World News Legal developments from around the world. The following is a collection of the most recent posts from other blogs addressing topics of international law.
(CNN) After eluding capture for years, two Mafia bosses have been arrested in an underground bunker in southern Italy.
Police seized mobsters Giuseppe Ferraro, 47, and Giuseppe Crea, 37, in Calabria region Friday, according to Italian news agency Ansa.
Ferraro was found guilty of murder and Mafia association decades ago, and had been a fugitive since 1998.
Crea was convicted of Mafia association and had been on the run for nine years, according to the news agency.
Their hideout had an array of weapons, including rifles, pistols and machine guns.
“Today is another great day for everyone and for the country because justice has won,” Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said after their arrest.
Beyond Italian borders
The two men are part of ‘Ndrangheta, a dangerous criminal organization that has tentacles worldwide. The group is based in Calabria, where the two men were arrested.
‘Ndrangheta’s power has grown beyond Italian borders.
Two years ago, Italian officials said the group is linked to drug trafficking in South and Central America, Canada and the United States.
The ‘Ndrangheta was formed in the 1860s, and is involved in kidnappings, corruption, drug trafficking, gambling and murders, according to the FBI.
An increasing number of wedding halls are not permitting the use of music downloaded from the Internet, even legitimately, for wedding parties. Doing so is considered beyond private use of the music and in violation of the Copyright Law.
Since playing music on CDs is permitted at wedding halls, customers of online music distribution services are complaining that it is unfair to prohibit legitimately purchased downloaded music.
“Please purchase a CD, because you cannot use this music here,” a wedding hall employee told one woman in Tokyo who was asked about the entertainment for her friend’s wedding party. The woman had paid for the song and downloaded it from an online music distribution service.
“Recently, some songs have only been distributed via the Internet,” she complained. “Although I purchased it, like a CD, I was told using it at my friend’s wedding party would be in violation of copyright. I can’t agree with that.”
However, the wedding hall has a legitimate reason for not allowing her to use the music she bought: According to the Copyright Law, copying and playing music and other media without permission of copyright holders is prohibited, except for private use.
An official of the copyright section of the Cultural Affairs Agency says that legally, “private” means use of a copyrighted item among four to five people with an intimate relationship similar to that of a family. Use of downloaded music at wedding parties is considered in excess of this restriction, according to the official.
Even if a song is legitimately purchased, playing it at a wedding party constitutes a violation of the Copyright Law because the song is considered a copy, having been downloaded from the Internet to a portable music player or computer.
The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) and the Recording Industry Association of Japan asked the Bridal Institutional Association, a group of hotels and wedding halls, in July 2014 not to use copied music at wedding parties without permission.
Distribution of music via the Internet has spread worldwide since Apple Inc. started selling its iPod portable music players in 2001. Although CD sales still account for a large portion of Japan’s music industry, the share of songs distributed online doubled to over 19 percent of all music sales in 2014 from a little less than 9 percent in 2005. On the other hand, the total production value of CDs in Japan dropped to ¥184 billion in 2014 — about half of the ¥359.8 billion seen in 2005.
“It is natural that copyright holders want to protect their rights because high-quality copies can be made easily today thanks to the advancement of digital devices,” said Kensaku Fukui, a lawyer knowledgeable about copyright. “However, it is also understandable that consumers find it unfair that use of legitimately downloaded songs at wedding parties is prohibited, because they don’t intend to distribute pirated copies. It is necessary to discuss solutions moving along and at the time.”
Using CDs permitted
According to JASRAC, the “copying right” must be obtained to play downloaded music, which is considered copied, at wedding parties and other public occasions.
The copying right might be granted if a user directly contacts a music creator or record company to seek permission and pays several thousand yen per song. Yet, most people do not try to deal with this by themselves, an official of the Cultural Affairs Agency said.
SANTIAGO, Chile — Prosecutors on Friday charged President Michelle Bachelet’s daughter-in-law, Natalia Compagnon, and 12 others in a corruption case that touches the presidential family and has damaged Ms. Bachelet’s popularity.
In a court session shown on national television, the prosecutors, Luis Toledo and Sergio Moya, accused Ms. Compagnon and her business partner in the firm Caval, Mauricio Valero, of issuing false invoices in a scheme to avoid paying about $165,000 in taxes. The court ordered Ms. Compagnon not to leave the country and confined several other defendants, including Mr. Valero, to their homes at night.
The defendants in the case include other Caval employees, former bank and municipal officials, a businessman and several lawyers, who were charged with a number of crimes. Five of them, including Mr. Valero, were also accused of bribery. Prosecutors said they were all involved in a speculative land deal that yielded millions of dollars in profit for Caval, with large kickbacks paid to those who facilitated it.
