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Mexican authorities says drug gang members have confessed to killing 43 students from a teachers college in the country's south and described a grisly disposal of the bodies — burning them on a pyre and then pulverizing teeth and bones to prevent the remains from being identified.

Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam, speaking at a news conference in Mexico City on Friday, played a video purporting to be three gang members confessing to the killings, The Associated Press reports. Another video, the AP says, "showed hundreds of charred fragments of bone and teeth that had been dumped in and along the San Juan River" near the town of Cocula.

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Pictures of the detainees for the case of missing students are seen displayed on a television screen during a news conference at the Attorney General's Office building in Mexico City on Friday. HANDOUT/Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption HANDOUT/Reuters/Landov

Pictures of the detainees for the case of missing students are seen displayed on a television screen during a news conference at the Attorney General's Office building in Mexico City on Friday.

HANDOUT/Reuters/Landov

Authorities recovered black plastic garbage bags containing ash and bones. Karam said the remains matched what authorities were told by the suspects, who described in detail how they loaded the students into two trucks, killed them, dismembered and burned their bodies and then tossed bags full of remains into a river.

The bizarre case allegedly began when the mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, ordered police to attack the students.

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this week that authorities believe Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, "ordered local police to intercept and do away with the students, from a rural college for the poor, who were en route to Iguala and might have planned to disrupt a party and speech by Pineda."

The newspaper says: "The case soon revealed the deep infiltration by drug gangs of police and City Hall in Iguala, about 80 miles south of Mexico City, and in other municipalities in Guerrero state. The governor, Angel Aguirre, was forced to resign amid the scandal, which has also handed President Enrique Pea Nieto his worst security crisis in nearly two years of government."

Six students were killed in the Sept. 26 police assault and 43 others were allegedly handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang. Authorities believe the police told the gang that the students were members of a rival trafficking group.

NPR's Carrie Kahn says that at Friday's news conference, Karam admitted that he cannot positively say the remains are those of the students, but he said he can say with certainty that the three new suspects killed the 43 students.

"The high level of degradation caused by the fire in the remains make it very difficult to extract the DNA that will allow an identification," Karam said at a news conference.

"What I can tell you with certainty [is that] there was a homicide of many people," he said. "The statements of [the suspects], the work of the experts, what they found in each one of the tombs, the certainty of where the garbage bags were ... I have no doubt that there was a mass homicide."

More than 70 people have been detained in the case so far, including Abarca and Pineda, who were captured Tuesday after weeks on the run.

Mexico's drug wars

Mexico

"The dissidents in the East had to trust us," he says. "But we had to trust them too. We weren't in a position to fact check whether an arrest at this or that demonstration had really taken place."

Not surprisingly, the Stasi were some of the show's most dedicated listeners, but their activities were not limited to monitoring.

At this time, Gorbachev ceased jamming Voice of America and the BBC in the Soviet Union, yet the East German authorities launched their first jamming campaign in a decade.

But the measure backfired. Radio Glasnost simply repeated the blocked shows, thanking the Stasi for the free promotion.

As the Stasi began to lose its grip on East German society, it gave up jamming the show. Radio Glasnost served as a vital communication channel for the resistance movement for over two years until it was no longer needed. The final show was broadcast just three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.

"I still get emotional now when I think about that last show," Jahn says. "How we all came together for the first time in our studio and celebrated the fall of the wall and the peaceful revolution."

Even today, Jahn — still a broadcast journalist at heart — believes the power of radio should not to be underestimated: "By November 1989, Radio Glasnost had done its job."

"It had contributed to the fall of the wall," he says.

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Berlin

Berlin Wall

As far back as the early 1990s, Washington thought trade and investment eventually would make China more democratic. In the past couple of years, though, the Communist Party has doubled down on repression at home and become more aggressive overseas.

In short, things have not turned out as Washington had hoped, and relations between the world's two major powers are tense these days.

President Obama will continue to work on that tricky relationship after he arrives in Beijing on Monday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit The gathering provides Chinese President Xi Jinping with an international platform as he hosts leaders from Japan, India and Russia and tries to boost China's standing in world affairs.

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Two decades ago, Republicans, Democrats and some prominent China scholars argued that economic engagement would change China's political system over time.

"By working with China and expanding areas of cooperation, dealing forthrightly with our differences, we can advance fundamental American interests and values," President Bill Clinton said in 1997.

James Mann, author of The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China, says the conventional wisdom was China's authoritarian system naturally would evolve.

"Part of the theory was, it was just inevitable," says Mann, a scholar-in-residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. "Any country that became prosperous and had growing trade and investment ties with the world would automatically liberalize."

