WASHINGTON — The FBI on Tuesday arrested a Florida man who federal officials say set off an explosive device in the Capitol tunnel during a fierce battle between Trump supporters and law enforcement officials Jan. 6.

Daniel Ball of Homosassa He is the only defendant on January 6 charged with detonating an explosive device during the attack on the Capitol.

Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Tuesday that he could identify illegal immigrants in New York at a glance, and when asked for an explanation, simply insisted that he “could tell” because he was a “city guy.”

On FiveWatters discussed how Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been bussing migrants into the city since at least last August, in part as a revenge tactic in response to the Biden administration’s opposition to Trump-era policies that use Covid-19 as a reason for further expulsions. This policy, called Section 42, expires May 11, and the White House announced it Tuesday. Preparation send 1,500 troops to the border in anticipation of the expected influx of migrants.

New York Mayor Eric Adams on Monday criticized Abbott, who also used his powers to send migrants to places like Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Washington DC, and Philadelphia to “target” cities at black mayors.

According to Watters, Adams’ remark was “silly”.

“It’s like a lawyer complaining that all these people come to them with problems. This is what you signed up for. You are a city of refuge! hey exclaimed.

Watters then said race was not a factor in Abbott’s decision, stating that Abbott did not bus migrants to New York during former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure (from 2014 to 2021) because there weren’t many of them. . border fears then.

Watters also asked, “Is Mayor Martha’s Vineyard black or white?” (In fact, it was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who, last September, organized two migrant flights to Massachusetts Island, which is made up of six cities, each governed by an elected council, not a mayor.)

Watters then claimed to have personally seen the migrants in New York, where the Fox News studios are located.

“On my way to work, I saw a family of illegal immigrants digging through the trash for recyclables,” Watters said, prompting co-host Jessica Tarlov to ask him why he was so sure.

“You can tell,” said Watters, whose explanation Tarlov didn’t like. “I can tell! I’m a city boy. You don’t want me to get into this, but I can tell.”

“This is the saddest thing to see because they can’t work here. They came to work, but they can’t work here,” he continued. “The bottom line is this: you need to be able to choose people who come to the country based on needs. If you need such people, invite them. But just say that everybody comes and then, oh, you know, now people are looking for a nickel bottle, that’s wrong. And you can’t blame the guy from Texas. Joe Biden is the common denominator of it all.”

Journalist and editor José Rubén Zamora was at home in Guatemala City last July when a dozen heavily armed, balaclava-clad policemen jumped off the roof and burst through the garage without a warrant. While his grandchildren huddled in the closet and his wife and daughter-in-law protested, Zamora was arrested. The senior officer whispered to Zamora that he considered himself innocent and spared him the humiliation of the handcuffs.

Ten days later, Zamora appeared in court on charges of money laundering, blackmail and influence peddling, which a public prosecutor later admitted he collected in seventy-two hours. The specific allegations have varied over time, but the crux of the government’s case is that Zamora laundered money and engaged in extortion to help fund his newspaper. elperiodicowhich he founded in 1996. Zamora admitted that he tried to hide the identity of his sponsors in order to protect them from government reprisals.

Zamora and his advocates, including press freedom advocates from around the world, call the prosecution a clear retaliation for his long history of exposing corruption. Zamora believes that two recent investigations conducted elperiodico Russia’s involvement in Guatemala has particularly irritated current President Alejandro Giammattei. A 2021 product revealed a secret deal to acquire Russian production COVID-19-19 Sputnik V vaccines through an intermediary, which the newspaper says involved millions of dollars in excess payments and violated Guatemalan law. Four months later a second story Described a deal with a Russian-backed mining company that allegedly delivered a carpet stuffed with cash bribes to Giammattei’s home. elperiodico also publishes a political gossip column that criticizes the country’s elite. In a statement to New Yorkera spokesman for Giammattei denied the allegations, fired two elperiodico investigations as “gossip” and “slanderous” and stated that the President played no role in Zamora’s prosecution. “Our commitment is to protect and respect journalistic activity,” the statement said, alleging that Zamora is being persecuted as a businessman and not as a journalist.

Zamora is being held in the Mariscal Zavala prison, on the territory of a military base on the outskirts of the capital. The prison was used to house officials who were targeted by a specialized anti-corruption unit supported by the UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. Created in 2007 at the request of the Government of Guatemala, the commission has become a collaborative effort to investigate criminal groups, fight corruption and strengthen the rule of law. Giammattea’s predecessor, Jimmy Morales, refused to renew the commission’s mandate in 2019, effectively shutting it down. Then, a year and a half after Giammattei took office, his attorney general, Maria Consuelo Porras, fired the country’s chief prosecutor for corruption, who then fled Guatemala for his safety. Consuelo Porras, who has been sanctioned by the US, has continued to staff the anti-corruption office with Giammattei supporters, including the prosecutor who is now handling the Zamora case. Nine current and former elperiodico journalists are under investigation for obstruction of justice. Three of Zamora’s lawyers were imprisoned, a fourth faced criminal charges, and a fifth was forced to resign.

