Mexico Arrests Leading Los Zetas Cartel Figure in Drug Raid

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Tamaulipas – Mexican authorities this week arrested one of the top leaders with the “Old School” faction of Los Zetas Cartel. The man spent some time in Texas and is linked to much of the ongoing violence in this city and other parts of the northern border state. Mexican federal authorities in the western coastal state of Jalisco arrested Jose Roberto “La Barbie” Stolberg Becerra during a drug house raid. Stolberg is wanted in Tamaulipas on kidnapping and organized crime charges in connection with numerous disappearances, extortion, and murders tied to his cartel’s play for control of the region. His sister is married to the son of former Tamaulipas Governor Egidio Torre Cantu.

Authorities with Mexico’s Office of the Attorney General say they raided the house as part of a drug distribution investigation in Tlajomulco, Jalisco. Officials reportedly seized baggies with marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Once in custody, police were able to identify Stolberg and link him with warrants from Tamaulipas. He will be transferred to face charges in the northern border state. Stolberg, aka “Bravo 7,” is classified as a “narco-junior” — someone from an upper-middle-class family who joined the drug trade for adventure, as opposed to economic need. According to top law enforcement sources, Stolberg fell into organized crime in the mid-2000s when Los Zetas were still part of the Gulf Cartel and Ciudad Victoria was controlled by the now-jailed kingpin Rogelio “El Rojo” Diaz Cuellar.

After the cartels split in early 2011, Stolberg sided with Los Zetas and began carrying out ransom kidnappings and extorted local businesses. By 2014, Los Zetas splintered into two factions, one led by Miguel Angel “Z-40” Trevino Morales called Cartel Del Noreste (CDN) — at war with “Vieja Escuela Z.” The “Old School Z” formed when the late Luis “El Rex” Reyes Enriquez convinced other Zetas that Trevino betrayed the greater cartel’s values to take power for himself. Soon after, the Gulf Cartel sided with Vieja Escuela Z and began targeting the CDN. Vieja Escuela Z and the Gulf Cartel created “Grupo Bravo,” a strike team that began targeting CDN members for gruesome executions. Grupo Bravo was led by Javier “El Shaggy or Bravo 1” Morales Valencia, who was killed in Nuevo Leon in 2016. Stolberg was a close ally of Morales and Daniel “El Arqui or Joker” Lara Salazar, along with Juan Pablo “El Oaxaco” Perez Garcia and associates. The group is responsible for more than 200 murders in Ciudad Victoria alone.

After the leaders of Grupo Bravo were either captured or killed, Stolberg fled to Weslaco, Texas. The cartel boss regularly moved between Weslaco and Ciudad Victoria until late 2017 or early 2018, when he returned to performing kidnappings and extortion schemes in the border state capital. Mexico’s National Security Commission says authorities received information in 2017 about Stolberg attending a wedding at a ranch in the central state of Guanajuato. There, his sister married Egidio Torre Jr., the son of former Tamaulipas Governor Egidio Torre Cantu. An arrest operation was canceled at the last minute due to pressure from the Guanajuato state government.

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/04/10/mexico-arrests-leading-los-zetas-cartel-figure-in-drug-raid/

Vancouver Man Faces New Money Laundering Charge in College Admissions Scandal

Vancouver businessman David Sidoo faces an additional charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering for his alleged role in a college admissions scandal in the United States. In a new indictment from the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts today, Sidoo is accused of wiring about $100,000 in January 2013 from an account in Canada to an account in California. The indictment says the money was in the name of college-prep company The Key, and meant to be in exchange for William (Rick) Singer’s facilitation of a SAT cheating scheme for Sidoo’s younger son. An assistant for Sidoo’s lawyer, Richard Schonfeld, said the attorney was declining comment on the new charge.

Sidoo, a 59-year-old former Canadian Football League player and well-known philanthropist, was previously charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud in connection with the scandal. He pleaded not guilty last month and was released by the federal court in Boston on a secured bond of $1.5 million and his travel was restricted to Canada and the United States. An indictment released March 12 alleged Sidoo paid $200,000 in total for someone to take an entrance exam on behalf of both his sons, and that he also paid an undisclosed amount for someone to fly to Vancouver and take a high school test. St. George’s School says a review of its records from 2012 indicates no school or provincial exams were written at the school by the student in question on or around the date referenced by the indictment.

At least nine athletic coaches and 33 parents, including Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, are among those who have been charged in an investigation dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. No students were charged. Authorities have said that in many cases the teenagers were not aware of what was going on.

Sidoo, known for his philanthropic causes in British Columbia, was CEO of Advantage Lithium and is a former Canadian Football League player for the B.C. Lions and Saskatchewan Roughriders. Advantage Lithium said on March 14 that Sidoo has taken a leave of absence from his executive role as company president and that his responsibilities as CEO have been assumed by another executive on an interim basis.

An indictment alleges Sidoo paid $100,000 in 2011 to have an individual secretly take the Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT, in place of his older son. It also asserts that Sidoo emailed copies of his son’s driver’s licence and student card for the purpose of creating a falsified identification card for the individual. The individual, whose name is redacted, flew from Tampa, Fla., to Vancouver to take the SAT on behalf of Sidoo’s son, the indictment alleges. The indictment says the test score was emailed to an administrator at Chapman University, a private California university, where Sidoo’s son was admitted and later enrolled. The indictment also alleges Sidoo agreed to pay another $100,000 in 2012 for someone to take the SAT in place of his younger son. It claims that in 2013 and 2014 the falsified SAT scores obtained on behalf of his younger son were sent to universities, including Yale and Georgetown, as part of his college applications. The score was also sent to the University of California-Berkeley, where the younger son was accepted and later enrolled, it says. Sidoo’s legal team has said the two sons have not been accused of any impropriety.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/vancouver-man-faces-new-money-laundering-charge-in-college-admissions-scandal_2874888.html

>>6128930

Not sure why the need to black out his eyes, strange.

