President Maduro: "I got the resources the country requires"

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did not elaborate on the amount, the terms, or the specific investment areas. He added the information would be provided by the ministers

"I got the resources the country requires to keep its investment and import levels and economic stability," announced the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, after his meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. 

The President referred to several agreements reached with Russia during his second visit to that country amid his presidential tour.

"We have agreed to expand investment and Russia's interest in the joint ventures of the Orinoco Oil Belt and other fields. We have decided to increase shareholding and investment in oil production," Maduro stated during a telephone interview with stat-run TV channel VTV.

He did not elaborate on the amount, the conditions, or the specific investment areas. He added the information would be provided by the ministers.

President Maduro commented that the US strategy was to overstock the oil market, by using techniques that cause environmental damage and seek to harm geopolitics, hitting the economies of Russia and Venezuela.

Source: http://www.eluniversal.com/

FBI arrests 20-year-old Ohio man who wanted to 'wage jihad' on US, plotted attack on Capitol

CINCINNATI –  A 20-year-old Ohio man's Twitter posts sympathizing with Islamic terrorists has led to his arrest on charges that he plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.

Federal authorities on Wednesday identified the man as Christopher Lee Cornell, also known as Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah.

Cornell, who lives in the Cincinnati area, allegedly told an FBI informant they should "wage jihad," and showed his plans for bombing the Capitol and shooting people, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.

The FBI said Cornell expressed his desire to support the Islamic State.

Authorities say Cornell was arrested Wednesday after buying two semi-automatic rifles and about 600 rounds of ammunition. But an FBI agent says the public was never in danger.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/

Passengers on smoke-filled DC subway train reportedly waited at least 35 minutes for rescue

Passengers on a stalled subway train that began filling with smoke at one of Washington D.C.'s busiest stations Monday afternoon were made to wait at least 35 minutes to be rescued.

The Washington Post, citing three District of Columbia officials with access to emergency dispatch records, reported that the delay was partially due to confusion about whether power to the track's electrified third rail had been cut. 

The smoke resulted in the death of 61-year-old Carol Glover, of Alexandria, Va., while 83 other passengers were hospitalized, two in critical condition. Glover and many of the injured were on board a Virginia-bound train that stalled shortly after leaving the L'Enfant Plaza station. It was the first fatality on a DC Metro train since 2009, when a crash killed eight passengers and a train operator. 

According to the Post, the first report of smoke near the station came at 3:18 p.m. Monday. Two calls in the next six minutes from Metro Transit reported smoke in the station, and also reported that passengers were having trouble breathing. 

Four minutes later, at 3:28 p.m., the District's fire department declared a "Metro tunnel box alarm," code for fire in a train tunnel. The Post reports that the first firefighters arrived at the station three minutes later, at 3:31 p.m. Two minutes later, operators received their first 911 call from inside the train, from a passenger who said it was filling with smoke. 

Despite the quick initial response, emergency responders were not able to access the tunnel until 3:44 p.m., when Metro confirmed that power to the third rail had been shut off and it was safe to enter. One official told the Post that the next report from inside the train came at 4 p.m., when a paramedic reported being with a patient, though a text message from a passenger in the first of the six cars that the firemen reached indicated that emergency personnel reached the train at 3:48 p.m. 

Edward C. Smith, president of the D.C. firefighters union, told the Post that he believed the timeline showed a fast response. Other fire union officials told the paper that some personnel reported issues with their radios in the tunnel, forcing them to retreat closer to the station platform. 

The exact cause of the smoke is still being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, though NTSB investigator Michael Flanigon told the Associated Press the smoke started when something came into contact with the high-voltage third rail and caused an electrical arc. It is also not clear why the train stalled and was unable to move in the tunnel.

The Metrorail system, which connects Washington with the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, carries an average of 721,000 passengers each weekday. Smoke and fire are not unusual on the subway system, which opened in 1976 and still uses some original rail cars. Metro's most recent safety reports showed 86 incidents of smoke or fire in 2013 and 85 through the first eight months of 2014.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/

Video shows group of teens attacking Chinese USC student

Video shows group of teens attacking Chinese USC student –  The last night of Xinran Ji's life can be told in the videos that tracked the Chinese graduate student from the time he left his apartment to study with other students at the University of Southern California until he returned home hours later covered in blood.

In between those still frames taken outside his apartment, police found two cameras that captured footage of a group of teens attacking him as he walked home from school early the morning of July 24.

The footage was shown Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court as a prosecutor made his case for trying three teens for murder in the incident that raised concerns in China about the safety of students abroad and refocused criticisms about security at USC.

Details were murky in the black and white surveillance videos, but they showed Ji being surrounded by a group of people on a dark street and then, in a subsequent video, being chased as he ran for his life.

"You can just see a scrum, it looks like," Deputy District Attorney John McKinney said during a break in court, describing one of the videos.

Authorities say Jonathan Del Carmen, 19; Alberto Ochoa, 17; and Alejandra Guerrero, 16, were trying to rob Ji, 24, when he was beaten with a bat and wrench and left for dead.