One popular U.S. columnist argued that as Chinese enjoyed greater and greater consumer choices — such as various types of coffee at Starbucks — a desire for political choice would follow. After meeting with then-premier Wen Jiabao in 2005, then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters China was heading towards a more open political system.

"The whole basis of the discussion I have had in a country that is developing very fast — where 100 million people now use the Internet, and which is going to be the second-largest economy in the world — is that there is an unstoppable momentum toward greater political freedom," Blair told reporters in Beijing, according to Bloomberg News.

But Mann says capitalism had the opposite effect.

Chinese naval soldiers stand guard on China's first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, as it travels toward a military base in Hainan province, in this undated picture made available on Nov. 30, 2013. Tensions in the South China Sea have grown over territorial disputes between China, the Philippines, Japan and others. Reuters/China Stringer Network/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Reuters/China Stringer Network/Landov

"It resulted in a rich, authoritarian regime, which is not what we were looking for in the first place, and which is more of a problem to deal with," he says.

China has poured some of its riches into naval power and is now tangling with Japan and the Philippines, close American allies, over disputed islands. China claims most of the vast South China Sea as its own, despite the protests of various neighbors.

Mann says American policymakers thought China would follow the path of other East Asian dictatorships, such as Taiwan and South Korea, which democratized in the 1980s. Those countries, however, relied on the U.S. for their defense, which Washington used as political leverage.

"The United States pushed Taiwan over a decade," says Mann. "None of that is going to happen in China. It has an entirely different relationship with the United States."

Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, says that instead of democratizing China, economic growth helped the party strengthen its grip on power.

"The U.S. has gravely underestimated the capabilities, the determination, the resourcefulness of the Chinese Communist Part. Better economic performance gives them greater political legitimacy, and [then] they don't have to do political reform," says Pei. It also "allows them more resources to use repression to defend one-party rule."

Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi has cracked down on Internet speech and jailed all sorts of critics. Last month, an 81-year-old writer known by the pen name Tie Liu was charged with "creating a disturbance." Among his apparent offenses: publishing the accounts of some of the political victims of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.

Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, knows China's political failings, but says the party has made improvements for which it doesn't receive credit. Those include term limits for top leaders, who — though not popularly elected — pay close attention to public opinion.

"America somehow is impatient," says Shen, who says Americans seem to think the only form of democracy is the one-person, one-vote Western model. America "is too idealistic and is too chauvinistic."

Trends That Undermine Communist Power

How long can the Communist Party stay in power? Pei expects it to run out of gas in 10 to 15 years.

"The people who work for this system have no fundamental loyalty to the system," says Pei. Indeed, the conventional wisdom among Chinese themselves is that most people who have joined the party in the past decade primarily did so to enrich themselves through connections and graft.

"All they want to do is benefit personally from their relationship with the system," Pei continues. "So, over the long run, the system will go bankrupt."

Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says the party has another trend running against it. Young Chinese have dramatically different expectations than their parents.

"Let's look at the young people in Shanghai, Beijing," he says. "They are more similar to their peers in Taipei, in Tokyo, in Washington, in New York. That's a very powerful force.

"They have similar lifestyles, they have similar kind of inspiration, and sooner or later they will also want to have freedom."

Li says that's natural. When that might happen, though, is anyone's guess.

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democracy

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In an unprecedented move, a Saudi advisory council says it approves of lifting a ban on female drivers. The Shura Council proposes that certain restrictions be applied, however: Women must be at least 30, have permission from their male guardian, not wear makeup and drive only in daylight hours, The Associated Press reports.

For years, the kingdom has refused to review the ban on female drivers, which is unique to Saudi Arabia, where conservative Muslim clerics have expressed concerns that female drivers could spread "licentiousness."

The AP reports:

"The Shura Council's recommendations are not obligatory on the government. But simply making the recommendation was a startling shift after years of the kingdom's staunchly rejecting any review of the ban.

"The council member told The Associated Press that the Shura Council made the recommendations in a secret, closed session held in the past month. The member spoke on condition of anonymity because the recommendations had not been made public."

As The Two-Way's Bill Chappell reported last year, there have been a number of bold protests against the ban, with Saudi women getting behind the wheel for a day. Thousands have signed online protests against the ban. The October 2013 protest highlighted by Bill was the third of its kind since 1990.

The AP says that the Shura Council recommended that women 30 and older be allowed to drive until 8 p.m. each day if they have permission from a male guardian. They would be allowed to drive from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday through Wednesday and noon to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, the Muslim weekend.

The council is also recommending a "female traffic department" made up of female officers to deal with female drivers, the AP says.

Saudi women driving

Saudi Arabia