions from the United States.
Twenty-seven-year-old restaurant manager Lilian Hernandez said she was bracing for the worst.
"We Venezuelans suffer all kinds of problems," said Hernandez, who had just recently managed to restock food that spoiled during the previous outage.
People wait inside a darkened office building during a power outage in Caracas, Venezuela, Monday, March 25, 2019. The subway suspended service because of the power cuts Monday, as local media reported outages in at least six states. (AP)
The Trump administration, which has made no secret of its desire to remove Maduro, has denied any role in the outages. Electricity experts and opposition leader Juan Guaido fault years of government graft and incompetence.
"This outage is evidence that the dictator is incapable of resolving the crisis," Guaido wrote on Twitter Monday.
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“In the middle of the angst of darkness, when our people need to be assured during another blackout, how can they pretend to keep repeating the same excuses of ‘electrical war and sabotage?” Guaido wrote on his Twitter account. “They’re corrupt liars.”
Meanwhile, as Venezuela’s economic and political crisis deepens, many seem resigned to continuous disruptions in their daily routines.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Immigration officials plan to release nearly 2,000 illegal immigrants from custody in the Texas area over the weekend, according to the local ABC-TV affiliate.
The release of the large number of immigrants comes as Border Patrol agents struggle to manage hundreds of more immigrants waiting along the border to turn themselves in and request political asylum, the news outlet said, citing an unnamed Border Patrol officer.
The release of so many immigrants prompted the El Paso Police Department to send an alert asking for volunteers to help.
"Urgent. Volunteers are needed today and tomorrow to help local Non-Governmental Organizations with the influx of migrants released yesterday and today," the alert stated.
Central American immigrant families. (AP)
Churches in Texas and elsewhere along border states have been helping to provide shelter and other services to immigrants who are released pending claims for asylum or other services.
CBP DEFENDS DECISION TO DETAIN GIRL, 9, FOR MORE THAN 30 HOURS DESPITE HER BEING U.S. CITIZEN
Ruben Garcia, the executive director of Annunciation House, a shelter in El Paso that houses immigrants temporarily in a working partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expressed concern that his organization cannot keep up with the demand of people arriving at the border in large numbers.
He was reaching out to churches in the area for help in housing the immigrants, according to the ABC report.
"If each one of those faith communities received, if they made the commitment to receive 20 refugees per week, just per week, that would allow us to receive 8,000 refugees per week," said Garcia.
A renewed surge of Central Americans showing up at the border has prompted immigration authorities, who say they are running out of space to hold them, to release them into the U.S.
From Dec. 21 to March 20, ICE released more than 100,000 people into the U.S., reported the Fox affiliate in San Diego.
The U.S. Border Patrol this month released families with notices to appear in court, the news outlet reported, noting the agency has not done such a thing since 1998. It said that the protocol is that the Border Patrol typically hands over migrants requesting asylum to ICE, which handles their petition and assumes custody.
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Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has said the release of migrants does not mark a return to the controversial “catch-and-release” policy.
“It’s not a protocol and there’s no reintroduction of catch-and-release,” she said. “But we are out of detention space.”
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The Democratic Socialists of America, whose membership ballooned after the 2016 candidacy of allied Sen. Bernie Sanders, announced its endorsement this week of the Vermont lawmaker in his second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Sanders is the only Democratic Socialist running for president in 2020, and the only socialist in American history with a serious chance of winning the presidency,” said the DSA in a press release. “Sanders’s platform — Green New Deal, Medicare for All, College for All, ending cash bail, strengthening unions, and a living wage — would transform American society by ending the worst forms of poverty and inequality while empowering workers to fight for even more.”
TOP 5 FAILED SOCIALIST PROMISES: FROM LENIN TO CHAVEZ
While the endorsement comes as little surprise, some democratic socialists had raised concerns that Sanders is not socialist enough.
“Sanders 2016 revived the progressive left and turned DSA into the largest socialist organization in America in seventy years,” former Sanders campaign worker Dan La Botz wrote on the DSA website in opposition to a Sanders endorsement. “Flooded with young people angry at the Democratic Party, DSA became a radical, activist organization projecting the need for a total socialist transformation of America.”
“Sanders 2020 will not have the same effect,” La Botz wrote. “Bernie will not appear to be much different than other progressive Democrats and his campaign threatens to lead DSA deep into the Democratic Party.”