A fourth defendant, Andrew Garcia, 19, is charged, but his hearing was postponed because his lawyer was ill and another defense attorney raised questions about his mental competency. Garcia blurted out obscenities in court Monday.

All four have pleaded not guilty and are being held without bail. Del Carmen and Garcia could face the death penalty if convicted. Ochoa and Guerrero are charged as adults, but they can only face up to life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted because of their ages.

The preliminary hearing that continues Wednesday included a witness who testified about being robbed by three of the defendants about an hour after Ji's killing.

But the brunt of testimony focused on videos and a trail of blood that led from Ji's apartment to two street locations where the confrontation footage was shot.

Ji managed to make it home, where he was found dead in bed later that morning.

Ji's roommate said she awoke around 3 a.m. and heard sniffling, but thought Ji had a cold, so she went back to sleep, Detective Matthew Courtney testified. When she emerged from her room four hours later, she found blood stains and Ji unresponsive and covered in bloody clothing.

Courtney and his partner tracked the bloody trail down the street and around the corner, where they eventually found a pair of broken glasses.

The detective and other officers went to USC and several other private building owners to gather at least seven videos that showed the attack on Ji or his alleged assailants driving through the neighborhood before or after the crime.

Cameras have become a ubiquitous witness to life around the campus that sits on the edge of downtown Los Angeles and borders neighborhoods with historically high crime. The school and Los Angeles police beefed up security measures, including more patrols on and around campus, after two Chinese graduate students were murdered outside an off-campus apartment in 2012.

Video from the location where Ji was first attacked showed a car pull to the side of the road and a group of people surround him in the street. McKinney said one of the men can be seen hitting Ji with a bat.

The student is able to get away, and a second camera caught him as he turned a corner with two others running after him, followed by a car.

The second video lasts longer, but most of the action is obscured until Ji stumbles to his feet and leans on a car for a few seconds. McKinney said Ji bled the most at that location.

He bled the whole way home, arriving at his front door at 12:48 a.m., where the white T-shirt he was seen leaving in appeared covered in blood.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/

Judge declares mistrial in case of SC police chief who killed black man

A South Carolina judge declared a mistrial early Tuesday in the case of a white ex-police chief charged with murder in the shooting death an unarmed black man.

The jury deliberated for 12 hours before telling Circuit Judge Edgar Dickson early in the morning they were deadlocked.

Prosecutor David Pascoe said he will evaluate his case but plans to try Combs again.

"I'm going to take a little time, but we're going forward," Pascoe said.

Pascoe said nine jurors had voted to convict Combs.

"We just had three jurors we couldn't convince," he said.

Defense attorney Wally Fayssoux, who maintains that Combs is innocent, said it had been a long week.

"We're disappointed we didn't get a result, but I think both sides feel that way," Fayssoux said.

The shooting happened after Combs was trying to arrest Bailey on an obstruction of justice warrant prosecutors contended was trumped up.

The defense said the shooting had nothing to do with race and argued Combs fired in self-defense when he was caught in the door of Bailey's moving truck.

During closing arguments, Pascoe said Combs frequently changed his story to match the evidence and was confident he would never be held responsible for killing Bailey because he was a police officer.

"He thought he got away with it because he wears a badge. Prove him wrong," Pascoe said in a passionate, hour-long argument during which he slammed the gun used in the killing on a table and had an assistant sit in the witness chair so he could carefully recreate the shooting.

Fayssoux said the case hinges on the three seconds in which Combs was trapped in the door of Bailey's pickup as it rolled in reverse, not the seven weeks it took Combs to serve a warrant on Bailey.

"Does he want to go home to his family?" Fayssoux said of Combs. "Or does he hope the truck doesn't roll over the top of him?"

Jurors had the choice between murder and voluntary manslaughter. Murder carries 30 years to life in prison without parole. Voluntary manslaughter carries two to 30 years in prison, and would have meant Bailey's killing was illegal but happened in the heat of the moment.

Judge Dickson authorized the voluntary manslaughter option Monday.

The seeds of the fatal confrontation were sown seven weeks earlier when Combs stopped Bailey's daughter for a broken taillight. The daughter called her father and Bailey came to the side of the road.

Sometime later, the chief secured a warrant for obstruction of justice, but waited several weeks to serve it until Bailey came to Town Hall the day before his daughter's trial. Pascoe asserted that Combs wanted to make a display of arresting Bailey, when he could have instead asked for help from sheriff's deputies.

After Combs told Bailey he was being arrested for obstruction of justice, witnesses said Bailey left Combs' office and went for his truck. Combs followed.

Pascoe said Combs could have stepped away from the truck door, but instead stood there and fired three shots into Bailey. The prosecutor said several things made it clear the truck was stopped and Bailey was trying to give up: The victim's foot was on the brake, and three shell casings were found close together along with Combs' dropped handcuffs.

But Combs' lawyer said all that mattered was that the chief feared for his life during the three seconds it took to shoot. He said Combs had no pepper spray or Taser and had no option but his gun.

