A political cartoonist for the Spanish-language counterpart of the Miami Herald stormed the newspaper building on Friday morning dressed in an FBI shirt and armed with a fake semiautomatic weapon, issued threats against the paper's editor and others and held officers at bay for three hours before surrendering, police said.
The cartoonist, Jose Varela, 50, was charged with three counts of aggravated assault, the police said. No one was hurt.
Varela, a Cuban-born freelancer who until February had worked as a staff cartoonist at the paper, El Nuevo Herald, claimed to be upset about biased coverage of Cuban-Americans in both El Nuevo Herald and its sister paper, the Miami Herald, said Miami Police Chief John Timoney.
truth be told
"One of his demands was he wanted that the truth be told," he said.
The newspapers, which are owned by the McClatchy Co and published in the same building, have been engulfed in Cuban-American politics and intrigue of late.
Last month, the Miami Herald broke the story that some reporters for El Nuevo Herald were also working for and being paid by Radio and TV Marti, the government's anti-Castro propaganda radio station broadcast to Cuba. Relations between the two papers, often tense, became outright hostile, and the publisher of both papers resigned.
According to the Herald's Web site, Varela, a Cuban immigrant, demanded the resignations of its executive editor, Tom Fiedler, and El Nuevo Herald's executive editor, Humberto Castello, accusing him of backing Fiedler.
This week, Fiedler accused an op-ed contributor for El Nuevo Herald of "blood libel" for suggesting that a Herald reporter who broke the Marti story had ties to Cuba's spy agency. In an editor's note, Castello called the spy claim unfounded.
But Varela was also apparently having personal problems. El Nuevo Herald's Web site said he had recently divorced and told colleagues last week that he had gotten a submachine gun and a sawed-off shotgun because he felt unsafe in his new home in Jupiter, a wealthy enclave near West Palm Beach.
not the first time
It was not the first time that a gunman had caused havoc at the Herald's boxy tan headquarters on Biscayne Bay. Last year, a former city commissioner facing corruption charges killed himself in the building's lobby after an anguished phone call to a Herald columnist.
The columnist was later fired after it was revealed he had taped the conversation.
Around 11am on Friday, the police said, Varela came to the building, was allowed in by the security desk since he was a frequent visitor, and, once at El Nuevo Herald's offices on the sixth floor, demanded to speak to Castello.
"He threw a bunch of papers in the air," said Alejandra Chaparro, a reporter for El Nuevo Herald. "He was demanding that the editor has to take responsibility."
Told that Castello was not in the building, Varela declared, "I am the publisher until Humberto Castello gets here," the Herald reported on its Web site.
A building security manager, Arturo Le Fleur, told the Herald that Varela pointed the gun facsimile at him.
Police officers quickly evacuated the building and isolated Varela on the sixth floor. Two hours of negotiations ensued. Detective Serafin Ordonez, a police negotiator, said he talked with Varela about his art, his family and a shoulder injury to try to calm him down.
Varela also gave a rambling interview to a Nuevo Herald reporter during the standoff. "Somebody has to pay," Varela said.
"Somebody has to do it because this is going be like cleaning excrement. So somebody has to pay and that will be Castello," he said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion