Mediaboss Marketing

A federal judge sentenced a former Starr County gangster to 10 years in prison Monday.

U.S. District Judge John D. Rainey sentenced Hector Pelon Guerra, 41, of La Rosita a former ranking member of the Texas Chicano Brotherhood in Starr County during a hearing Monday afternoon in Victoria.

Guerra pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 2,200 pounds of marijuana. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped a gun charge against him and recommended 10 years in prison.

I do accept my responsibility, your honor, Guerra said.

The case brought together Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Criminal Investigations Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

They identified more than 70 people affiliated with the Texas Chicano Brotherhood.

The McAllen investigation revealed that Ricardo GARCIA, Rafael DIAZ, and Hector GUERRA were ranking members within the Starr County faction of the TxCB organization, according to a summary of the case against Guerra filed by federal prosecutors. These ranking members thus became targets of an electronic surveillance (wiretap) investigation.

The Gulf Cartel paid members of the Texas Chicano Brotherhood to transport marijuana throughout the Rio Grande Valley, according to federal court records. The gang also robbed stash houses and sold the stolen marijuana to other smugglers.

Guerra and other members of the gang moved about 330 pounds of marijuana a week, according to information provided to the government by an informant. The gang also participated in kidnappings and murders.

After a grand jury indicted Guerra, agents tracked him to a trailer home in La Rosita. A regional SWAT team from San Juan ripped off the door with a battering ram, set off two stun grenades and arrested him on Nov. 21, 2018.

And that is how the SWAT team in San Juan knocks on the door, said Bill Weir, the host of a short-lived television show called Border Live, which filmed the arrest. Weir said agents had both a federal arrest warrant and a search warrant.

The search warrant had been written by Arturo David Ibarra Jr., an investigator with the Starr County District Attorneys Office.

Ibarra told a judge that investigators believed Guerra was an enforcer in the Texas Chicano Brotherhood.

In early 2018 the suspected party was arrested for the possession of marihuana. During the scope of that investigation intelligence revealed that the suspected party was smuggling narcotics, specifically marihuana, in large quantities and has direct contact to the Gulf Cartel, read the affidavit, according to federal court records. It is my belief that the suspected party has evidence in his possession which can be beneficial to the investigation into the Texas Chicano Brotherhood gang.

Ibarra requested a no-knock warrant based on information provided by an informant.

During the investigation Investigator Ibarra learned that the suspected party attended a Texas Chicano Brotherhood meeting on November 18, 2018 and the suspected party was in the possession of a AK-47 and a handgun, read the affidavit, according to federal court records.

When agents searched the trailer, they didnt find an AK-47. They did, however, find a pistol hidden in an air-conditioning vent.

Attorney Micah Wayne Hatley of Victoria, who represented Guerra, challenged the search warrant.

Information about a months-old marijuana bust simply wasnt enough to justify a search, Hatley argued in a motion to suppress. The warrant also failed to include any information that linked the marijuana bust to Guerras house.

Statements that Guerra made after his arrest should be suppressed too, Hatley argued, because a federal agent questioned Guerra after he invoked his right to remain silent.

Rainey, the federal judge, agreed.

Hector Guerra, 41, of La Rosita was a ranking member of the Texas Chicano Brotherhood. (Photo courtesy of the Starr County Sheriffs Office.)

The Court finds that the search warrant was not supported by probable cause and that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule does not apply, Rainey wrote in an opinion filed in February. The search of Defendants home after the initial protective sweep incident to his arrest therefore violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

Rainey also suppressed all statements Guerra made to agents.

There is no question Defendant explicitly invoked his right to remain silent. Under Miranda and its progeny, the agents should have immediately terminated the interrogation at that point, Rainey wrote. Instead of ensuring that Defendants right to remain silent was scrupulously honored, they continued, in the Governments own words, trying to encourage him to cooperate with the government.

The Texas Chicano Brotherhood green-lighted Guerra after his arrest, according to a transcript of a court hearing in August 2020. Concerned about his safety, the U.S. Marshals Service kept Guerra in solitary confinement and transferred him at least three times.

Guerra agreed to plead guilty in May.

We made the deal for 120 months, your honor, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Hubert Booth, who prosecuted the case.

Guerra said he wanted to take classes in prison and become a different person.

The first few times you came into this court, that wasnt your attitude, Rainey said.

Guerra agreed.

I know, Guerra said. And I apologize.