Eutawville suspended Combs after the shooting and dismissed him several months later. The town reached a $400,000 wrongful death settlement with Bailey's family.

Although Combs was white and Bailey was black, race hasn't been front and center of the case. Pascoe contends Combs was angry at Bailey for just trying to show him up.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/

Charlie Hebdo attack: Helicopters hunt for suspects in woods of France

Longpont, France (CNN)An intense manhunt for two brothers wanted in the Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre focused Thursday on northern France's Picardy region, where sources close to the investigation said a police helicopter might have spotted the suspects.

Authorities believe that Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, entered a wooded area on foot, the sources told CNN's Chris Cuomo. Now investigators are using helicopters equipped with night vision tools to try to find them, the sources said.

Earlier Thursday, a police helicopter glimpsed what investigators believed to be the fugitives in the same area, near Crepy-en-Valois, France.

Said Kouachi, left, and Cherif Kouachi are suspects in the Paris attack.

Police flooded the region, with heavily armed officers canvassing the countryside and forests in search of the killers. They came after a gas station attendant reportedly said the armed brothers threatened him near Villers-Cotterets in Picardy, stole gas and food, then drove off late Thursday morning.

About 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the gas station, police blocked a rural country road leading to the French village of Longpont. Authorities have not commented in any detail, but pictures showed heavily armed police officers with shields and helmets in the blocked-off area.

Hours later, a CNN team witnessed a convoy of 30 to 40 police vehicles leaving a site near Longpont.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls put the Picardy region on the highest alert level, that same level that the entire Ile-de-France region, including Paris, is already under.

As the search for the suspects intensified, details emerged about their past travels -- and possible training abroad.

Said Kouachi went to Yemen for training, a French official told CNN. The training he received included instruction from al Qaeda's affiliate there on how to fire weapons, a U.S. official said, citing information French intelligence provided to the United States.

In addition to northern France, other parts of the country have also been under scrutiny.

More than 80,000 police were deployed nationwide Thursday, France's interior minister said.

Earlier Thursday, a gunman -- dressed in black and wearing what appeared to be a bulletproof vest, just like those who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices -- shot and killed a female police officer in the Paris suburb of Montrouge. A municipal official was seriously wounded in that attack, France's interior minister said. One person was arrested, Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman said, though it's not known whether the shooter is still at large.

Authorities have called that a terror attack, but they haven't connected it to Wednesday's slaying of 12 at the satirical magazine's Paris headquarters.

Latest updates at 10:15 p.m. ET

• Investigators found empty containers and gasoline inside a car driven by the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack, according to U.S. and Western officials who say they received information from French intelligence about the vehicle. The suspects may have intended to use the items to make rudimentary explosives such as Molotov cocktails, the officials told CNN's Pamela Brown, Barbara Starr and Deborah Feyerick.

• The head of Britain's MI5 security service told an audience in London that his agency was offering French intelligence officials its "full support" as France responds to Wednesday's terror attack in Paris.


• Paris' iconic Eiffel Tower went dark Thursday night in remembrance of the victims of Wednesday's attack.

• In the United States, the Paris Las Vegas resort said it also planned to dim the lights on its half-sized replica of the tower Thursday night. "We stand with Paris in mourning the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack," a spokeswoman for the hotel said.

Charlie Hebdo to publish next Wednesday

While its business is satire, Charlie Hebdo has been the subject of serious venom.

That includes its publication of cartoons lampooning the Muslim prophet, Mohammed, which some found very offensive.

Satirical magazine is no stranger to controversy

The magazine's offices were fire-bombed after that in 2011, on the same day the magazine was due to release an issue with a cover that appeared to poke fun at Islamic law.

It was attacked again Wednesday, when two masked men entered its offices not far from the famed Notre Dame Cathedral and the Place de la Bastille.

Map: Charlie Hebdo HQ, Paris

On their way into the building, they asked exactly where the offices were. The men reportedly spoke fluent French with no accent.

They barged in on the magazine's staff, while they were gathered for a lunchtime editorial meeting. The gunmen separated the men from the women and called out the names of cartoonists they intended to kill, said Dr. Gerald Kierzek, a physician who treated wounded patients and spoke with survivors.

The shooting was not a random spray of bullets, but more of a precision execution, he said.

The two said they were avenging the Prophet Mohammed and shouted "Allahu akbar," which translates to "God is great," Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said.

Cell phone cameras caught the two gunmen as they ran back out of the building, still firing. One of them ran up to a wounded police officer lying on a sidewalk and shot him point-blank.

It was the deadliest attack in Europe since July 2011, when Anders Behring Brevik killed 77 people in attacks on government buildings in Oslo, Norway, and at a youth camp on the island of Utoya.

cnn tonight jean casarez comparing terror attacks _00000515
Comparing Charlie Hebdo to other terror events 02:53
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But it won't stop Charlie Hebdo. Pelloux told CNN affiliate BFMTV that thousands of copies of the magazine will be published next Wednesday. Proceeds from the issue will go to victims' families, France's Le Monde newspaper reported.

