A Spaniard is in police custody after the appearance of parts of the body of a Colombian friend of his with whom he was traveling in the landfill on the island of Koh Phangan, in Thailand.

Daniel Sancho Bronchalo, 29, was taken this Friday to the Koh Phangan police station for questioning about the disappearance of his friend and has denied any connection to the case, the Bangkok Post newspaper reported.

A day before, he had gone to the same police station to report the disappearance of his friend, at which time the garbage collectors had already found human remains, including a pelvis and cut-out intestines, inside a sack of fertilizer.

On Friday, they found more human remains in a black bag, this time along with a black T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and a pair of red underpants.

The police officers who went to the place together with the forensics suspected that the parts could belong to the Colombian man.

Investigating officers discovered that Sancho had purchased a knife, rubber gloves, a kitchen sponge, a cleaning pad and a bottle of detergent on Tuesday.

Upon checking their hotel room, they realized that the refrigerator, bathroom, and kitchen sink had been washed, but in the drains they found traces of blood, grease, and hair.

As a result of the celebration these days of World Youth Day (WYD), with the visit of Pope Francis to Lisbon, messages such as the following are circulating on X (formerly Twitter): “The youth of the Pope in Lisbon, demonstrating that They are undoubtedly the generation that will create a more just and supportive world. Someone explain to them that the open doors were to the heart of God. The meter is paid.”

The tweet is accompanied by a video in which several young people appear, apparently WYD pilgrims, crossing the turnstiles of the Lisbon metro without passing their ticket.

However, this is false. According to the information on the WYD 2023 website, the packages include free transportation during the entire World Youth Day period.

The pilgrim kit includes free transport

As indicated on the WYD 2023 website, “all packages include the pilgrim's kit, personal accident insurance and free transportation during the WYD period.”

Pilgrims have been provided with a yellow “Navegante” pass that allows them to circulate through all public service companies for regular passenger transport, throughout the municipalities of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (AML).. This pass works for a period of variable duration: four days from August 4 to 7; eight days from July 31 to August 7; nine days from July 30/31 to August 7/8; or only for volunteers, 16 days from July 23 to August 7.

The yellow pass contains the initials of WYD and the number of days printed in black letters, it will depend on the period that the pilgrims have paid. WYD participants send the INFOVERITAS team a photograph of the card, which also includes an exclusive number that corresponds to each one of the pilgrims, so that its use is non-transferable.

The accreditation hanging from the neck

WYD participants confirm to INFOVERITAS how they have organized. “Each pilgrim who has paid for the pack has an accreditation around his neck, plus a metro card and a bus card. Most of the time we swipe the card. However, if there are a lot of people, the security officers directly check that we wear the accreditation around our necks.”

Accreditation reveals information about the package that the pilgrim has paid for. Young people should write their name, the country they come from and the name of their group coordinator contact.

What is WYD?

World Youth Day (WYD) consists of a meeting of young people from all over the world with the Pope. On their website, they define it as “a youth festival, an expression of the universal Church and a strong moment of evangelization of the world of youth”. It takes place every two, three or four years on an international basis in a city chosen by the Pope, and always counting on his presence.. The first edition took place in 1986 in Rome.

This year it is celebrated in the city of Lisbon. The meeting began with the opening mass on August 1 at seven in the evening and will come to an end on August 6. However, as indicated by the periods of validity of the “navigator” pass, some young people will remain in the Portuguese capital until August 8.

INFOVERITAS verifies that…

The young pilgrims who have attended the World Youth Day have paid the transport pass to move around the city of Lisbon. The official WYD website specifies that the packs that pilgrims have purchased to attend include transport in the city.

In addition, WYD participants confirm to INFOVERITAS that the accreditation and metro and bus cards come with the registration. In the video they show how they pass through the subway doors, since the security check that the young people carry the accreditation with them, because all the packages of the pilgrim kit include the free transport pass.

Gustavo Petro's first scandal as president of Colombia —this Monday marks his first year in office— has come close to him: from his own family. Last March, the Colombian Prosecutor's Office announced the opening of an investigation into the accusations against Nicolás Petro of having received money from an illegal source.. Five months later, the president's eldest son has been arrested in Barranquilla, along with his ex-wife, for the alleged crimes of money laundering and illicit enrichment.

The accusations, confirmed this week by Nicolás to the Colombian Prosecutor's Office, are serious because money laundering in Colombia has a penalty of between 10 and 30 years in prison and illicit enrichment of 5 to 10 years. Nicolás Petro, who is also a deputy, has agreed to collaborate with the Justice and has begun to do so.

He has revealed to the Prosecutor's Office that part of the allegedly illegal money he received entered his father's 2022 electoral campaign. As explained by the prosecutor in the case, Mario Burgos, in a public hearing, the president's son “provided relevant information that the Prosecutor's Office was unaware of” about “facts that he knows and are of concern to the country.”

