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Note: The following text is a quote: Roseville Man Pleads Guilty to “Lasering” Police Helicopter SACRAMENTO, CA—Acting United States Attorney Lawrence G. Brown announced today that BALTAZAR VALLADARES, 30, of Roseville, pleaded guilty today before United States District Judge William B. Shubb to interference with the safe operation of an aircraft. This case is the product of a joint investigation by the Federal Air Marshals, the FBI, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, the Roseville Police Department, and the Sacramento Police Department. According to Assistant United States Attorney Matthew D. Segal, who is prosecuting the case, VALLADARES pleaded guilty to shining a...

Prominent Cuban author and dissident, Armando Valladares, has predicted the collapse of communism in Cuba after the death of former president Fidel Castro. Valladares said that people in Cuba were tired of 'acquiescing to state terrorism' like others had in communist Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Valladares said that the young "sons of the revolution, are becoming ever more politically active... The author who spent 22 years in prison was in Italy to present a new edition of his most popular work, Against All Hope: a Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulags, in the Italian capital in Rome. He also critised...

Conditions at the prison at Guantánamo are inhumane. Inmates are deprived their right to religious worship, receive scant nutrition and suffer constant verbal and physical abuse from guards. It's a humanitarian outrage. I refer, of course, to Castro's Guantánamo Provincial Prison in Cuba proper, the prison across the fence from the U.S. naval base compound holding the terrorists. Fidel's lock-up makes the U.S. prison look like a five-star tropical resort. Torture, deprivation and isolation of political prisoners at the "other" Guantánamo -- or at any of Fidel's gulags across the island -- are no secret. They've been loudly denounced by...