'It was their only mistake'

Authorities have released few details on why they've zeroed in on the Kouachi brothers. But they have pointed to one key clue found inside a getaway car the gunmen apparently used: Said Kouachi's identification card. It was discovered by investigators as they combed the vehicle for clues after impounding it.

"It was their only mistake," said Dominique Rizet, BFMTV's police and justice consultant, reporting that discovering the ID had helped French investigators

Other evidence also points to the brothers' involvement, according to U.S. officials briefed by French intelligence.

Police hunting for the Kouachi brothers have searched residences in a number of towns, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

Who are the suspects?

An ISIS radio broadcast Thursday praised the attackers, calling them "brave jihadists." There was no mention of a claim of responsibility for the attack.

Officials were running the brothers' names through databases to look for connections with ISIS and al Qaeda.

A third suspect, 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, turned himself in to police, a source close to the case told the AFP news agency. In French media and on social media, classmates of Mourad, who is in his final year of high school, said he was with them at school at the time of the attack.

Cazeneuve said that nine people overall have been detained in connection with the Charlie Hebdo attack.

But the Kouachi brothers remain on the run.

'Parisians will not be afraid'

The victims' names were splashed Thursday across newspapers as heroes for freedom of expression. "Liberty assassinated." "We are all Charlie Hebdo," the headlines blared.

They included two police officers, Stephane Charbonnier -- a cartoonist and the magazine's editor, known as "Charb" -- and three other well-known cartoonists known by the pen names Cabu, Wolinski and Tignous. Autopsies on the victims were underway Thursday, Cazeneuve said.

Flags flew at half-staff on public buildings and events were canceled Thursday, a national day of mourning. Crowds gathered in the rain in Paris in the victims' honor, many holding up media credentials and broke into applause as the silence ended. The bells of Notre Dame Cathedral tolled across the city.

"I can't remember such a day since 9/11," said Klugman, Paris' deputy mayor. "The country really is in a kind of shutdown in respect and memory of the 12 people killed."

The day earlier, thousands poured into streets in hordes in a show of solidarity, holding up pens and chanting, "We are Charlie!" Similar demonstrations took place in cities in addition to Paris, including Rome,

On Thursday, demonstrators once again vowed that nothing would silence them.

Standing in Paris' Place de la Republique, Lesley Martin sounded defiant as she waved an "I am Charlie" sign.

"I am not afraid," she said. "Tonight I'm here and, if tomorrow I have to be here, I don't care if anybody comes and just wants to do something really bad here. I'm not afraid to die."


Source: http://edition.cnn.com/

The United States expresses concern about arrest of mayors in Venezuela

The US Department of State called for the end of violence

EL UNIVERSAL

Thursday March 20, 2014  04:40 PM

Through its spokesperson, Jen Psaki, the US Department of State expressed on Thursday its concerns about the detention of two opposition mayors in Venezuela, and called on authorities for the release of people unfairly held in custody, AFP reported.

The US also called for the end of restrictions to the freedom of press and made an appeal for an inclusive dialogue with all Venezuelans from the political spectrum.

The spokesperson remarked that Venezuela should stop violence against its own citizens and opposition leaders.

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American inmate killed in Israeli prison after shooting guards

Israeli special forces raided a prison in central Israel on Sunday, killing a notorious prisoner who was serving time for a gruesome murder carried out in the US.

Police identified the inmate as Samuel Sheinbein, an American who fled to Israel after murdering and dismembering another man in Maryland in 1997 and whose case sparked a high-profile row between the two allies.

Police special forces rushed to this prison in central Israel after Sheinbein stole a weapon and shot three guards, wounding two of them seriously. He then barricaded himself inside the compound where a standoff ensued, with counter-terrorism units dispatched to the scene. The inmate then opened fire again, wounding three more guards, before the forces shot him dead, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Hospital officials said one of the wounded guards was fighting for his life. Police and the Israel prison service have opened investigations into the incident. Sheinbein’s lawyers told Israeli TV that their client was under duress and that the Israeli prison service has ignored their warnings.

Sheinbein, 34, was tried in Israel in 1999, two years after he fled to the country and successfully sought refuge from extradition, enraging Maryland authorities and briefly threatening US aid to the Jewish state.

An Israeli court sentenced Sheinbein to 24 years for his killing and dismemberment of 19-year-old Alfredo Enrique Tello Jr. Sheinbein was 17 at the time of the killing and could have faced a life sentence in Maryland. His extradition to Maryland was blocked after a yearlong battle between Israel and the United States over an Israeli law that prohibited it.

Following that embarrassment, Israel changed its laws to allow the extradition of Israeli citizens on condition that they are returned to Israel to serve any sentence imposed.

Sheinbein, of Aspen Hill, Maryland, confessed to strangling Tello with a rope and hitting him several times with a sharp object. Sheinbein then dismembered the body with an electric saw and burned it, authorities said. Another teenager charged in the killing, Aaron Needle, committed suicide while in jail in Maryland.