Money for the presidential campaign

“In reality, some of said money entered their coffers and others went to the 2022 presidential campaign in which our current president, Dr. Gustavo Petro Urrego, was elected,” the prosecutor said. This is what Day Vásquez, Nicolás's ex-wife, already said, that the 2022 presidential campaign received “dark money”, money from former drug traffickers.

Of said money, some entered their coffers and others to the 2022 presidential campaign in which Gustavo Petro was elected,” said the prosecutor.

According to the Prosecutor's Office, the president's son acted to hide the assets he acquired thanks to the million-dollar sums of cash he received from different people in the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Barranquilla.

According to the prosecutor's account, Petro Jr. bought lots, apartments, houses and high-end cars that, according to communications with Day Vázquez, could not remain in his name, since it was not right for the son of the President of the Republic to make such movements. financiers, details the Colombian political and current affairs magazine Semana.

“Here he is stealing, I am stealing, the other is stealing and we are all stealing,” Vásquez told Máximo Noriega —a friend and until last week a candidate for the governorship of the Atlantic for the Colombia Humana movement, created by the president— in a call on January 23 when he asked her to return money to Nicolás Petro, from whom she was already separated.

Money linked to drug trafficking

The investigation would have evidence that Nicolás Petro received money from Samuel Santander Lopesierra, alias “El hombre Malboro” and Alfonso Hilsaca, alias “El Turco Hilsaca”, both linked to drug trafficking and with criminal records. The first was convicted of drug trafficking in the United States and the second was investigated for alleged conspiracy to commit a crime and commit homicide.

Before the Prosecutor's Office, the president's son has admitted “that he did receive large sums of money from “The Marlboro Man”. Nicolás also told the Prosecutor's Office that he had received money from Gabriel Hilsaca Acosta, son of “Turco Hilsaca,” as well as from “Óscar Camacho, a powerful businessman from the city of Cúcuta.”

The money was transported in suitcases and kept in a safe. This patrimonial increase was, in the opinion of the Prosecutor's Office, an illicit enrichment. Apparently, the president's eldest son received at least 200 million pesos a year (about 45,000 euros). However, according to prosecutors, to support the millionaire assets that those 200 million pesos held, he would have had to receive them monthly.

Nicolás Petro dedicated himself to doing business, between quotes, business here and there in the name of his father, without his father knowing.”

Months ago, Nicolás's ex-wife said that Gustavo Petro was unaware of his son's movements of illicit money. However, now he would have told the Prosecutor's Office that part of the dirty money did end up in the electoral campaign of the now president.

Now, after Nicolás's testimony, prosecutor Burgos affirms that “a part of this money was used by Nicolás Petro Burgos himself and his wife (at that time) for their personal benefit… Another part of that money was invested in the presidential campaign of the year 2022”.

When she discovered the cake with her statements to Semana, Day Vásquez assured that her ex-husband wanted to make money taking advantage of her last name. “Nicolás Petro dedicated himself to doing business, between quotes, business here and there in the name of his father, without his father knowing,” he declared in March.

Who is Nicolas Petro?

Nicolás is Petro's eldest son and deputy of the Atlantic assembly. He was born on June 21, 1986 (today he is 37 years old) and his mother is Katia Burgos, the first wife of the now Colombian president.. He grew up far from his father, then an M19 guerrilla.. He studied Law at the Pontifical Bolivarian University and then a master's degree in Climate Change and a master's degree in Government and Public Management (the latter in Barcelona, at the Pompeu Fabra University).

Deputy for the Atlántico department, the Electoral Council has already investigated him for possible irregularities in his 2018 campaign

Back in Colombia, he chose, like his father, a political career.. He settled in Barranquilla and in 2018 he already ran for governor of Atlántico. He did not win, but he managed to occupy a seat in the Assembly of that department of Colombia where complaints of vote buying are frequent at electoral times. a “hard blow” that comes from the same family

That race already caused him a first scandal. The National Electoral Council investigated him for two years for possible irregularities in the Atlantic campaign. In December 2022, he was fined 14,900,000 pesos (less than 3,000 euros).

How will it affect the president?

“How much can the denunciations that deputy Nicolás Petro deliver to the Prosecutor's Office destabilize Gustavo Petro? It is curious that the 'soft coup' that the Government was talking about did not take place, but a 'hard coup' has developed that comes from the same presidential family,” political analyst Juan Carlos Flórez wrote on Twitter.

He is the first son of a president to go to jail.. because no other president allows justice to act independently as Gustavo Petro does”

Former senator Gustavo Bolívar, candidate for mayor of Bogotá and squire of the president, assures that “Nicolas Petro is the first son of a president to go to jail, but not because the sons of other presidents have not committed crimes, but because no other president allows justice to act independently and without pressure as Gustavo Petro does”.