Conditions in the prison where Zamora is being held are indicative of the ongoing struggle for accountability in the country. Former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who was arrested in 2015 on corruption charges, lives in a part of the prison that Guatemalan media reported includes furnished apartments with gardens and other amenities. According to Zamora and his family, Pérez Molina gets regular vacations that have seen the former president get out of prison. Meanwhile, the newspaper’s editor is in isolation and rarely visits him.

In April, I accompanied Samora’s son Ramon, who visits the imprisoned editor with his mother every Tuesday and Saturday. They bring him homemade food and other essentials, including clean linen. The Guatemalan officials agreed that I could accompany them as director of the Defense Journalism Initiativeat the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Ramon picked me up from the hotel in his black jeep. After a fifteen minute drive, we arrived at a checkpoint inside the military base where the Mariscal Zavala prison is located. We parked our car at the prison gates, passed through a security checkpoint, and walked several hundred yards down a wooded road with coffee and egg McMuffins we’d bought for Zamora at a nearby McDonald’s. At two additional checkpoints, we were again searched. Finally, the guards opened the padlocked gate and let us inside the fenced area, where Zamora paces back and forth for one hour a day when he is allowed to exercise.

When we entered his little cinder block cell, Zamora was dressed in jeans and a faded plaid shirt, tasseled moccasins on his feet, and his thick gray hair was combed back and neatly parted. The editor, whom I first met during the coverage of the civil war in the country, looked thin, but thanks to the food that his wife brought him, he gained eight of the twenty-eight pounds he had lost immediately after imprisonment. He called the unkempt patch of grass outside his cell “Champs Elysées Tropical Version”.

Zamora told me that the first month of his imprisonment was brutal. There have been water cuts, selective searches, overnight construction work near his cell, and a bed bug infestation that he suspects was intentional. Now Zamora is used to the routine. He spends his days reading books – he had a huge biography of Winston Churchill on his bedside table, as well as a volume of the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz. elperiodico, which he writes by hand and gives to Ramon. One of the themes of these columns is the long working hours and the low wages of his guards, which is of great public concern, but also an attempt to favor curry. During my visit the security guards were professional and respectful.

During the two-hour conversation, Zamora gave details of his case, spoke about the values ​​and principles of independent journalism, and lamented his country’s slide into authoritarianism. He said he was very upset that, after decades of military rule and the struggle to return to democracy, corruption has contributed to the emergence of a new type of autocracy in his country. “Criminal mafias have returned to power through a democratic process,” Zamora said. He called Guatemala “a klepto-narco dictatorship that is renewed every four years”.

After our visit, Ramon and I went to the US Embassy to find out what US officials were doing to help Zamora. Embassy officials declined to speak about the Zamora case on the record, but in March the State Department issued a statement expressing its concern about the fate of nine journalists facing obstruction of justice charges. “We call on the Guatemalan justice system to end the criminalization of independent journalists and support independent journalism,” the statement said.

Zamora is just one of 363 journalists imprisoned around the world at the end of last year, a record number, according to Committee to Protect Journalists. In March Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia and charged with espionage. Gershkovich, his editors and US officials denied the allegations and said Russian authorities were using bogus criminal prosecutions to silence foreign and Russian journalists. Imprisoning journalists is one of the most brutal tactics used by autocrats and corrupt leaders to control the news and media space and protect themselves from scrutiny. Less visible methods include legal harassment, online trolling, defamation of individual journalists, and financial pressure. The latest annual report from researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden notes: “The level of democracy enjoyed by the average world citizen in 2022 has dropped to its 1986 level. More than 35 years of global gains in democracy have been undone over the past decade.”

Two weeks before I met Zamora in his cell, the United States hosted the Democracy Summit, the Biden administration’s landmark event to fight corruption, promote transparency, and fight autocracy around the world. Guest List about one hundred and twenty countries some notable new democratic apostates are included, such as Israel and India, and defiantly excluded others, such as Hungary, Turkey, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Biden administration officials did not specify inclusion criteria.

The main meetings of the summit were held in Washington, DC; side events have been organized around the world in partnership with governments and civil society organizations on issues such as gender equality and technology. Freedom of the press and support for independent media were high on the agenda. A few days before the summit, President Joe Biden signed an executive order banning US government agencies from using commercial spyware. The move was welcomed by press freedom advocates, as the technology has been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on journalists and human rights activists in dozens of countries, including in Latin America.

IN article published in foreign affairs when he ran for president in 2020, Biden pledged, “During my first year in office, the United States will organize and host a global summit for democracy to revive the spirit and common purpose of the peoples of the free world.” In December 2021, the first Summit for Democracy took place, but due to the pandemic, it was virtual. Biden announced that USA invests up to thirty million dollars at the International Public Media Foundation, a new media development organization co-chaired by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and Mark Thompson, former CEO of The New York Times Company. Despite criticism over the lack of specific commitments from participating governments, the administration felt that the first summit delivered on a key campaign commitment.