Sheinbein fled to Israel days after Tello’s remains were found in a garage. He successfully sought refuge under a law that prevented the extradition of Israeli citizens to foreign countries. Sheinbein had only passing contact with Israel, but his father, Saul, was born in the country and Sheinbein qualified for Israeli citizenship.

Israel refused to extradite Sheinbein, prompting protests from senior officials, including then-Attorney General Janet Reno. Some congressmen who had otherwise been friendly to Israel threatened to cut aid in response.

Nitzana Darshan-Leitner, who represented Sheinbein in 1997, bemoaned the “terrible tragedy” that befell the families of both the wounded guards and the shooter and challenged the system for how it has handled her client.

“When he was sentenced, he was 17, without a criminal background, a kid from a normal background,” she said. “It is hard to understand how after all these years in prison it was not able to help him rehabilitate.”

Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler, who tried to extradite Sheinbein back to the US as a state’s attorney in the 1990s, said Sheinbein was a troubled young man whose mental health issues continued into adulthood.

Gansler said the timing of Sheinbein’s prison outburst was most striking because he was close to serving two-thirds of his sentence and becoming eligible for parole.

“He’s on the brink of being released from jail and then he goes on what basically seems to be a suicide rampage,” Gansler said. “So this was a young man who was still very troubled, and this ends a very tumultuous life.”

Gansler said Sheinbein’s death “brings actual closure” to the gruesome Maryland murder case. He expressed sympathy for the families of the Israeli guards, “and hopefully they all survive”.

Source: The Guardian
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Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán: US to seek cartel leader's extradition from Mexico

World's most wanted drugs trafficker spent his final days of freedom scrambling through tunnels and drains

Washington will seek the extradition of Mexico's most-wanted man, the US attorney's office announced Sunday, as reports emerged that Joaquín Guzmán Loera spent his final days of freedom scrambling through tunnels and drains before ending up pinned to a bed in a beachside condominium unable to reach a Kalashnikov rifle lying on the floor.

The arrest of Guzmán (known as El Chapo, or Shorty) in the Pacific resort city of Mazatlán just before dawn on Saturday punctured the myth of untouchability that had enveloped the capo since his escape from a high-security jail in January 2001 and his rise to the status of world's most wanted trafficker.

News of Guzmán's capture has been triumphantly received in the US, where he is blamed for up to 80% of the drugs trade in cities such as Chicago, with the official response emphasising the successful collaboration of the US with the Mexican authorities.


"[The] apprehension of Joaquin 'Chapo' Guzmán Loera, by Mexican authorities is a landmark achievement, and a victory for the citizens of both Mexico and the United States," said the US attorney general, Eric Holder. "We are pleased that we were able to work effectively with Mexico through the co-operative relationship that US law-enforcement agencies have with their Mexican counterparts."

The secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, called it a "milestone in our common interest of combating drug trafficking, violence and illicit activity along our shared border".

Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the US attorney's office in Brooklyn, said later that his office planned to seek Guzmán's extradition to face a variety of charges, although the Mexican ambassador to the US, Eduardo Medina Mora, hadearlier rejected calls for an American trial, saying it was important Guzmán was tried in Mexico.

Over the years there were numerous reported sightings of the highest profile leader of the Sinaloa cartel – named after Guzmán's native state – which already had a long trafficking tradition as far afield as Argentina. Guzmán was believed to spend most of his time, however, in the mountainous regions where he grew up in poverty.

A former high-level official of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, who was briefed about the arrest operation that involved American agencies, said Guzmán had tired of living without the luxuries he could so easily afford. "He became complacent and started coming to the city," Michael Vigil told the Associated Press. "That was a fatal error."

The Mexican attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, told reporters that the authorities began closing in on the 56-year-old drugs kingpin this month once they had located a network of safe houses, one of them owned by one of his former wives.

But by time the team on his trail had got through a reinforced steel door to at least one of those houses, the capo had slipped away via a tunnel leading to the city's drainage system.

A video of one of the houses shows the entrance to the tunnel under a bath, which tipped up to reveal a metal staircase below. The 5ft 6in (160cm) Chapo already had a reputation as a pioneer in the use of tunnels under the border to move drugs north and money south.

The manhunt in nearby Culiacán was accompanied by the arrest of a number of second-tier figures in the Sinaloa cartel, along with dozens of weapons, which may have helped the authorities follow his trail to a 10-floor holiday apartment block called the Miramar, on the coastal road through the city of Mazatlán, Sinaloa's main seaside resort.

Witnesses told local media that the capo had moved into the flat two days before his capture and kept a low profile. Few were willing to give many details about the much-feared drug lord.

According to a report in the Milenio newspaper, dozens of navy operatives isolated the block a little before 4am on Saturday, and quickly dominated a single lookout on the ground floor.

It was a far cry from the multiple security perimeters that had protected Guzmán in the Sierra, with the help of tip-offs from corrupt authorities. These had ensured he could woo a teenage beauty queen, who would later become his wife, with a two-day party in 2007 without being bothered.