A Chilean magazine, Qué Pasa, reported last year that Caval, a small firm started by Ms. Compagnon and Mr. Valero in 2012, had secured a $10 million loan to buy about 270,000 acres of rural land in Machalí, south of the capital. At the time, the municipality was considering rezoning the land for urban development, which would greatly increase its value.
The Bank of Chile approved the loan the day after Ms. Bachelet was re-elected in December 2013, after a meeting Ms. Compagnon and her husband, Sebastián Dávalos, had with a vice president of the bank.
When the deal came to light, public attention focused at first on how Caval had come to know that the land would be rezoned and whether Ms. Compagnon and her husband had done anything improper to obtain the loan. Mr. Dávalos soon resigned from a position on his mother’s staff overseeing government-sponsored charitable foundations and social programs, and has stayed out of the public spotlight since.
The Caval scandal prompted investigations by the country’s tax authorities as well as the public prosecutor’s office and two congressional commissions, which issued a report describing Caval as a lobbying firm“whose profile and comparative advantage lies in its political and government connections.”
Mr. Toledo, the prosecutor, said this week that there was insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Dávalos.
Ms. Bachelet has said she was not aware of the business dealings of her son and daughter-in-law. Even so, her ratings in opinion surveys have fallen steeply. In a poll by Plaza Pública Cadem released this week, just 25 percent of respondents said they approved of her presidency.
The Caval matter is one of a series of high-profile corruption scandals that shook the corporate and political establishment of Chile over the past year, involving collusion and price-fixing by major industries and companies, illegal corporate financing for electoral campaigns and misuse of military spending.
“These times have been hard and very painful for me and my family,” Ms. Bachelet said in a statement Friday. “Chileans demand and deserve equal opportunities and rights, and this also means equality before the law.”
These green-minded drug smugglers tried hiding more than a ton of marijuana as carrots while crossing the border through Mexico.
Ehh… what’s up, pot?
Drug smugglers were busted trying to hide more than a ton of marijuana disguised as carrots while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, officials said.
Hiding their green bud among the orange vegetables, the smugglers tried driving through the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge on Sunday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said.
After an image scan, officers brought out a canine team to sniff out the drugs.
Disguised among the cargo of fresh carrots were 2,817 packages of marijuana, wrapped into carrot shapes with orange plastic.
The drugs were wrapped in carrot shapes around orange plastic and hidden among the fresh vegetables.
“Once again, drug smuggling organizations have demonstrated their creativity in attempting to smuggle large quantities of narcotics across the U.S./Mexico border,” said Port Director Efrain Solis Jr. “Our officers are always ready to meet those challenges and remain vigilant towards any type of illicit activities.”
Officers seized 2,493 pounds of marijuana, worth about $499,000, police said.
On Dec. 2, 2015, at the same bridge, police stopped drug dealers from bringing in $1.7 million worth of narcotics, which were disguised as cucumbers and carrots again.
About two weeks after that, officers found $479,000 worth of marijuana hidden among fresh tomatoes.
Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, started out in business not long after turning 6, selling oranges and soft drinks. By 15, he said in an interview conducted in a jungle clearing by the actor and director Sean Penn for Rolling Stone magazine, he had begun to grow marijuana and poppies because there was no other way for his impoverished family to survive.
Now, unapologetically, he said: “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.”
Though his fortune, estimated at $1 billion, has come with a trail of blood, he does not consider himself a violent man. “Look, all I do is defend myself, nothing more,” he told Mr. Penn. “But do I start trouble? Never.”
The seven hours Mr. Guzmán spent with Mr. Penn, and the follow-up interviews by phone and video — which began in October while he was on the run — marked another surreal turn in his long-running effort to evade the Mexican and American authorities. Mr. Guzmán, one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, who had twice escaped jail, was captured in his home state of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico on Friday after a gun battle with the authorities.
Mr. Guzmán’s comments also mark a stark admission that he has operated a drug empire. Interviewed by a group of reportersin 1993 after a previous arrest, he denied that he engaged in drug dealing. “I’m a farmer,” he said, listing his produce as corn and beans. He denied that he used weapons or had significant funds.
The interview with Mr. Penn, believed to be the first Mr. Guzmán has given in decades, was published online Saturday night, along with a video portion of the interview.
The interviews were held in a jungle clearing atop a mountain at an undisclosed location in Mexico. Surrounded by more than 100 cartel troops, and wearing a silk shirt and pressed black jeans, Mr. Guzmán sat down to dinner with Mr. Penn and Kate del Castillo, a Mexican actress who once played a drug kingpin in the soap opera “La Reina del Sur,” according to Rolling Stone.