But some have not waited for the facts to be proven and judged. “I will denounce Gustavo Petro before the Accusations Commission. Nicolás (Petro) has confirmed to the Prosecutor's Office that his father did know about the income of irregular money to the presidential campaign. I hope that for the first time, this commission will act on the evidence and not simply acquit,” said Senator Jonathan Pulido Hernández.

Former right-wing presidential candidate Federico Gutiérrez has said that “justice must go to the depth of this fact” and added that “it is inevitable to start a process that restores the confidence of Colombians in democracy.”

It is inevitable to start a process that restores the confidence of Colombians in democracy”

Former President Andrés Pastrana, always very critical of Petro, has assured that “criminal responsibility for the money received by Nicolás Petro falls on the beneficiary of the crime, the candidate and current president Gustavo Petro, who must immediately confront what he is calling into question the legitimacy of his mandate.

And now that? According to Yann Basset, director of the Democracy Studies Group, told El Nacional, “it will be decisive how the investigation will continue and whether the thesis held by Nicolás Petro's ex-wife is credible, according to which the president does not was aware of his son's actions, which obviously raises doubts to the extent that these events apparently had to do with campaign financing. It's like a sword of Damocles hanging over the president.”

“I receive with pain, on a personal level, the information about alleged irregularities in the development of the presidential campaign on the coast,” Gustavo Petro himself said in a statement this Friday. “Nothing can stop the fight of a lifetime against corruption, we will continue without distractions the task and commitment for a better Colombia. It will be the judges who legally define what corresponds.

The invasion of Ukraine is moving. Belarus has become the epicenter of the war and a sort of base camp for thousands of mercenaries from the Wagner Group, deployed on the country's border after their alleged attempted rebellion against the Kremlin.. Also in a warehouse where Vladimir Putin has deployed tactical nuclear weapons, which he assured in June that they will only be used in the event of a “threat to the integrity, independence, sovereignty and existence of the Russian State.” An explosive cocktail that has put Europe on high alert and, specifically, the countries closest to Aleksandr Lukashenko's autocracy, such as Poland.

This same Friday, the Russian authorities warned that Poland “is prone to provoke” and accused Warsaw of “increasing tension” regarding the situation on the border with Belarus, where tensions have escalated after the arrival of the mercenaries. from Prigozhin.

But the thing does not stop there. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) also assured this Friday that Russia is planning a false flag attack against an oil refinery located in the Belarusian city of Mozyr.. According to the Ukrainians, Putin would try to involve Minsk in a war that has been going on for more than a year and a half. The operation would thus take place when Volodímir Zelenski is about to make public a new proposal for peace. But what is a false flag attack?

This warlike operation essentially consists of carrying out a political or military action with the intention of blaming an opponent for it. The name derives from the military concept of hoisting false colours, that is, the flag of a country other than one's own. In this case, the SBU asserts that Russia would have sent soldiers from its special forces to Belarus, posing as mercenaries from the Wagner Group to carry out this act of sabotage for which Kiev would be held responsible.. According to this, he would have received orders to move to Belarus under a false identity as a Wagner mercenary.

The false flag attack has been used in various wars in history, one of the best known being the attack perpetrated by Nazi Germany in the then German city of Gleiwitz (today part of Poland) at the start of World War II.. A group of Nazi agents posed as Poles to sabotage the radio signal. The objective was to use a pretext to invade Poland.

Thus, the SBU has urged Lukashenko's Army and the rest of its authorities to refrain from participating in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has warned that anyone who crosses the border with hostile intentions “will be destroyed.”

hybrid warfare

Belarus seems to be fully married to Putin

Donald Trump, president of the United States between 2017 and 2021, has been seen, once again, singled out by justice. One year after the US elections, the one who has been one of the most controversial presidents in history is facing more than 70 criminal charges brought by the Prosecutor's Office during his second race to the White House.

Sexual crimes, falsification of documents and an attempt to manipulate the elections, are the three causes that blame the one who is also one of the richest businessmen in the world.

However, for Trump and his spokesmen, this entire legal cycle is nothing more than “a continuous desperate and agitated attempt” by Biden to “harass President Trump” ahead of the elections that will take place in 2024.

$130,000 for the silence of Stormy Daniels

The facts date back to 2016 when Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, issued a payment of $130,000 (€120,000) to the porn actress Stormy Daniels in order to keep hidden an alleged sexual encounter that took place ten years earlier.

The judicial process began at the end of March when Alvin Bragg, a New York prosecutor, considered that this money came from the electoral campaign dedicated to the elections that took place weeks after the alleged extramarital affair.. However, the former president assured that said meeting never took place and that the payment was made with his own money.