When the authorities reached a laboratory in the same mountain range, reputedly capable of producing 100kg of crystal meth a day in 2009, the only sign of El Chapo's possible presence was a large quantity of designer suits for a very short man, as well as a catalogue of Colombian models.

But in the Mazatlán apartment block was bereft of even door reinforcements. According to the Milenio report, the marines easily broke the lock on the door to flat 401 and immobilised Guzmán on his bed before he had time to reach for his AK-47 rifle.

A video of the apartment suggests Guzmán was living in comfort, though not in a style befitting a frequent inclusion on Forbes' rich lists. The video shows a pink suitcase on a bed as well as a travel cot, although there are no reports suggesting there was anybody else inside the flat at the time of the arrest.

On Sunday, the facade of the Miramar was crowded with passers-by and motorists taking photographs of the cream-coloured Miramar condominium block with its white balconies.

By then Guzmán was locked up again in the Altiplano high-security jail, though not the same one he had left behind so embarrassingly for the authorities 13 years ago, inevitably alluded to in a rash of ballads, or corridos, that immediately turned up on YouTube. One has the lines: "With the capture of El Chapo things are not going to change / Let's see if he doesn't surprise them and escape again."

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Is San Francisco losing its soul?

The big pay cheques of the tech boom are changing the City by the Bay as Twitter and Google millionaires take over its bohemian haunts. Could this be the end of the city as we know it? 

Poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to San Francisco in 1951 because he heard it was a great place to be a bohemian. He settled in the Italian working-class neighbourhood of North Beach with its cheap rents and European ambience. And before long he put the city on the world's counter-cultural map by publishing the work of Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But despite his status as world and local literary legend, the 94-year-old co-owner of the renowned City Lights bookshop and publishing house doesn't feel so at home in the City by the Bay anymore. 

He complains of a "soulless group of people", a "new breed" of men and women too busy with iPhones to "be here" in the moment, and shiny new Mercedes-Benzs on his street. The major art galley in central San Francisco that has shown Ferlinghetti's work for two decades is closing because it can't afford the new rent. It, along with several other galleries, will make way for a cloud computing startup called MuleSoft said to have offered to triple the rent. "It is totally shocking to see Silicon Valley take over the city," says Ferlinghetti, who still rents in North Beach. "San Francisco is radically changing and we don't know where it is going to end up."

Until recently, San Francisco, California – a small city of around 825,000 poised on the tip of a peninsular on America's western edge that sprang up during the 1840s gold rush – wasn't thought of as a centre for business. Rather, it was famed as an artistic, bohemian place with a history of flowering counter-cultures that spilled over and changed America and the world, from the beats in North Beach to the hippies in the hilly region of Haight- Ashbury to the gay rights movement in the Castro neighbourhood. Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner called it "49 square miles surrounded by reality".

But times have changed in Ferlinghetti's city. San Francisco has become the hype- and capital-fuelled epicentre of America's technology industry, which has traditionally centred on the string of suburban cities known as Silicon Valley 40 miles to the south. In 2011, Mayor Ed Lee introduced tax breaks for Twitter and several other tech companies to encourage them to settle in and revitalise the downtown San Francisco neighbourhood South of Market, or Soma, and help the city climb out of the recession. Soma has become home to some of the most important companies in the new economy, such as Twitter and Dropbox, and many small startups hoping to challenge them. AngelList, a networking site for investors, now lists 5,249 tech startups in San Francisco, each worth $4.6m (£2.8m) on average and offering an average salary of $105,000 (£64,000).

At the same time, San Francisco has become a bedroom city for people who work in Silicon Valley and prefer vibrant urban neighbourhoods to sleepy suburban towns. Facebook, Google, Apple and other companies lay on shiny luxury buses to ferry their employees on the approximately 90-minute trip. San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Authority estimates about 35,000 ride the air-conditioned, Wi-Fi-provisioned buses each day.

In one sense, San Francisco is thriving. The unemployment rate is just 4.8%, compared to 8.3% for California as a whole. In 2013 job growth in San Francisco County led all others in the nation. But the influx of so many young, rich tech workers has caused significant tensions. Starting in mid-2011, rents and house prices began to soar. Eviction rates soon followed as property speculators sought to cash in by flipping rent-controlled apartment buildings into flats to sell. Evicted residents have found themselves unable to afford to live in their city anymore and many businesses and non-profits have been squeezed. "There is only a handful of cities in the world that have such an extreme problem of gentrification," says Richard Walker, an urban geographer at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The facts are stark. The median household income of the San Francisco Bay Area is now higher than anywhere else in America, and San Francisco has twice as many billionaires per capita as London (financial analysts PrivCo estimated that Twitter's stock market launch in November 2013 created more than 1,600 new millionaires in a single day, mostly employees). The median monthly rent is already the highest in the country and is still increasing at a rate three times the national average. Based on official figures from the San Francisco Rent Board, the San Francisco Tenants Union estimates that no-fault evictions displaced nearly 1,400 renters in 2013. About a third of those evictions were under California's Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict tenants and sell their apartments. A City study from October 2013 says Ellis Act evictions increased by 170% from 2010 to 2013. There are also untold numbers who have left the area after accepting buyouts.