About a quarter of some 13,000 DSA members responding to the organization’s poll before the decision to back the senator said they did not support the endorsement of Sanders.
But other DSA followers, who have debated among themselves whether they should seek to gain influence within the Democratic Party or on their own under the socialist banner, see Sanders as their ticket to growth.
An apparent DSA member identified only as “Neal M.” wrote on the organization’s website: “DSA benefited hugely from being the only socialist organization to actively endorse Sanders in 2016. If we enthusiastically support Sanders in 2020, DSA could become a 100,000 member organization, with significantly greater capacity and resources.”
“The number one lesson we should learn from 2016 is that small socialist organizations must participate in the big movements that dominate national politics.”
Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist. He announced his Democratic presidential bid last month, saying his campaign is about “creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”
Sanders spoke to striking university workers in Los Angeles this week and complained about “a war being waged against the working people.”
The DSA puts its membership at more than 56,000 as of March. Its long-term mission is to run candidates as socialists, and not under the Democratic Party banner.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks as he kicks off his second presidential campaign, Saturday, March 2, 2019, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Sanders pledged to fight for "economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice." (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)
Ella Mahony of the DSA’s national political committee said in recent days that democratic socialists have a unique spotlight right now to further their anti-capitalist agenda and convert more Americans to socialism. Not backing Sanders, she said on the DSA website, would mean losing an opportunity to push their message on a national stage.
“The combination of the Sanders campaign and the teachers’ strike wave has made our job as socialists so much easier,” Mahony said. “Now, we can go into our campuses or workplaces and find people willing to identify not just as union activists or as socially conscious but as Democratic Socialists.”
Jon Torsch, center, wears a t-shirt promoting democratic socialism during a gathering of the Southern Maine Democratic Socialists of America at City Hall in Portland, Maine, Monday, July 16, 2018. On the ground in dozens of states, there is new evidence that democratic socialism is taking hold as a significant force in Democratic politics. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
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“It is our duty to take full advantage of this moment and run out the radicalizing processes happening in the formal political sphere, in labor, and in society as far as they can go, she added. “Whatever the details of his program may mean to us, to the rest of the world, the Bernie Sanders campaign will be a referendum on socialist politics in the United States.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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In another example of Venezuela’s increasingly brazen attacks on journalists, national police reportedly forced a Polish reporter from his car and viciously beat him.
The reporter, who was not arrested, was left lying in the street, according to multiple reports, including from the reporter’s newspaper in Poland and the Venezuelan Press Workers’ Union.
A photo of Tomasz Surdel’s bloody, swollen face was posted on Twitter after the attack, which occurred late last week.
He suffered a broken nose, cuts and other injuries, according to his newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza.
Gazeta Wyborcza posted a message from Surdel on its website saying: “My lips are so swollen that I cannot speak.”
Surdel said that members of the National Police Special Forces, clad in all-black and known in Venezuela as "the death squad," stopped him as he was driving in Caracas.
"They asked for documents," he said. "For several minutes, they spoke with someone on the radio about what to do with me. In the end, they told me to get out of the car. They said they had a few questions.”
PHOTOS EMERGE SHOWING VENEZUELA’S ‘DEATH SQUAD’ WITH LIFELESS BODIES
They allegedly never asked questions, and instead put a hood over Surdel’s head and pummeled him, according to his account to the newspaper.
“They beat me with something hard, probably with (pistol) butts, mainly on the face,” he said. “I also got a few strong blows on the rib. When they finished and pulled off the hood, I saw the muzzle of the gun in front of my eyes.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as well as other rights groups, denounced the assault and is demanding an investigation.
Surdel’s newspaper said on its website that the Venezuelan Embassy in Warsaw has complained to it about the reporter’s stories about President Nicolas Maduro and the country’s worsening financial, social and political problems.
"We are alarmed at the depth and pace of increasing violence and hostility to journalists working in Venezuela, and are gravely concerned about their safety," said CPJ Central and South America Program Coordinator Natalie Southwick in New York. "Venezuelan authorities should immediately investigate the targeted assault on Tomasz Surdel and identify those responsible."
CPJ told Fox News on Tuesday that Surdel is believed to be in Venezuela healing from his injuries, but added it is not certain that he remains in the country.