Follow this link:
Texas Chicano Brotherhood 'enforcer' sentenced to 10 years in prison - Progresstimes

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Sadly, we are approaching a time in America when our elected public officials will assault the liberties we have hired them to protect. Whatever the cause, the government will soon blame its failures to contain a virus on a small portion of the population and then impose restrictions on the inalienable rights of all of us.

We cannot permit this to happen again.

During the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln thought it expedient to silence those in the northern states who challenged his wartime decisions by incarcerating them in military prisons, he was rebuked afterward by a unanimous Supreme Court. The essence of the rebuke was that no matter the state of difficulties whether war or pestilence the Constitution protects our natural rights, and its provisions are to be upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, in good times and in bad.

Whether COVID-19 is coming back or not, our central planners have panicked. We do not have a free market in the U.S. in the delivery of health care; rather, we have thousands of pages of statutes, regulations, and controls at the federal, state, and local levels.

Those controls were revealed as manifestly deficient the last time around. The feds were so protective of their control of health care an area of governance that the Supreme Court has ruled is nowhere delegated to them in the Constitution and, but for their power to tax those who defy them, is nonexistent that they insisted that only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta could be trusted to test for the virus.

It took weeks of begging by governors and mayors, and health care professionals for the feds to relent. Of course, once they acknowledged that labs throughout the country were as competent as theirs, they realized that their incompetence had deprived all physicians as well as most private sector and state government-owned labs of the test kits themselves.

We all know how central economic planning diminishes freedom, produces scarcity, and adds to the cost of products. Now we know that central micromanagement of health care kills people.

But these mayors and governors were not to be outdone by the feds in their totalitarian impulses. Many of them issued decrees that are as profoundly unconstitutional as Lincolns efforts to silence dissent.

They ordered the closing of most businesses and nearly all retail establishments. They acted as if they, and not we, owned our faces. They shuttered religious institutions. It took a year for the courts to interfere partially with this madness.

The fulfillment of these totalitarian impulses put millions out of work, closed and destroyed thousands of businesses, and impaired the fundamental rights of tens of millions all in violation of numerous sections of the Constitution that the totalitarians swore to uphold.

And now they are threatening to do this again.

The Contracts Clause of the Constitution prohibits the states from interfering with lawful contracts, such as leases and employment agreements. The Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the states from interfering with life, liberty, or property without a trial at which the state must prove fault. The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires just compensation when the state meaningfully interferes with an owners chosen lawful use of his property.

Taken together, these clauses reveal significant protections of private property in the Constitution. Add to this the threat of punishment that accompanied these decrees and the fact that they were executive decrees, not legislation, and one can see the paramount rejection of basic democratic and constitutional principles in the minds and words and deeds of those who have perpetrated them.

Add to all this the protection in the First Amendment of the rights to worship and associate, and elsewhere the judicially recognized right to travel, and it is clear that these nanny state rules were profoundly unconstitutional, indisputably unlawful, and utterly unworthy of respect or compliance.

Why is this happening again?

Throughout history, free people have been willing to accept the devils bargain of trading liberty for safety when they are fearful. We supinely accept the shallow and hollow offers of government that somehow less liberty equals more safety. It doesnt. This is the governments dream dominance without resistance.

This happened here with the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s when the Federalists feared a second revolution and punished speech critical of them, during the Civil War when Lincoln feared dissent and Congress feared defeat. They locked up innocents during World War I when President Woodrow Wilson punished the speech he hated and feared, and during the Great Depression when President Franklin D. Roosevelt feared economic calamity and seized property without compensation. And, after 9/11, fearing another attack, Congress secretly crafted the Patriot Acts circumvention of the Fourth Amendment and authorized the creation of the total surveillance state.

Of course, just one year ago, we free people were all in lockdown a word used to describe confining prisoners to their cells.

This sordid history came about when the public was fearful of the unknown and trustful of the governments bargain. But the liberty that was sacrificed for the safety that was promised is being taken away again.

Liberty is natural and personal. You can sacrifice yours, but you cannot sacrifice mine. Thus, personal liberty the Declaration of Independence calls our rights inalienable, and the Ninth Amendment reflects freedoms nature as limitless is insulated from totalitarian and even majoritarian interference.

Today, the fear of contagion again gives government cover for its assaults on freedom and poses a question the government does not want to answer: If liberty can be taken away in times of crisis, is it really liberty; or is it just a license, via a temporary government permission slip, subject to the whims of the politicians in power?

