From AP, Sept. 15:

Cops: Driver using GPS when bus hit NY bridge
SALINA, N.Y. — A double-decker bus driver may have been distracted by his own GPS device when he drove the vehicle into a railroad bridge in central New York, killing four passengers, authorities said Wednesday.

On Sept. 16 Miami federal district judge William Zloch sentenced former Guatemalan soldier Gilberto Jordán to 10 years in prison for concealing his role in a 1982 massacre when he applied for US citizenship. Jordán, a member of the notorious Kaibil counterinsurgency force, is one of 14 soldiers wanted in Guatemala for the brutal murder of some 250 campesinos in the village of Las Dos Erres, Sayaxche (or Libertad), in the northern department of Peten. He moved to Miami in 1990 and became a US citizen in 1999. Arrested by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency on May 5 this year, he pleaded guilty in July to charges of lying on a citizenship application. Ten years is the maximum sentence for the offense.

After three days of meetings at the Distinction Night Club in a suburb north of Port-au-Prince, on Sept. 16 four Haitian political coalitions announced their opposition to the general elections scheduled for Nov. 28. The four coalitions--Alternative, Liberation, Rasanble ("Assemble") and the Union of Democratic Haitian Citizens for Development and Education (UCCADE)— said they were forming a "United Political Front" and expressed their lack of confidence in the current Provisional Electoral Council (CEP). Instead of elections, the coalitions called for a "government of public safety" to take power after President René Garcia Préval's term ends on Feb. 7 and carry out a transition to full democracy.

Mexico's National Defense Secretariat announced on Sept. 13 that four soldiers would be arrested and charged with homicide for the killing of two civilians the night of Sept. 5 on the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo highway in Apodaca municipality in the northern state of Nuevo León. The soldiers, from the 7th Military Zone, opened fire on a car in which members of an extended family were driving home after a party. Vicente de León Ramírez and his 16-year-old son, Alejandro Gabriel de León Castellanos, were killed; three other family members were hit by bullets, and two children, 8 and 9, were injured by broken glass. The soldiers said they shot at the car because the driver, Vicente de León's son-in-law, ignored orders to stop at a checkpoint. The family denied that there was a checkpoint and said they not been ordered to stop.

A group of 12 Chilean activists began an open-ended "massive solidarity fast" on Sept. 14 to support indigenous Mapuche prisoners who have been carrying out a liquids-only hunger strike since July 12. The solidarity fasters included the presidents of the Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH) and the Federation of University of Santiago Students; the president of the Copper Workers Commission of the Unified Workers Confederation (CUT); and members of the Coordinating Committee of Santiago Autonomous Mapuche (COOAMS) and the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees. A number of leftists, unionists and artists expressed their solidarity with the fast, which was being held in the FECH offices in Santiago.

A judge from Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court of Iran on Sept. 18 sentenced Shiva Nazar Ahari, a journalist arrested following the 2009 presidential election, to six years in prison. Ahari was sentenced to three-and-half-years for warring against God, known in Islamic law as moharebeh, two years for conspiracy to commit a crime and six months for propaganda against the government. In addition to the jail sentence, Ahari was also ordered to pay a $400 fine or face 74 lashes. Ahari's conviction on the charge of moharebeh could have resulted in the death penalty. Her lawyer has stated that he will appeal the sentence.

The US Department of Justice announced Sept. 17 that a US scientist and his wife have been indicted for conspiring to sell nuclear weapons information to an individual they believed worked for the Venezuelan government. Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni and his wife, Marjorie Mascheroni, were arrested that day by the FBI and appeared before the US District Court for the District of New Mexico. The defendants used to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and possessed classified nuclear weapons knowledge. According to the indictment, between March 2008 and August 2009, Pedro Mascheroni, who is a naturalized US citizen, negotiated a deal with an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a Venezuelan official in which he would help the country develop a nuclear weapon in exchange for over $700,000. No actual members of the Venezuelan government have been charged in the case. If convicted, the couple faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

An armed commando of some 40 men with assault rifles ambushed a patrol of the State Ministerial Police (PME) in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero Sept. 18, killing eight and leaving a ninth seriously wounded. The police were attempting at arrest a homicide suspect in El Revelado, Teloloapan municipality, near the border with Mexico state. The bodies of some of the dead officers are reported to have been mutilated when they were recovered. (La Jornada Guerrero, BBC News, LAHT, Sept. 18)