Venezuela is gripped by a humanitarian crisis that is expected to worsen as U.S. oil sanctions designed to put more pressure on Maduro take their toll. Venezuela’s population is enduring hyperinflation and a scarcity of medicine and other necessities that the opposition blames on the administration’s socialist policies.
More than three million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, about one-third of them finding refuge in Colombia.
About 1,000 members of the Venezuelan security forces have fled to Colombia since last month, giving up weapons and uniforms as they abandoned the Maduro government, Colombian authorities said Monday.
The downward spiral of Venezuela has prompted Venezuelans to take to the streets in mass protests. That, in turn, had led to a crackdown on political opponents and both domestic and foreign journalists. Since January, more than 40 deaths – many of which occurred during the mass protests against Maduro - have been linked to the National Police "death squad," which uses military weapons. The squad is known as the FAES —the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian National Police’s Special Action Forces.
Venezuelan National Police special forces, also known as "death squads."
Over the weekend, Germany’s foreign ministry said that a German freelance journalist freed in Venezuela months after he was jailed as a suspected spy was on his way home.
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A Caracas court ordered the conditional release of Billy Six on Friday. Six was ordered to report to the court every 15 days and not to speak to media. He wasn’t deported but was allowed to leave Venezuela if he chose. German authorities said Sunday he flew out of the Caracas airport, but didn’t give further details.
Six had been charged with espionage, accusations his relatives rejected as trumped-up.
His release followed the arrest and deportation earlier this month of U.S. freelance journalist Cody Weddle. Univision’s Jorge Ramos was also deported with his team in late February after President Nicolas Maduro abruptly ended an interview.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Cuban doctors at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, Cuba on November 23, 2018. REUTERS/Fernando Medina
Cuban doctors dispatched to Venezuela as part of Cuba’s mission to help the South American nation’s medical needs were pressed by the host government to tie crucial treatments and medication to a patient’s promise to vote for President Nicolas Maduro and his candidates in last year’s elections, according to The New York Times.
The Times reported that in interviews, 16 doctors involved in Cuba’s medical missions said they were pressured to do such things as deny treatment to patients who supported Maduro’s political opponents and to go door-to-door in poor areas and offer medicine and treatment to those who voted for the socialist leader.
One doctor described how he was told not to treat a 65-year-old patient who sought emergency care because of heart failure because the oxygen tanks needed to respond to his condition were being saved for manipulating would-be voters closer to the election.
“These are the kinds of things you should never do in your life,” said one Cuban doctor who requested anonymity.
Others expressed similar frustration and outrage over being coerced to handle people in dire need of medicine and treatment in a way that went against everything they had been taught in their medical training.
Some of the doctors, such as Dr. Carlos Ramírez, a dental surgeon, grew so disgusted they defected when they had the chance.
Ramirez at first relished providing medical care in a nation where the system was in chaos.
US WITHDRAWING REMAINING STAFF FROM EMBASSY IN VENEZUELA
But then his job changed to include strong-arming patients into supporting Maduro and his candidates, he told the Times. They were told to focus on the most vulnerable patients, such as the elderly or people with chronic conditions.
“You arrived with vitamins and some pills for blood pressure," said Ramírez, who defected to Ecuador. “And when you started to gain their trust, you started the questions: ‘Do you know where your voting place is? Are you going to vote?’ ”
Voters register with members of the ruling United Socialist Party before proceeding to a polling post to vote in presidential elections in Valencia, Venezuela, Sunday, May 20, 2018. (AP)
Venezuelan and Cuban authorities, who had a vested interest in seeing Maduro win and socialism continue in Venezuela, told the Cuban doctors to scare patients by telling them that if Maduro lost, relations between Cuba and Venezuela would end and the imported doctors would be removed from the country.
“With [late President Hugo] Chavez it had been hard, but with Maduro, starting in 2013, it was worse,” another Cuban doctor told the paper.“It became a form of blackmail: ‘You’re not going to have medicine. You’re not going to have free health care. You’re not going to have prenatal care if you’re a pregnant woman.’ ”
Venezuelan authorities kept close watch over the Cuban doctors to ensure they were complying with the mandate, the Times reported.
The re-election of Maduro last May was dogged by reports of fraud. His political opponents and many foreign nations consider the election illegitimate because popular opponents were banned from running and the largest anti-government parties boycotted the race.