We cannot permit this to happen again.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is an analyst for the Fox News Channel. He has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution.

Follow this link:
Freedom in the time of COVID-19 madness - Washington Times

In 1992, 11-year-old Guy Fraser spent his summer vacation fiddling with a radio. He was searching, sometimes in vain, for an English-language broadcast of the Olympics in Barcelona. He was trapped in France. Oblivious to the Olympics and her sons devotion to them Frasers mother had booked a two-week break that coincided almost perfectly with the Games. Fraser was heartbroken, but he made the best of it. He found French broadcasts he could mostly understand as he sussed out how his favourite athletes were faring in Spain.

Nearly three decades later, the Englishman is just as enthusiastic about the Games, especially after more than a year of Covid-19 lockdowns. So in the leadup to Tokyo, he began to do some research. Fraser is an equalopportunity viewer Once you properly understand the rules and tactics, any sport is inherently fascinating, he told the Guardian in an email and he wanted to be as informed as he could be. So he scrolled his phone from his home in Bath perusing rosters, trying to learn a thing or two about the people whod earned spots on teams across the world.

And sometimes, he failed. Sometimes he couldnt find any information at all.

I was surprised by the amount of people listed as competing who didnt have [a Wikipedia page] started yet, Fraser said. I assume the lack of competitions worldwide leading up to the Games meant that a few of the usual markers werent hit. He added: These are fabulous, fantastic athletes at their peak of capabilities and at the peak of human physical achievements, and they deserve recognition and representation.

Before this year, Fraser had dabbled in the wide world of Wikipedia. He believes wholeheartedly in the free online encyclopedia and its force as a social good, and from time to time hed edited or added a page. Now, though, he felt Wikipedia was seriously lacking and he had plenty of time on his hands. Fraser works with children who have autism, and the pandemic had disrupted his professional life and kept him confined to home. He was itching for something to do, and he found it in an internet blind spot. He was going to make sure every single Olympian got a Wikipedia page.

This summer, Fraser pored over pages of results everything from the decathlon to race walking to shot put. He translated text from foreign languages, read interviews, checked and double-checked his work. He doesnt like to code, so every time he finished a page, he flagged it for Wikipedia to finish the job. Since 1 June, he has created 358 pages. In that time, he has also made more than 1,300 edits.

He wrote about Ebba Tulu Chala, a Swedish marathoner who was born in Ethiopia and left as a child refugee, and Elija Godwin, a US runner who was impaled by a javelin in 2019. Then theres Alice Mason, a distance runner and doctor from New Zealand who paused her Olympic training during the pandemic to work at an urgent care centre, and Andrew Coscoran, an Irish middle-distance runner who was suspended from the Florida State college team for breaking curfew. Fraser doesnt discriminate between good deeds and bad. His goal is pure information, and the facts he knows about his athletes could fill a novella. Over the course of his research, he learned about photography and the Atlanta Falcons, Freibergs disease, the Republic of Kiribati, knee injuries, immigration and the optic nerve. If you have to trawl through a few Belarusian hammer throwers to find the great stories, Fraser said, so be it.

As he gathered information and parsed it into readable narratives, Fraser found himself pulling for people he researched. The more he knew about where theyd come from and what obstacles theyd faced, the more certain he became about their chances to win it all. Hes still waiting for one of his athletes to take gold.

When Fraser told his friends what he was working on, several were amused. His girlfriend is puzzled by the exercise, which ate up hours of his summer, but that doesnt faze him. At least Im being quiet, he says. Its as harmless a hobby as you get.

More than 10 million people across the world have registered to create and edit Wikipedia pages since the site went online in 2001. Exactly 199 of them have created more than 20,000 pages; the busiest creator had made 895,445 pages as of Thursday, way north of Frasers total. Still, he ranks in the top 1% of creators and hes done the bulk of his work this summer.

A week into the Games, Fraser is still plugging away with his pages on the English language version of the site. He has more to do hes not certain how many, exactly, but he wont rest until the 11,656 athletes are all enshrined in the online encyclopedia (he is helped by the fact that the vast majority of them already had pages). On Thursday, he watched BMX and learned that one of the Latvian competitors has also competed in bobsled events. On Friday, he turned his attention to track and field, working his way down the roster of entrants in the 100m dash. And hes not just creating pages; hes also making sure every runner who logs a personal best time gets an edit to document it. In the process, he discovered that Maggie Barrie, a sprinter from Sierra Leone, had been entered in the wrong race because of an administrative error. It was yet another story to file away, a page edit, on his way toward what, exactly? Recognition? Page views? The honour of creating a page for an underdog-turned-medallist?

