World Glance
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Waving flags, chanting and banging pots and pans, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans jammed a highway Monday to demand the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in a crisis triggered by a leak of offensive, obscenity-laden chat messages between him and his advisers.
The demonstration appeared to be the biggest protest on the island in nearly two decades.
“Finally, the government’s mask has fallen,” said Jannice Rivera, a 43-year-old mechanical engineer who lives in Houston but was born and raised in Puerto Rico and flew in to join the crowds.
The protest came 10 days after the leak of 889 pages of online chats in which Rosselló and some of his close aides insulted women and mocked constituents, including victims of Hurricane Maria.
The leak has intensified long-smoldering anger in the U.S. territory over persistent corruption and mismanagement by the island’s two main political parties, a severe debt crisis, a sickly economy and a slow recovery from Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017.
Iran says it arrested 17 Iranians allegedly recruited by CIA
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran on Monday announced the arrest of 17 Iranians accused of spying on the country’s nuclear and military sites for the CIA and said some of them have been sentenced to death. President Donald Trump called it “another lie” from Iran.
The arrests happened over the past months, an Iranian intelligence official said at a news conference in Tehran. He said those taken into custody worked on “sensitive sites” in military and nuclear installations.
The official did not say how many were given death sentences.
The official said the 17 were recruited by the CIA and had “sophisticated training” but did not succeed in their sabotage missions. Their spying missions included collecting information at the facilities where they worked and installing monitoring devices, he said.
He said some were staff members at the targeted facilities, and the rest were working as consultant and contractors. The official said the CIA had promised them U.S. visas or jobs in America.
“That’s totally a false story. That’s another lie,” Trump said at the White House.
Trump also said Iran has “disrespected” the United States, adding: “If they want to make a deal, frankly it’s getting harder for me to want to make a deal with Iran because they’ve behaved very badly. They’re saying bad things.”
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director, declined to address specifics of the arrests but said: “The Iranian regime has a long history of lying.”
“I think everyone should take with a grain of salt everything that the Islamic Republic of Iran asserts today,” he said.