Maduro, a 56-year-old former bus driver and Chavez’s hand-picked successor, took the helm of government after narrowly winning election following Chavez’s 2013 death. He denies being a dictator and often accuses President Donald Trump of leading an economic war against Venezuela that is destroying the country.
When Maduro began his second six-year term in January, Venezuela’s Congress, controlled by Maduro’s opposition, declared its head, Juan Guaidó, the country’s legitimate president and declared the 2018 election a sham.
Cuban doctors hold up framed pictures (L-R) of late President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s National hero Simon Bolivar, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Cuban national hero Jose Marti and Fidel Castro during a march of farmers in support of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas February 26, 2014. REUTERS/Tomas Bravo
The Times said the Venezuelan government refused to respond for the story. The Cuban government defended its medical mission in Venezuela as one that upholds high standards that have made its doctors valuable in areas such as Africa, Latin America and Haiti.
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“The historical impact of that cooperation in Venezuela has been reflected in the 1,473,117 human lives that have been saved,” the Cuban government said, according to The Times.
Some doctors said the practice of using them as a way to threaten Venezuelans into voting for Maduro began as far back as the 2013 election, and grew worse last year, when opposition to the president was more intense.
Cuban doctors said they even were given fake identification and told to cast votes for Maduro.
“I asked myself, ‘Why is a physician, someone who is meant to be on a humanitarian mission, having a part in who wins an election?’” said one of the doctors, according to The Times. “This is called tampering. There is no other word for it.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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In this image made from video, Senator Fraser Anning swipes at a teenager who broke an egg on his head while he was holding a press conference, Saturday, March 16, 2019, in Melbourne, New Zealand. Following the mass shootings on Friday, Anning came under sharp criticism over tweets including one that said: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?” (AP Photo)
An Australian teenager who gained notoriety for cracking an egg on the head of a senator from his homeland who disparaged Muslims after the massacre at two New Zealand mosques Friday said he is donating most of the more than $50,000 in his GoFundMe page to victims of the tragedy, according to published reports.
Will Connolly, who is 17, made global headlines after he broke the raw egg on the head of Australian Senator Fraser Anning, who blamed the mass killing by Australian suspect Brenton Harrison Tarrant on New Zealand’s immigration policies.
After the massacre, Anning, known for his controversial comments about immigration, immediately began tweeting and releasing statements disparaging Muslims.
He tweeted: "Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”
And in a statement, Anning said: “The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”
Anning was in Melbourne speaking to reporters on Saturday when Connolly walked up behind him and cracked the egg on the politician’s head.
Anning punched Connolly and the politician’s supporters grabbed the teenager, holding him down on the floor until the police arrived.
The video of the incident went viral on social media, with many people hailing the “Egg Boy” a hero, and some saying that violence at the massacre was not to be addressed with more violence. An artist painted a mural of the incident to honor the teen, and musicians have offered Connolly free concert tickets. T-shirts bearing the image of Connolly’s face are for sale.
Others say that to praise Connolly is to support violence.
Actor Dean Cain, who played Superman in the TV show “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” denounced Connolly on Twitter.
“I would have knocked that kid cold,” he wrote.
Police released Connolly without charge. But a GoFundMe page with a goal of $50,000 had been set up to cover any legal fees Connolly might have faced.
By Monday morning, more than $51,000 had been raised.
After his release, Connolly tweeted: “Don’t egg politicians. You get tackled by 30 bogans at the same time. I learnt the hard way.”
And he noted: “This was the moment I felt so proud to exist as a human being. Let me inform all you guys, Muslims are not terrorists and terrorism has no religion. All those who consider Muslims a terrorist community have empty heads like Anning.”
On Sunday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that Anning’s comments were "a disgrace.”
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And Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Anning should feel “the full force of the law” for assaulting Connolly after being egged.
On Sunday, Anning remained defiant, saying he would not apologize for his comments or actions.
"I don’t regret anything I do," he said regarding striking Connolly, according to the New Zealand Herald. "I defended myself, that’s what Australians do, usually, they defend themselves."
Anning added: "He got a slap across the face which is what his mother should have given him a long time ago because he’s been misbehaving badly."
The police released a statement saying the entire matter, including the actions by Connolly and Anning, is under investigation.