It isn't as if San Francisco hasn't seen a tech boom before. Silicon Valley's dotcom boom of 1998 to 2001 also led to significant displacement in San Francisco. But this latest one is focused on the city and visibly changing it faster. Many long-time San Francisco residents worry not only about being forced out of the city they love, but also that their city is being changed for the worse. Critics say that San Francisco's communities of alternative culture, ethnic or otherwise – the soil of its creative mojo and legendary social movements – are being turned into playgrounds for rich people. If San Francisco's soul is its social and economic diversity and status as a refuge for those outside the mainstream, then it is being lost. 

Emerging in its place is the mostly white, male-dominated, monied monoculture of the tech industry and there appears no end in sight. "It is not like it is over, but the tide is going out on San Francisco," says Chris Carlsson, a resident since 1992 and co-founder of the Critical Mass bicycle activism movement, whose offshoots regularly take over the streets of London and other cities worldwide. Writer Rebecca Solnit, whose book Hollow City documented the effect of the first dotcom boom, fears the world is about to lose one of its most radical outposts. "I am not arguing for a city frozen in amber," she says, "but this particular iteration of change is eliminating a lot of what the city's identity has been for the past 150 years." 

Artist Zeph Fishlyn, aged 47, came to San Francisco in 1988 and settled in the working-class Hispanic Mission District, drawn by the large lesbian community there. In late 2012 she and 16 other artists who were part of the Million Fishes Art Collective were kicked out of the studio space they had lived and worked in for almost a decade. Rents have soared in the Mission, which is conveniently located for the freeways to Silicon Valley and has become a fashionable place to live. A new landlord had bought the building and, citing non-compliance with zoning laws, kicked them out.

Unable to afford to stay in San Francisco, Fishlyn moved east across the bay to Oakland, where the burgeoning art and activism scene is buoyed by a steady flow of economic refugees. "Anybody spending their time doing something that doesn't come with a big pay cheque is having to move," says Fishlyn, "and that includes the creative sector and any kind of social justice work." So many creative types have relocated to Oakland that Oakland's mayor, Jean Quan, recently likened the city to Brooklyn (San Francisco was Manhattan); San Francisco-based street artist Eclair Bandersnatch, whose stencil portrait of Edward Snowden recently featured in the Guardian, says so many of her friends have moved away that she feels like an anomaly. The irony, she notes, is that "with money you get people who are more into the arts".

The Mission and Ferlinghetti's North Beach are "ground zero" for gentrification, says Ted Gullickson, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Others have already been subsumed including, he says, the Castro district, the world famous "gayborhood" synonymous with progressive hero Harvey Milk. The area was hit badly by evictions in the first dotcom boom, he says, and has been finished off by the latest tech surge. "It is more homeowner and much straighter, much whiter and much more conservative." In late 2012, the elected representative of the Castro introduced a measure to ban public nudity outside of festivals in San Francisco despite, or perhaps because of, male nudity being commonplace in the Castro for decades.

Gullickson believes the future of the city's character now rests on the Mission, North Beach and the wider Haight-Ashbury, iconic neighbourhoods which people associate with San Francisco. "I think ultimately if they become gentrified, we are talking about San Francisco as a whole." 

There are others who see what is happening in San Francisco in a different light. Fred Turner, an American cultural history professor at Stanford University, argues that gentrification driven by white, middle-class newcomers to the city is nothing new, and has even underpinned its famous counter-culture movements. The arrival of the bohemians in North Beach began the displacement of the working-class Italians; the arrival of the hippies in Haight-Ashbury displaced some of the long-standing working-class residents; and the Castro had a large working-class Irish population before it became a gay mecca. The latest incarnation digital workers displacing working-class Latinos and artists from the Mission District who themselves were already gentrifying it is not radically different. "Nearly everything that is said about them the taking of public resources, the pushing out of poor folks and different ethnic minorities was said about the hippies of the 1960's and not without good reason," says Turner. 

In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, he even argues that today's tech culture is a direct descendant of the hippy movement. The techies are far richer and aren't a counter-culture, but like some hippies they have the same sense of social mission to transform the world for the better with technology. Likewise the way that tech culture mixes work and play and emphasises personal growth has echoes of hippy life. "The same logic that was driving the counter-culture and that continues to drive much of San Francisco today is the very logic that drives Google," says Turner. "In a limited sense, the 1960's are turning around to bite San Francisco."

Stewart Brand, who personified the link between San Francisco's 60's flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley, lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. He is watching with pleasure as the tech boom enfolds San Francisco. Now 75, Brand came to the Bay Area in 1956 and became famous for publishing the counter-cultural bible the Whole Earth Catalog which recommended the tools, technology and attitudes hippies would need to advance themselves and society as a whole.

