Man accused of killing 5 in Texas arrested – Newstrends
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Man accused of killing 5 in Texas arrested

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2 years ago

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Man accused of killing 5 in Texas arrested

After a manhunt that stretched to the Mexican border, heavily armed Texas and federal officers on Tuesday arrested the man who they believe fatally shot five people in a neighborhood dispute outside the town of Cleveland, Texas, officials said.

The suspect, Francisco Oropesa, was “caught hiding in a closet underneath some laundry” in a home a few miles from the site of the Friday shooting in San Jacinto County, said Greg Capers, the county sheriff.

Mr. Oropesa, 38, an immigrant from Mexico who had been deported four times, was charged with five counts of murder and was being held on $5 million bond, Sheriff Capers said. Mr. Oropesa was being transferred back to a San Jacinto County jail on Tuesday night.

Sheriff Capers declined to say who owned the home near the town of Cut and Shoot where Mr. Oropesa was found but said that he had not resisted arrest. Property records indicated that the home belonged to one of his relatives.

“Somebody got a tip,” Sheriff Capers said in a Tuesday night news conference. Then tactical officers from several agencies “meandered over there and found that tip to be true.”

Officials said that those connected to the home, in Montgomery County, were being questioned but that no one else had been taken into custody as of Tuesday evening.

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For four days, state and federal law enforcement officials had been searching for Mr. Oropesa in the thick woods around his home outside Cleveland, in neighboring counties and as far south as the border with Mexico, where, officials believed, he might be trying to flee.

But in the end, officers found Mr. Oropesa — whose face stared out from large Spanish-language posters around San Jacinto County, about an hour’s drive north of downtown Houston — roughly 10 miles away from the scene of the killings.

Jimmy Paul, an assistant special agent in charge with the F.B.I., said that the tip that had led to the arrest came in at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday; Mr. Oropesa was arrested shortly after, at 6:30 p.m. Mr. Paul did not elaborate on the nature of the tip or who had left it. Officials had offered rewards totaling $80,000 for information leading to Mr. Oropesa’s arrest.

Officials said he had been taken into custody without incident by a team that included officers from the U.S. Marshals Service, the Texas Department of Public Safety and a tactical unit from the Border Patrol.
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The killings occurred late Friday. Officials said Mr. Oropesa had been firing a gun that night in his front yard outside Cleveland, on a plot of land smaller than an acre in a row of similarly sized properties along a rutted dirt road. His immediate neighbors, a family from Honduras, complained about the noise, to both Mr. Oropesa and the police via 911, around 11:30 p.m.

Officers did not immediately go to the area, where residents have long complained of dangerously wanton gunfire. Soon after the complaints, officials said, Mr. Oropesa could be seen on a doorbell video entering his neighbor Wilson Garcia’s home, armed with an AR-15-style rifle.

Five people were fatally shot inside the home, according to the F.B.I.: Mr. Garcia’s wife, Sonia Guzman, 25; his son, Daniel Enrique Laso, 9; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Juliza Molina Rivera, 31; and Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18.

Officials declined to answer questions on Tuesday about the speed of the response to the killings.

The top official in San Jacinto County, Fritz Faulkner, said in a telephone interview that he had been alerted to the arrest shortly after it happened. The killings had shocked the community, he said, and the county was now, after several days, finally able to rest easy.

“I’m just elated,” Mr. Faulkner said.

New York Times

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Democrats drag Trump to court over election overhaul order

Published

9 hours ago

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April 1, 2025

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U.S President Donald Trump

Democrats drag Trump to court over election overhaul order

The Democratic Party has sued the Trump administration over an attempt to impose sweeping changes on the election systems, including requiring citizenship proof to register to vote and limiting mail-in ballot counting.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, the Democratic Party asked a federal court to block the executive order, which prevents states from counting mail-in ballots that arrive after election day. The president’s directive also requires proof of citizenship to be presented — through documents such as a passport — when registering to vote.

“The President does not get to dictate the rules of our elections,” said the lawsuit filed in Washington by the Democratic National Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and others.

“The Executive Order seeks to impose radical changes on how Americans register to vote, cast a ballot, and participate in our democracy—all of which threaten to disenfranchise lawful voters and none of which is legal,” it added.

After signing the March 25 order, called “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”, US President Donald Trump described it as “the farthest-reaching executive action taken” to secure US elections.

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Trump, who does not acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, has long questioned the integrity of the US electoral system. He has repeatedly and baselessly amplified conspiracy theories about massive election fraud in the United States, particularly involving absentee voting.

Legal scholars swiftly denounced Trump’s election order as an abuse of presidential power that could prevent millions of eligible voters from casting ballots.

Advocacy groups led by the Campaign Legal Center and State Democracy Defenders Fund filed a separate lawsuit on Monday against the same executive order.

“The president’s executive order is an unlawful action that threatens to uproot our tried-and-tested election systems and silence potentially millions of Americans,” Danielle Lang of the Campaign Legal Center said in a statement.

“It is simply not within the president’s authority to set election rules by executive decree, especially when they would restrict access to voting in this way.”

Democrats drag Trump to court over election overhaul order

AFP

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Iran warns US against attack, threatens with nuclear weapon

Published

16 hours ago

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April 1, 2025

By

Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei

Iran warns US against attack, threatens with nuclear weapon

Iran would have no alternative but to acquire a nuclear weapon if attacked by the United States or its allies, an adviser to the country’s supreme leader warned on Monday, following a threat by Donald Trump.

The comments came hours after the supreme leader himself, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had promised to hit back if the US president made good on his threat to bomb the Islamic republic if it did not agree to a deal to curb its nuclear programme.

“We are not moving towards (nuclear) weapons, but if you do something wrong in the Iranian nuclear issue, you will force Iran to move towards that because it has to defend itself,” Khamenei’s adviser Ali Larijani said in an interview with state TV.

“Iran does not want to do this, but… (it) will have no choice,” he added.

“If at some point you (the US) move towards bombing by yourself or through Israel, you will force Iran to make a different decision.”

In an interview on Saturday, Trump had said “there will be bombing” if Iran did not agree to a new nuclear deal, according to NBC News, which said he also threatened to punish Tehran with what he called “secondary tariffs”.

Trump’s language represented a sharpening of his rhetoric, though it was not clear whether he was threatening bombing by US planes alone or perhaps in an operation coordinated with another country, possibly Iran’s nemesis Israel.

“They threaten to do mischief,” Khamenei said of the remarks during a speech on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

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“If it is carried out, they will definitely receive a strong counterattack.”

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei, in a post on X, said the threat was “a shocking affront to the very essence of international peace and security”.

Baqaei warned of unspecified “consequences” should the United States choose a path of “violence”.

– ‘Glass room’ –

A statement on Monday also said the foreign ministry summoned the charge d’affaires of the Swiss embassy, which represents Washington’s interests in Iran, “following the threats by the US president”.

“The Americans have at least 10 bases in the region around Iran, and they have 50,000 troops,” warned General Amirali Hajizadeh, commander of the aerospace force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“Someone who is in a glass room shouldn’t throw stones at anyone,” the man in charge of Iran’s ballistic missile programme threatened on state television Monday.

Since taking office in January, Trump has reinstated his “maximum pressure” policy, which in his first term saw the United States withdraw from a landmark agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme and reimpose sanctions on Tehran.

Western countries including the United States have long accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapon, which Tehran has denied, insisting its enrichment activities were solely for peaceful purposes.

The 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers required Iran to limit its nuclear ambitions in exchange for sanctions relief.

– ‘Indirect’ channel –

On March 7, Trump said he had written to Khamenei to call for nuclear negotiations and warn of possible military action if Tehran refused.

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The letter was delivered to Tehran on March 12 by UAE presidential adviser Anwar Gargash, Iranian news agency Fars reported at the time.

On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the country had delivered a response via intermediary Oman, without detailing its content.

Araghchi said Iran would not engage in direct talks “under maximum pressure and the threat of military action”.

In his remarks, however, the minister left open the door for “indirect negotiations”.

According to NBC, Trump also said US and Iranian officials were “talking,” but he did not give details.

President Masoud Pezeshkian on Sunday said Khamenei, who as supreme leader has the final say in major state policies, had permitted indirect talks.

Oman has served as an intermediary in the past, in the absence of US-Iranian diplomatic relations severed after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

On Monday, Araghchi said the United States had received Iran’s letter.

“We have been informed by our friends in Oman that the letter has reached its destination and has been read.”

Beyond its nuclear programme, the West also accuses Iran of using proxy forces to expand its influence in the region, a charge Tehran rejects.

“There is only one proxy force in this region, and that is the corrupt usurper Zionist regime,” Khamenei said, calling for Israel to be “eradicated”.

Iran warns US against attack, threatens with nuclear weapon

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‘Bitcoin could replace U.S. Dollar as global currency’

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1 day ago

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March 31, 2025

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‘Bitcoin could replace U.S. Dollar as global currency’

BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink acknowledged in his 2025 annual letter that Bitcoin could challenge the U.S. dollar’s status as the global reserve currency.

“If the U.S. doesn’t get its debt under control, if deficits keep ballooning, America risks losing that position to digital assets like Bitcoin,” Fink wrote in BlackRock’s March 2025 letter.

The statement marks a significant shift from the head of the world’s largest asset manager, recognizing digital assets as potential alternatives to the dollar.

Throughout the letter, Fink mentioned Bitcoin seven times and the dollar eight times, signaling the growing relevance of digital currencies in financial discourse.

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BlackRock’s letter frames Bitcoin as both an innovation and a risk, warning that if investors view it as a more stable long-term store of value than the dollar, it could undermine U.S. financial primacy.

Fink stressed that “two things can be true at the same time,” referring to both innovation and risk in digital asset development.

Beyond Bitcoin, Fink positioned tokenization as a transformative force for capital markets, likening it to the shift from postal mail to email.

He argued that tokenized assets could bypass financial intermediaries and democratize access to investments through fractional ownership and improved voting systems.

BlackRock also highlighted India’s digital identity system as a model for secure transactions, with over 90% of Indians verifying smartphone transactions—a benchmark for future tokenized economies.

‘Bitcoin could replace U.S. Dollar as global currency’

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