“The incident is being actively investigated by Victoria Police in its entirety,” the statement said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Herbert Diess, CEO of German automaker Volkswagen AG, speaks at the company’s annual press conference at Volkswagen headquarters on March 12, 2019 in Wolfsburg, Germany. (Getty)
The chief executive of Volkswagen has apologized for evoking the infamous slogan that appears at the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp when speaking about the German company’s profits at a meeting on Tuesday.
CEO Herbert Diess said he should not have uttered “Ebit macht frei,” a phrase echoing "Arbeit Macht Frei", which means “work sets you free” and is synonymous with the camp. Ebit is an acronym for "earnings before interest and taxes".
Diess issued a statement calling his use of the phrase “definitely an unfortunate choice of words,” according to the BBC.
CATALAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL UNDER FIRE AFTER TWEET QUOTING ANNE FRANK
"At no time was it my intention for this statement to be placed in a false context. At the time, I simply did not think of this possibility."
United States Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence, right, stand with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and his wife Agata Kornhauser-Duda, left, under the gate during their visit at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, Friday, Feb. 15, 2019. They stand under the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign (AP)
The incident refocused attention on the company’s Nazi origins, a chapter that it has struggled to acknowledge and get past.
FORD AND VOLKSWAGEN ANNOUNCE ALLIANCE TO BUILD PICKUPS AND VANS
Nazi guards kept watch over slave workers from concentration camps at the Volkswagen plant, feeding them poorly and beating or shooting them for minor mistakes, according to The New York Times.
Nazis took away the children who were born to the slave workers and put them in a facility that had Nazi supervision and had inhumane conditions. The Times said that more than 300 children died at the nursery.
US AMBASSADOR URGES GERMANY TO BAR ENTRY OF CONVICTED PALESTINIAN TERRORIST
In 2016, Volkswagen came under fire when its company historian, who had researched and reported the car manufacturer’s Nazi past, left under unclear circumstances.
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The historian, Manfred Grieger, and Volkswagen did not comment on what led to the end of his employment, adding fuel to the theory that he had been dismissed after revealing much more than the company wanted. The abrupt departure of the historian prompted 75 of Germany’s most prominent scholars to sign an angry letter that accused Volkswagen of firing Grieger for punitive reasons.
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A failure by the Obama administration to react to numerous warnings by state officials and its own drug investigators about the rising peril of illicit fentanyl allowed the problem to fester over the years and claim tens of thousands of lives, according to The Washington Post.
And while states were seeing a growing number of fentanyl-related overdoses, Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder announced a new policy to ease prosecutions of low-level nonviolent drug offenses, which he said would address overly harsh mandatory-minimum sentences for first-time offenders. The move, law enforcement officials told The Post, led to fewer arrests and affected investigators’ ability to reach criminals high up in the drug-trafficking chain through deals offered to lower-level offenders.
That, the newspaper said in its report on Wednesday, slowed law enforcement efforts to get to the sources and understand the networks behind the flourishing fentanyl trade.
From 2013 to 2017, nearly 70,000 people died of synthetic opioid-related overdoses, most tied to fentanyl, which is commonly obtained through the black market. In 2017, The Post noted, fentanyl became the leading causes of fatal overdoses.
“Everybody was slow to recognize the severity of the problem, even though a lot of the warning signs were there,” The Post quoted New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, as saying.
The appeals to the Obama administration were numerous and came from myriad sources.
Federal authorities on Monday seized 110 pounds of fentanyl in a shipment of iron oxide from Area Port of Philadelphia. (cbp.gov)
A group of national public health experts sent a letter to senior Obama administration officials in 2016 begging for immediate action because, they stressed, thousands of people had been dying from fentanyl overdoses since at least 2013.
“The fentanyl crisis represents an extraordinary public health challenge —and requires an extraordinary public health response,” the group said in the letter, which was sent to officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and to the drug czar.
The administration, it said, acknowledged the letter but took no action.
AS DOCTORS TAPER OR END OPIOID PRESCRIPTIONS, MANY PATIENTS DRIVEN TO DESPAIR, SUICIDE
One significant move that the CDC took in response to increasing public attention on overdoses due to opioids – which included largely illicit opioids such as heroin and illicit fentanyl – was to issue guidelines for general practitioners on prescribing opioids to people with chronic pain.
But many pain specialists and public health experts say those guidelines, while well-intentioned, made sweeping dose recommendations that remain debatable among medical professionals and have since been used to deny pain patients the doses they need. The guidelines also unleashed a wave of policies and laws around the country restricting doses and in some cases discouraging the prescribing of opioids, even to patients who long have relied on them and use them responsibly.