As Brand sees it, history is being made again in the city. There is the suburban version of Bay Area cyber-business and there is a new urban version being created in San Francisco. "Market Street has been this sleepy dead street for a long time," says Brand, referring to the thoroughfare that bounds Soma. "Well, it is lively and exciting again now, thanks to the tech guys… A creative form is a creative form." Brand is convinced that the injection of so many young people with technical skills, money to play with and no family ties will spawn new ideas in San Francisco, a well-heeled, much needed creative renaissance. 

He has little sympathy for those displaced along the way. San Francisco is a small corner of the Bay Area, he points out, and the rest still has significant economic diversity. Even if San Francisco becomes a Manhattan-like redoubt of the rich, the area as a whole will see benefits. "One side effect of this may well be that Oakland, which is pretty damn interesting, becomes even more interesting."

Curiosity drew Zeph Fishlyn back to Million Fishes's old building last year. She found it occupied by a startup called Bloodhound that had moved in mid-2013 and was paying two and a half times the old rent. The company designs apps to make exchanging contact details with people easier in work situations. Its founder and CEO is Anthony Krumeich, a 27-year-old dropout from Stanford University's Symbolic Systems course, which has produced senior executives for companies such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. On Twitter, he describes himself as: "Inventor, dog owner, free and present thinker, entrepreneur, drop-out, sailor." 

Originally from suburban New York, Krumeich has curly hair, thick-rimmed glasses and wears a plaid shirt – standard urban hipster uniform. He arrived in San Francisco in late 2010, after a couple of years trying to get Bloodhound going in Silicon Valley. The company now has 15 employees and nearly $5m in investment funding including from Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook. Bloodhound has revenues but not profits and Krumeich moved his company to the Mission from Soma in search of lower rents and some soul. The office's aesthetic is white space, wood and large Apple computers. It overflows with signs of a start-up culture there are also soft furnishings, a table-tennis table and a copy of the tech entrepreneurs' bible The Lean Start-up. Employees who commit to not driving get a custom-made bike from a local bike shop and three days a week a chef cooks the office a wheat- and dairy-free lunch.

Krumeich and I walk the one block to Lower 24th Street, San Francisco's most vibrant centre of Hispanic culture and commerce. It has the highest concentration of Latino businesses in the city, an eclectic mixture of speciality stores, Mexican bakeries, grocers and butchers. But 24th Street is in transition. High-end coffee shops and restaurants are poking in, along with a fashionable Jewish deli selling $13 sandwiches. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who has a second home in the Mission, has been spotted there. 

Krumeich is busy with the kind of project that Brand claims will define San Francisco's future. Inspired by the housing crisis, he and his companion a Boxer dog have just moved into what he calls an "alternative living situation", a shipping container on a flatbed truck. Krumeich is converting it into an off-grid, mobile living space that he says will be self-sustaining in its finished form. Solar panels provide electricity and a system of plants is to be used to recycle grey water. He thinks more mobile living might be the future.

But unlike Brand, Krumeich believes new San Francisco doesn't have to eradicate the old. The big ground-floor windows of his office are currently exhibiting canvases painted by an Oakland-based artist. A couple of weeks ago he held his first "artists' showcase", where he opened the doors to passers-by and had various local artists show their work and he is thinking about a new kind of app to connect artists with potential buyers. 

All this was inspired by finding out that Million Fishes had been in the space before, courtesy of Fishlyn. "They had an interesting place," he says, and while he is determined not to suffer from "tech guilt" he is thinking about the role he can play in his community. "I don't have a lot of preconceived notions about how this should work, but I am just going to start from: I care about other people; I am trying to do interesting and good things; I would like my presence here to be a contribution." 

That kind of tech-led mission might be possible, but perhaps first an endangered species needs to be saved from extinction. Since late 2013, neighborhood marches and blockades against Google's commuter buses have captured local, national and international attention. Tenant and neighborhood organisations are working on proposals to be taken to San Francisco voters in November suggestions include a moratorium on no-fault evictions. In January, the mayor responded to the growing pressure, urging people to stop demonizing tech workers while announcing a seven-point housing plan which includes a target of 30,000 new homes by 2020, at least a third of which will be affordable. More immediately, he plans to try to reform the state's Ellis Act. 

The San Francisco peninsular is where the world's new dominant industry information technology is most concentrated. Its tensions between highly paid tech workers and the communities that came before them may be a preview for other places. "What happens here may well happen in similar ways elsewhere, such as the emerging tech zones in London and Berlin," says Turner. "San Francisco is a canary in a coal mine." What reinvented San Francisco will look like when the dust settles is difficult to predict. But the nature of urbanity is that people packed in together do encounter each other and discover history and traditions. "Cities are more resilient than you might think," says Richard Walker. It's unlikely to be all doom for old San Francisco.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for one, is still convinced that the San Francisco he knows ultimately can't be engulfed by Silicon Valley, seeing too strong a connection to its geography, with water on three sides. "It still has an island mentality," he says. "At nearly 95, all I can say is good luck!"

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