Ultimately, a grand jury convened by Bragg decided to charge Trump with a total of 34 counts for a payment that involved violating election finance rules.

A few days later, on March 4, the Republican appeared in New York, pleading not guilty to all charges and stating that this entire case was a “witch hunt” and “political persecution and electoral interference.”. In May, Judge Merchan of the Supreme Court of the same district set March 25, 2024 as the date for the next trial.

The Mar-a-Lago documents

On June 27, another 37 charges were added to Trump's list when special counsel Jack Smith presented another list of crimes for “mishandling forged documents” during the former president's time in the White House. In this case, the “deliberate withholding of national defense information” at his Mar-a-Lago estate and two types of obstruction were the three causes determined by the prosecutor.

The FBI found 48 boxes of documents with at least thirty containing national defense matters and secret attack plans.

Just a week ago, Smith decided to expand the accusation for three new crimes related to the attempted sabotage of the video surveillance cameras of the Republican's mansion, which had received an order to deliver the images.

Again, Trump's spokesmen dismissed the accusations for what they consider to be part of the Biden team's political strategy before the upcoming US elections.. Now, Judge Aileen Cannon has decreed that the trial will be held on May 20, 2024, just six months before the call to the polls.

Electoral manipulation and assault on the Capitol

Last Tuesday, Smith indicted Trump, granting him what will be the third case against which the businessman will have to fight to maintain his career in the White House.. This time, the Prosecutor's Office has accused him of reversing the result of the 2020 elections, where he was defeated by his rival, Democrat Joe Biden.

The accusation is made up of four crimes: “dishonesty, fraud and deception” to the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official procedure by trying to prevent Biden's victory from being certified in Congress, obstruction of an official procedure for the attempted assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and conspiracy against the right to vote and vote counting of citizens.

The defendant appeared this Thursday, August 3, in the federal court of the district of Washington, where he pleaded not guilty.. For her part, Judge Moxila Upadhyaya accepted her release under certain conditions and pending the next hearing, which will take place on August 28.

The Prosecutor's Office considers that Trump's insistence on spreading a message of “falsified elections” deeply touched his followers, for which they blame him for creating an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger that eroded public faith in the electoral administration “.

A possible fourth cause

This time it is Fani Willis, Fulton County prosecutor, who will try to indict Trump with the support of the jury for the former president's attempts to reverse the Georgia election results in 2020.

The prosecutor began investigating the alleged “push” more than two years ago, after listening in January 2021 to a recording of a phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which they talked about trying to “find “the votes needed to sell Biden in this state.

Now, Willis has declared that all accusations will be presented until next August 18.. Subsequently, the jury must determine whether or not to indict Trump for these events.

The former first lady of the United States Michelle Obama congratulated her husband, former President Barack Obama (2008-2017) on his 62nd birthday on Friday in a message on social networks in which she declared her eternal love.

“Happy birthday to my favorite thoughtful boy. I will always love you, Barack Obama,” he wrote on social networks along with an emoticon of a smile with hearts.

The 59-year-old former first lady attached a photo of Obama on vacation with a thoughtful face and sunglasses in hand.

The current president, Joe Biden, also congratulated Obama a “very happy birthday” on social networks, whom he defined as his “brother and friend.”

The president published an old photograph of the two sitting and smiling in a garden when Biden was vice president in the Obama Administration.

Barack and Michelle Obama are considered the most popular US presidential couple, for their elegance and style, since John F.. y Jackie Kennedy.

New York authorities have publicly identified a woman whose remains were found on separate dates — her legs and feet in 1996 and her skull in 2011 — and who is part of a long list of victims in the Long Island town blamed on a murderer. in series in the media case of 'Gilgo Beach'.

The woman was identified with the help of DNA tests as Karen Vergata, who was 34 when she disappeared in February 1996, according to the Suffolk County, Long Island prosecutor's office handling the case.

The victim remained as 'Jane Doe' until now, a name given to unidentified corpses. It is believed that Vergata, like other victims in this high-profile case, was a sex worker and advertised her services on the Craigslist website.

Prosecutor Ray Tierey explained that, after a genealogical profile was created, the FBI identified her in September 2022, but that only her family had been notified.

The victims of 'Gilgo Beach', a total of nine women, is a notorious case that for years has kept the attention of the authorities and the media.

The remains of a man and a child were also found, still unidentified, but it is unknown if they are linked to the deaths of the women.

Last month the architect Rex Heuerman was arrested as an alleged perpetrator.

Heuerman has been charged to date in the deaths of three women. Although authorities did not say if he could be linked to Vergata's murder.

The architect, married with two children and who had his firm in Manhattan, pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The case has been the subject of several documentaries and inspired the film Lost Girls, released in 2020.