Anzac Bridge, Sydney, Australia (photo: The Nation Report)
Former Honduran President Faces Drug Charges in New York Trial; Groups Indict US and Canada as Co-conspirators
The drug trafficking trial of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez has been delayed a week from February 5 to February 12. He and his co-defendant Juan Carlos Bonilla (the former head of the Honduran National Police) face charges of taking millions of dollars of bribes from drug cartels. Hernandez claimed his attorney was not sufficiently representing him and that his defense team was infiltrated by the US Drug Enforcement Agency-DEA.
Meanwhile a US and Canada delegation to Honduras is indicting the US and Canada as Co-conspirators in the Orlando Hernandez trial. Delegation members intend to present evidence at the trial that their countries protected the “political, economic, and military interests of their governments and corporations over the rights and interests of the Honduran people.”
The group met with communities affected by mining and “land grabbing” and concluded that the “continuing poverty, inequality, and dispossession of the Honduran people result in the crimes of the Narco-dictatorship that ruled Honduras since the US and Canadian-supported coup in June 2009.”
Miami Moves to Close Seaquarium
The mayor’s office of Miami-Dade County has announced that it is moving to revoke the lease of Miami’s Seaquarium. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava continues to receive public pressure to finalize its shuttering.
After a year’s-long campaign, animal rights group PETA said that after lawsuits, celebrity ads, letters to county officials and multiple rallies that they will “celebrate the day the animals are finally freed from the dilapidated concrete tanks where the long-suffering orca Lolita and so many other lived and died in misery.”
Two Tribes File Suit to Halt Construction of Transmission Line
The Tohono O’odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache Tribe have filed suit to stop the authorization of the SunZia high voltage 550-mile transmission line through their historical and cultural sites. The line is set to carry renewable energy from New Mexico to California.
Archaeology Southwest and the Center for Biological Diversity are also plaintiffs in the suit.
The tribes accuse the Bureau of Land Management and SunZia of violating the National Historic Preservation Act, the Administrative Procedure Act and executive orders on historic preservation in addition to not receiving tribal consent.
The route was approved in 2015 but tribes say they have submitted complaints for over ten years.