Sign up for our Tokyo 2020 briefing with all the news, views and previews for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

But Fraser isnt concerned with any of that; he says he set out on this quest without a goal. There was no endpoint, because the concept of an ending is totally at odds with Wikipedia.

Theyre never finished, he says of his pages. You cant ever say all the information has been found. People will continue to build and improve and tweak and add. Its a great community; when you make a mistake, before you awake the next day someone youll never meet anonymously on the other side of the world fixes it. Its incredibly lifeaffirming and provides a bit of faith in humanity.

The rest is here:
There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia - The Guardian

Heppenheim/Hamburg (DPA) Spectators and stargazers can expect fireworks: the stars falling by the hundreds on the Perseids Islands can be seen in the night sky in the first half of August.

And the conditions for the scene are good as long as the weather lasts all this summer, which so far has been fairly mixed. The conditions are particularly favorable this year, because the moon sets late in the evening, says the Association of Friends of the Stars in Germany. This means that its light will not illuminate the night sky and will not disturb the view of dying cosmic dust particles. Under optimal conditions, you could see a meteor rushing across the sky every minute or two.

According to Sternfreunde, the peak of the meteor stream is expected on the nights of August 12 and 13. If you then look east in a clear sky after midnight, you can see dozens of stars falling per hour. But even on the weekends before and after you can see the glowing particles.

The Perseids appear to come from the constellation of Perseus, but its the debris cloud from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle that floods Earth every year in its orbit around the Sun. According to Astronomical Friends, the comet was independently discovered by Louis Swift and Horace Tuttle on July 19, 1862, and it takes about 133 years to complete one orbit around the Sun. The next time it should be visible from Earth is in the year 2126.

According to the Hamburg Planetarium, what burns up in Earths atmosphere are the crumbs of a comet that it loses in its orbit. Each August, Earth crosses this cosmic debris path, and comet particles fall into the atmosphere like raindrops on a car window. Then they burn up to 100 to 80 kilometers above the Earths surface. Some particles are bright enough to be seen even in the interfering light of large cities. However, the planetarium advises you to go to a dark place without disturbing the light and also to be patient. Falling stars will likely come in bursts, and the eyes will have to get used to the darkness of the night.

dpa-infocom, dpa: 210805-99-714652 / 2

Alcohol buff. Troublemaker. Introvert. Student. Social media lover. Web ninja. Bacon fan. Reader.

Read the rest here:
Science - Fireworks of the cosmic parts - Perseids burning in the sky - Wikipedia - The Weston Forum

My great-uncle Walter Scott worked for the Guardian as a foreign affairs subeditor from 1916 to his retirement in 1963 aged 88 (The changing art of the subeditor: You had to read the type upside down, 2 August). He was due to retire in 1939, just as war broke out, and younger men in the office enlisted.

A small team under the leadership of EA Montague vowed to continue printing and distributing the paper throughout the war, even if the country came under enemy occupation. On 9 July 1940, Walter received a memo saying that in the event of an invasion of Britain, he would be notified by a secret code. The message would read: Private and confidential, not for publication sortie 03.30 hours. If he received this, Walter was instructed to immediately notify all war correspondents around the world, as their lives would be endangered.

A particular friend of Walters was James Bone (London editor of the Manchester Guardian, 1912-45). He frequently invited Walter for weekends at his country cottage, Abbots Holt, in Tilford, Surrey. At his retirement dinner, Bone made a speech paying tribute to the people he worked with and said and the great Walter, who has carried so much of the London end on his shoulders. He has borne with me so patiently for so long and I fear I have not benefited as I should from his kindly admonitions. The last note from James to Walter, dated 6 September 1959, asks: [Do you] like the Guardians new name? Its the penalty that Manchester had to pay the world!

Walters services were needed as he was the go-to person for knowledge of foreign affairs. The management were concerned for his wellbeing and sent the following note: KAS [the office manager] says that he is quite content so long as we tell Walter Scott in writing that he has complete freedom to stay away in bad weather or whenever he feels slightly below par.

Walters command and memory of foreign affairs meant he was consulted long into his retirement; he was their Wikipedia.Anita ScottFarnham, Surrey

Have an opinion on anything youve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.

Original post:
Walter Scott, the 88-year-old Guardian subeditor who was a walking Wikipedia - The Guardian