Even though Mexican troops attacked his hide-out in the days after the meeting, necessitating a narrow escape, Mr. Guzmán continued the interview by BlackBerry Messenger and in a video delivered by courier to the pair later.
The story provides new details on his dramatic escape from prison last summer, when he disappeared through a hole in his shower into a mile-long tunnel that some engineers estimated took more than a year and at least $1 million to build. The engineers, Mr. Penn wrote, had been flown to Germany for specialized training. A motorcycle on rails inside the tunnel had been modified to run in the low-oxygen environment, deep underground.
Mr. Penn’s account is likely to deepen the concern among the Mexican authorities already embarrassed by Mr. Guzmán’s multiple escapes, the months required to find him again and his status for some as something of a folk hero. Mr. Penn describes being waved through a military road checkpoint on his way to meet Mr. Guzmán, which Mr. Penn suggested was because the soldiers recognized Mr. Guzmán’s son. Mr. Penn said he was also told, during a leg of the journey taken in a small plane equipped with a scrambling device for ground radar only, that the cartel was informed by an insider when the military deployed a high-altitude surveillance plane that might have spotted their movements.
In the end, the Mexican authorities said Friday night that Mr. Guzmán had been caught partly because he had been planning a movie about his life, and had contacted actors and producers, which had helped the authorities to track him down. Mr. Penn’s story says Mr. Guzmán, inundated with Hollywood offers while in prison, had indeed elected to make his own movie. Ms. del Castillo, whom he contacted through his lawyer after she posted supportive messages on Twitter, was the only person he trusted to shepherd the project, the story says. Mr. Penn heard about the connection with Ms. del Castillo through a mutual acquaintance, and asked if he might do an interview.
It is not clear whether the contacts described in the story are the ones that led to Mr. Guzmán’s arrest. Mr. Penn wrote that he had gone to great lengths to maintain security while arranging to meet Mr. Guzmán. He described labeling cheap “burner” phones, “one per contact, one per day, destroy, burn, buy, balancing levels of encryption, mirroring through Blackphones, anonymous email addresses, unsent messages accessed in draft form.” Nevertheless, he wrote, “There is no question in my mind but that DEA and the Mexican government are tracking our movements,” referring to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. A Mexican government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential matters, said the authorities were aware of the meeting with Mr. Penn.
Mr. Penn and Mr. Guzmán spoke for seven hours, the story reports, at a compound amid dense jungle. Mr. Guzmán does not speak English, and the interview was conducted in Spanish through translators.
It was not immediately clear what the ethical and legal considerations of the article might be. In a disclosure that ran with the story, Rolling Stone said it had changed some names and withheld some locations. An understanding was reached with Mr. Guzmán, it said, that the story would be submitted for his approval, but he did not request any changes. The magazine declined to comment further Saturday.
A Mexican official said late Saturday that all actors and producers who met with Mr. Guzman, which includes Mr. Penn, were under investigation. But it remained unclear whether the circumstances of the meeting were the subject of inquiry or the individuals themselves would face scrutiny from the Mexican government.
The topics of conversation turned in unexpected directions. At one stage, Mr. Penn brought up Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate; there were some reports that Mr. Guzmán had put a $100 million bounty on Mr. Trump after he made comments offensive to Mexicans. “Ah! Mi amigo!” Mr. Guzmán responded.
He asked Mr. Penn whether people in the United States were interested in him and laughed when Mr. Penn told him that the Fusion channel was repeating a documentary on him, “Chasing El Chapo.”
In a wider-ranging interview, for which Mr. Penn submitted questions that were put to Mr. Guzmán on video by one of his associates, he detailed his childhood and said he had tried drugs during his life but had never been an addict and had not touched them for 20 years. He said that he was happy to be free, and that the pressure of evading the authorities was normal for him.
Pushed on the morality of his business, he said it was a reality “that drugs destroy. Unfortunately, as I said, where I grew up there was no other way and there still isn’t a way to survive, no way to work in our economy to be able to make a living.” If he disappeared, he said, it would make no difference to the drug business.
Asked about the violence attached to his work, he said in part it happened “because already some people already grow up with problems, and there is some envy and they have information against someone else. That is what creates violence.”
Mr. Guzmán, Mr. Penn said, was familiar with the final days of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug boss who had previously been the world’s most notorious and who died in a shootout with the authorities. How, he asked, did Mr. Guzmán see his last days? “I know one day I will die,” he said. “I hope it’s of natural causes.”