Bipartisan House Bill Seeks to Stop Flow of China’s Synthetic Opioids into US

WASHINGTON—Florida Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan and Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton on Wednesday introduced the Fentanyl Sanctions Act, a bipartisan measure intended “to force China to stem the flow of deadly, synthetic opioids being trafficked into the United States.”

Fentanyl, which is similar chemically to heroin but 50 times more powerful, is the main substance the measure targets, because it was associated with more than 28,000 opioid overdose deaths in 2017, 40 percent of the 70,000 plus overdose deaths recorded that year. An estimated 80 percent of the drug that comes into the United States originates from China, according to a joint statement issued by Buchanan and Moulton. Chinese officials agreed last week to clamp down on fentanyl trafficking. While China is the major source of fentanyl trafficking into the United States, significant amounts also come from Mexico and other countries.

“Fentanyl and other opioids have ravaged Florida communities and torn apart many families and lives,” Buchanan said. “While I welcome China’s announcement that it will ban all forms of fentanyl, we must ensure that their words are followed through with meaningful action. “I urge my colleagues to immediately approve this bipartisan bill to deliver another resource that could help combat the flow of opioids across our borders.” Moulton added that “Fentanyl has become the leading illegal drug in the opioid crisis in our country, and it’s time we attack the source. “While China’s ban on producing fentanyl is a promising start, Congress should hold China to its word. This bill will target the fentanyl producers worldwide who profit from the overdose deaths happening in communities across our country, including Massachusetts, where fentanyl is the leading cause of opioid-overdose deaths. Congress must act quickly.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/bipartisan-house-bill-seeks-to-stop-flow-of-chinas-synthetic-opioids-into-us_2874963.html

Rubio & Bipartisan Group Introduce Anti-Opioid Bill to Sanction Chinese-Origin Fentanyl

https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=Press-Releases&id=A5C2EE13-D4C2-4B4D-8D90-EE11C76355F8

>>6129246

Ahh, the cabal at work..doubtful it will work.

Former Pope Benedict blames church’s scandals partly on the ‘60s

When Pope Benedict XVI resigned the papacy in 2013, he vowed to live the rest of his days in seclusion, to serve the Catholic Church “through a life dedicated to prayer.” But the church’s spiraling abuse crisis prompted him this week to ­return to the limelight. The retired pontiff has drafted a 6,000-word document in his native German and aims to publish it in a monthly periodical for clergy in his home region of Bavaria. Benedict says the document, an English translation of which I’ve reviewed, is meant to assist the Church in seeking “a new beginning” and making her “again truly credible as a light among peoples and as a force in service against the powers of ­destruction.”

In the preface, he makes it clear that he is “no longer directly responsible” for the church and that he consulted Pope Francis before ­resolving to make the document public. Nevertheless, Benedict’s “The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse” has the unmistakable ring of a papal document. You might even call it a post-retirement encyclical. It’s written with his signature precision and clarity of insight and offers a piercing account of the origins of the crisis and a ­vision of the way forward. The church’s still-radiating crisis, Benedict suggests, was a product of the moral laxity that swept the West, and not just the church, in the 1960s. The young rebels of 1968, Benedict writes, fought for “all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms.”

Benedict adds: “Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of 1968 was that pedophilia was now also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.” This might strike contemporary readers as puzzling. But those who lived through that wretched decade will remember that some of the leading ’68ers also advocated “anti-authoritarian education,” which involved some pretty ­unsavory interactions between adults and children. Hippie communes weren’t child-friendly places, either. “I have always wondered how young people in this situation could approach the priesthood and accept it, with all its ramifications,” Benedict writes. “The extensive collapse of the next generation of priests in those years and the very high number of laicizations were consequence of all these processes.” The church, in other words, was no more immune to the disorders of that decade and its aftermath than the rest of society.

How come? Benedict blames clerics and theologians who, in the ­aftermath of Vatican II, abandoned natural law — the notion that morality is written into ­human nature itself and can therefore be grasped by human reason — in favor of a more “pragmatic” ­morality. Under the new dispensation, “there could no longer be anything that constituted an ­absolute good, any more than anything fundamentally evil; there could only be relative moral judgments.”

The real world result was that “in various seminaries, homosexual clubs were established, which more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in seminaries.” The new morality also encouraged a “critical or negative attitude toward hitherto existing tradition,” he writes, in favor of a “new, radically open relationship with the world.” For one bishop, the German pontiff says, that meant going so far as screening porn for seminarians. In many seminaries, meanwhile, students caught reading his own books, written while he was still a cardinal and known for their doctrinal rigor, would be “considered unsuitable for the priesthood.”

The looseness of those years also affected how the church ­handled cases of abusive priests, who we now know targeted mostly boys and young men. In church proceedings, “the rights of the accused had to be guaranteed” above all else, “to an extent that factually excluded any conviction at all.” Such absolutism in defense of the accused was ­incorrectly seen as a “conciliar” requirement — anything less was a betrayal of Vatican II. Hence the cover-ups and shuffling around of abusive priests. It’s impossible to miss Benedict’s bitterness toward what he sees as distortions of Vatican II, a council he helped shape as a young theologian.

https://nypost.com/2019/04/10/former-pope-benedict-blames-churchs-scandals-partly-on-the-60s/