Meanwhile, painkiller prescription rates have declined, and many doctors are either forcing patients to taper off – against the recommendation of the CDC guidelines – or abandoning those pain patients altogether.
A Fox News series in December reported that while many pain patients in the United States have been left undertreated, creating a new public health crisis, overdose deaths due to illicit fentanyl continued to climb.
In June, Robert Mansfield, age 61, of Ladson, S.C., was sentenced to 20 years in prison for distribution of fentanyl resulting in the death of a man in December 2016, federal prosecutors said (Charleston County Sheriff’s Office)
Political leaders and police from areas hard hit by fentanyl overdoses told The Post that when the Obama administration did address the overdose crisis, it focused on prescription painkillers and heroin, not the greater threat of fentanyl.
“Fentanyl was killing people like we’d never seen before,” said Derek Maltz, the former agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Operations Division in Washington. “A red light was going off, ding, ding, ding. … We needed a serious sense of urgency.”
TOUGH NEW OPIOID POLICIES LEAVE SOME CANCER AND POST-SURGERY PATIENTS WITHOUT PAINKILLERS
But with no loud alarm coming from President Barack Obama or his senior officials, Congress did not move to provide the funding needed, U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not have the manpower or the equipment to detect fentanyl shipments entering from Mexico and China, and the U.S. Postal Service did not use electronic tools that would allow for detecting packages containing fentanyl that had been ordered through the Internet, The Post said.
Manchester [New Hampshire] Fire Chief Dan Goonan said he got tired of going to the numerous roundtable discussions that first responders, politicians and policymakers were having about fentanyl because nothing ever got done.
In 2014, the DEA started to alert local law enforcement agencies around the country about fentanyl, but it got little to no attention at the national level, the Post said.
President Barack Obama meets with Attorney General Eric Holder (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
After actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose, attracting broad media attention to the problem, Holder appeared in a video calling heroin an “urgent and growing public health crisis.” But, just like others in the administration who saw the overdose crisis only in terms of heroin and prescription pills, Holder did not mention the bigger threat – fentanyl.
Holder’s former spokesman, Matthew Miller, defended him in an interview with The Post. “It says something that the people pointing fingers at the attorney general can’t point to a single action they recommended that he declined to take,” Miller said. “Eric Holder made fighting the opioid crisis a major focus, he strongly supported the DEA’s work in this area, and if the officials trying to now lay the blame at someone else’s feet had asked for more assistance, he would have given it.”
By the time Holder left his job, federal drug prosecutions had dropped, while fentanyl overdoses were spreading around the country.
Later, Congress asked for the creation of a National Heroin Task Force to look at the overdose epidemic. But again, the focus was heroin and prescription painkillers, which account for a minority of overdoses.
The Post noted that the task force produced a 23-page report on the OD crisis for Congress – within those pages, though, a mere five sentences mentioned fentanyl.
Michael Botticelli, the White House drug czar in the Obama administration, said, “In retrospect, it should have been a focus of the report.”
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Tom Frieden, who was the CDC head during the Obama administration, said he tried to impress upon officials the dangers of fentanyl and how it was becoming a major killer in many communities.
“I felt like I was a bit of a voice in the wilderness,” Frieden said. “I didn’t have the sense that people got this as a really serious problem.”
In an interview with CNN after the new report was published, one of the Post reporters, Sari Horwitz, said: “The Trump administration has done some things. They’ve talked about it more than the Obama administration. They’ve ramped up prosecutions. The Justice Department is going after fentanyl and drug trafficking.”
“But," she added, "people are telling us you cannot arrest your way out of this problem. There needs to be a three-pronged approach that involves prevention which is, as I said, a public service campaign to let people know how incredibly dangerous fentanyl is.”
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Cast of the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, starring Andy Samberg (center).
Brazilian fans of the sitcom "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" were left confused and none-too-pleased when an episode featured a character praising controversial President Jair Bolsonaro.
The root of the unpopular dialogue, according to the Universal Television-produced NBC show’s creators, was a wrong translation of the dialogue.
The episode showed the character Charles Boyle, a detective in the 99th precinct in Brooklyn, speaking positively about Bolsonaro in the Portuguese voiceover translation, according to the Wrap.
