Wife of drug kingpin ‘El Chapo’ pleads guilty to US charges
WASHINGTON — The wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman pleaded guilty Thursday to charges in the U.S. and admitted that she helped her husband run his multibillion-dollar criminal empire.
Emma Coronel Aispuro appeared in federal court in Washington and pleaded guilty to three federal offenses as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors.
The charges include knowingly and willfully conspiring to distribute heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine for several years. She also pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge and to engaging in transactions with a foreign narcotics trafficker.
Coronel Aispuro, 31, was arrested in February at Dulles International Airport in Virginia and has been jailed since then.
“She is very happy to put this behind her,” Coronel Aispuro’s attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said outside the courthouse.
Prosecutors have alleged Coronel Aispuro “worked closely with the commandand-control structure” of the Sinaloa cartel and conspired to distribute large quantities of drugs, knowing they would be smuggled into the United States.
As Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Guzman ran a cartel responsible for smuggling cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors say. They also said his “army of sicarios,” or “hit men,” was under orders to kidnap, torture and kill anyone who got in his way.
Prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi said Guzman’s wife had “aided and abetted” the Sinaloa cartel’s objectives to smuggle drugs into the U.S. and helped to import more than 450,000 kilograms of cocaine, 90,000 kilograms of heroin, 45,000 kilograms of methamphetamine and about 90,000 kilograms of marijuana.
Lichtman insisted that Coronel Aispuro was a “very minimal participant” in the drug empire.
Coronel Aispuro is due back in court in September for sentencing.
Record US budget deficit:
The U.S. budget deficit hit a record $2.06 trillion through the first eight months of this budget year as coronavirus relief programs drove spending to all-time highs.
The shortfall this year is 9.7% higher than the $1.88 trillion deficit run up over the same period a year ago, the Treasury Department said Thursday in its monthly budget report.
The report showed that spending from October through May totaled a record $4.67 trillion, up 19.7% from the same period a year ago. Government tax revenue was up 29.1% to $2.61 trillion, compared to the same period a year ago.
Rare Iran mission: An Iranian destroyer and support vessel are now sailing in the Atlantic Ocean in a rare mission far from the Islamic Republic, Iran’s state TV reported Thursday, without offering the vessels’ final destination.
The trip by the new domestically built destroyer Sahand and the intelligence-gathering vessel Makran comes amid U.S. media reports, citing anonymous American officials, saying the ships were bound for Venezuela.
The Associated Press could not immediately
confirm the ships’ destination.
The vessels departed last month from Iran’s southern port of Bandar Abbas, said Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, Iran’s deputy army chief. He described their mission as the Iranian navy’s longest and most challenging voyage yet, without elaborating.
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price would not speculate on what the vessels were carrying, saying only “that if this is an effort to transfer weapons or otherwise to violate its international obligations we would be prepared to respond.”
The unusual voyage comes ahead of Iran’s presidential election on June 18 in which voters select a successor for the relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani.
Ethiopia famine: Famine has afflicted at least 350,000 people in northern Ethiopia’s conflict-ravaged Tigray region, a starvation calamity bigger at the moment than anywhere else in the world,
the United Nations and international aid groups said Thursday.
With their joint announcement, the humanitarian officials for the first time described the unfolding crisis in Tigray as a famine and specified the number of people suffering from it. They had warned for weeks of an impending disaster from the conflict in Ethiopia, the most populous country in the Horn of Africa.
Mark Lowcock, the top humanitarian emergency official at the United Nations, told a webcast meeting of aid officials and diplomats that the number of people affected by the famine was “higher than anywhere in the world” and was the worst in any country since a 2011 famine gripped neighboring Somalia.
“This severe crisis results from the cascading effects of conflict, including population displacements, movement restrictions, limited humanitarian access, loss of harvest and livelihood assets, and dysfunctional
or nonexistent markets,” a summary of the data said.
Macron slapper sentenced: A Frenchman who described himself as a rightwing or extreme-right “patriot” was sentenced to four months in prison Thursday for slapping President Emmanuel Macron in the face.
Damien Tarel, 28, was also banned from holding public office in France and from owning weapons for five years over the swipe Tuesday, which caught Macron’s left cheek as the French leader was greeting a crowd.
During Thursday’s trial, Tarel testified that the attack was impulsive and unplanned, and prompted by anger at France’s “decline.”
He showed no emotion as the court in the southeastern city of Valence convicted him on a charge of violence against a person invested with public authority.
He was sentenced to four months in prison and handed an additional 14-month suspended sentence.
Tarel acknowledged hitting the president with a “rather violent” slap. “When I saw his friendly, lying look, I felt disgust, and I had a violent reaction,” he told the court. “I was surprised myself by the violence.”
A milk tanker truck going too fast for traffic conditions collided with seven passenger vehicles on a Phoenix freeway, killing four people and injuring at least nine, authorities said Thursday.
The tanker “failed to slow for traffic congestion,” the Arizona Department of Public Safety said in a statement.
Six of the nine people injured late Wednesday were taken to hospitals in critical condition, the Phoenix Fire Department said..
After the initial collisions, the trailer of the tanker rig separated and went over the freeway’s median wall and ended up on its side in the lanes of the freeway going in the opposite direction, the public safety department said.
Deadly freeway crash: