Colombian authorities said on Friday they have launched an international hunt for a former defense minister after the Supreme Court upheld his conviction for stealing almost US$500,000 from a presidential campaign.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ratified a lower court's conviction of aggravated theft for Fernando Botero Zea -- son of famed painter Fernando Botero -- saying the former Cabinet minister must serve a 30-month jail sentence for pocketing almost US$500,000 from the 1994 campaign of Ernesto Samper, whose drug-tainted election bid he ran.
Samper was Colombia's president from 1994-1998, a period of tense relations with the US, which repeatedly denounced the president for taking money from the Cali drug cartel, then the world's largest cocaine smuggling organization, based in Colombia's third-largest city.
"We've issued a notice through Interpol to 189 countries to locate Botero," said Oscar Galvis, a spokesman for the DAS intelligence agency. "If he steps foot in the country he'll be immediately arrested."
Botero, who is believed to be residing outside the country, already served a five-year sentence last decade for his involvement in the Andean nation's worst drug-corruption scandal.
In August 1996, he was forced to resign as defense minister and was immediately jailed when it was revealed he accepted millions of dollars in donations on behalf of Samper's campaign from the Cali drug cartel, which at the time was the world's largest cocaine-smuggling organization.
Although the scandal prompted the US to revoke Samper's visa, the former president has long maintained he had no knowledge of what his campaign manager was doing behind his back.
In a statement on Wednesday he applauded the Supreme Court decision, saying it "closed a chapter" in the investigation into the illegal financing of his campaign.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
RSS