Fans expressed gratitude for broadcasting the show to Brazilians but told the creators that the pro-Bolsonaro praise left them confused.
BRAZIL SCHOOL SHOOTING LEAVES SEVERAL DEAD
“We’re so thankful @TNTBr is transmitting B99 for us Brazilian fans, but it’s so wrong that the translations are implying Boyle is a Bolsonaro supporter (he’s Brazil’s president – a more extreme version of Trump) since that’s totally against everything B99 and Boyle stand for,” said a tweet from the account Brooklyn 99 Updates.
Brooklyn 99 Updates tweeted a video of part of the episode on Saturday.
The Wrap reported that after becoming aware of the bewildering translation through Twitter messages directed at him, "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" creator and showrunner Dan Goor is making sure it gets corrected by the voiceover company that was responsible.
"Brooklyn Nine-Nine" actress Melissa Fumero tweeted: "We love you, Brazil (heart) so crazy this even happened."
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It remains unclear how the translation mishap happened; even more curious is that the president is not discussed in the episode that was broadcast in the United States.
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A prominent Venezuelan journalist is in the custody of the country’s intelligence agents after he was picked up after leaving work Monday, according to the National Union of Press Workers.
The union reported that Luis Carlos Diaz, a reporter for Unión Radio News in Caracas and activist for internet and press freedom, appeared near his home Tuesday morning in handcuffs while government security agents raided his home.
The union said that they took Diaz’s computers, cell phones, money, and other belongings.
Diaz told journalists and others who were outside his home that he had been arrested and beaten in detention, the union tweeted. He is reportedly being held at the notorious El Helicoide political prison.
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It is the latest high-profile detention of a journalist by Venezuelan authorities, who have intensified a crackdown on the press that became routine during the administration of the late President Hugo Chavez. Human rights groups say the crackdown on both international and Venezuelan journalists has grown worse and bolder in recent weeks under the administration of President Nicolas Maduro.
“In Venezuela, the system of censorship and repression is nothing new, but in the last few months we’ve seen a significant crackdown,” Natalie Southwick, who focuses on Central and South America for the Committee to Protect Journalists, told Fox News. “We’ve seen high-profile and ongoing harassment and detention, and confiscation of equipment recently.”
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Last week, counterintelligence agents detained U.S. journalist Cody Weddle and Venezuelan fixer Carlos Camacho and interrogated them for about 12 hours before releasing Camacho and expelling Weddle.
Maduro’s crusade against the press came into sharp focus recently with the detention of Jorge Ramos, the star anchor of the Spanish-language television network Univision, and his crew.
Venezuelan journalist Luis Carlos Diaz (Twitter)
After having his cell phone confiscated by Maduro’s security agents, Ramos obtained a borrowed phone and described how his tough interview with Maduro landed him in detention for a few hours. Security agents took equipment, including cell phones, from Ramos and his crew.
Daniel Garrido, a reporter for Telemundo, also a U.S.-based Spanish-language television news network, was abducted in Caracas while reporting about Ramos’ detention.
In the last week of January, there were more than a half dozen international journalists detained, usually for short periods, Southwick said.
But dozens of Venezuelan journalists – on the margins of international public awareness — have been detained and harassed, Southwick noted.
“These cases of Jorge Ramos and international reporters have gotten lots of attention, but it’s worth emphasizing that this kind of harassment and threats are something that Venezuelan journalists face every day doing their work,” she said.
Venezuelan authorities saw Diaz as an irritant.
The Caracas Chronicles, for which Diaz is a contributor, said in an article published Tuesday that the government is trying to accuse the journalist and another reporter, Nelson Bocaranda, of having advance knowledge about the nationwide blackout that hit Thursday and continues, causing problems for Venezuelans, leaving them with little power, water and communications.
The outlet added that Maduro addressed the nation after Diaz went missing on Monday to say that two culprits – without naming them — with ties to the blackout were in custody.
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CPJ released a statement Tuesday demanding Diaz’s release.
"Venezuelan authorities should immediately release Luis Carlos Díaz, return his confiscated equipment, and stop this absurd campaign blaming their own failures on critical journalists," the statement said. "Without electricity, much of the Venezuelan public is already deprived of access to information from TV, radio, and the internet in the midst of an emergency. Harassing and jailing journalists will only exacerbate the crisis."
Source: Fox News World
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