Category Archives: Americas

Salvadoran government accused of doctoring true extent of Covid deaths

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A Salvadoran newspaper reported 15,956 people died from the disease, three times more than President Bukele’s official numbers

Nayib Bukele’s administration in El Salvador has come under fire from rights groups for apparently falsifying Covid-19 figures in an attempt to cover up the true cost of the pandemic.

Two-thirds of the country’s Covid-19 fatalities were left out of official figures in order to give the illusion that the authoritarian government had the pandemic under control, the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica reported on Monday.

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EU to invest €45bn in Latin America and Caribbean

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Package includes projects to extract minerals, electrify bus fleets and help protect Amazon rainforest

EU leaders in Brussels have announced €45bn (£39bn) in investments to Latin America and the Caribbean, some of which will speed the shift to clean energy, but made little headway thawing a frozen trade deal that critics say will further degrade the Amazon rainforest.

The EU-Celac summit, the first of its kind since 2015, aimed to bring the EU closer to Latin American and Caribbean countries. Disagreements over how to refer to the war in Ukraine in the final text soured negotiations.

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Nicaragua fails to back censure of Russia at end of EU-Latin America summit

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Celac president declares first summit of its kind in eight years a success despite late wrangling

EU leaders have failed to persuade all of their Latin America and Caribbean counterparts to strongly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite watering down a joint statement closing a two-day summit in Brussels.

Ralph Gonsalves, the president of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), brushed off a row after Nicaragua failed to agree to the sole paragraph on the war in the final 41-paragraph communique.

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UN unable to feed 100,000 Haitians this month amid ‘catastrophic’ conditions

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The World Food Programme’s Haiti response is only 16% funded with more than half of the country’s population regularly hungry

The World Food Programme (WFP) will be unable to feed 100,000 Haitians this month as the UN agency has insufficient funding to meet burgeoning humanitarian needs in the embattled Caribbean nation.

Haitians grappling with dire malnutrition will have to endure the absence of vital food and financial support amid the worst hunger crisis the country has ever witnessed, the WFP announced on Monday.

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Millions on alert as wildfire smoke from Canada to spread to US

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Officials issue air quality advisories across US and with nearly 900 forest fires – many of them ‘out of control’ – burning to the north

As they did last month, wildfires in Canada are again expected to spread increased air pollution to the US this week, as millions in the country are under air quality advisories.

About 70 million people could be under air quality alerts as wildfire smoke from western Canada spreads to parts of the northern US and as far south as Alabama, CNN reported.

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Drought leaves millions in Uruguay without tap water fit for drinking

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After years of underinvestment, reservoir has had to be topped up from estuary, raising health concerns

More than half of Uruguay’s 3.5 million citizens are without access to tap water fit for drinking, and experts say the situation could continue for months.

Some had predicted the crisis years ago when pointing out the vulnerability of the single reservoir supplying water to the metropolitan area around the capital, Montevideo.

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Trudeau pays tribute to firefighter, 19, killed battling Canada wildfires

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Devyn Gale killed while tackling British Columbia blaze as wildfires continue to rage across country with little reprieve

Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has paid tribute to a young firefighter who was killed while battling a forest blaze in British Columbia, as wildfires continue to rage across the country and the western province requested an extra 1,000 international firefighters.

Devyn Gale, 19, was part of a team that was tackling a fire outside the town of Revelstoke, about 310 miles (500km) north-east of Vancouver. Revelstoke Royal Canadian Mounted Police said she had been clearing brush in a remote area where a small fire had started. She lost contact with her team and was discovered caught under a fallen tree.

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Ex-diplomat jailed for 2012 murder of Venezuelan ambassador in Kenya

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Dwight Sagaray was given 20-year sentence after being stripped of diplomatic immunity following the crime

A Kenyan court has sentenced a former Venezuelan diplomat to 20 years in jail over the 2012 murder of the Latin American nation’s acting ambassador at her home in an upmarket Nairobi neighbourhood.

Dwight Sagaray, who was the first secretary at the embassy, was convicted in January, along with three Kenyan nationals, over the murder of the ambassador Olga Fonseca.

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AI resurrection of Brazilian singer for car ad sparks joy and ethical worries

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Beloved musician Elis Regina died aged 36 in 1982 but a new Volkswagen commercial shows her duetting with her daughter

The premature death in 1982 of one of Brazil’s most treasured musicians left her homeland reeling. “Brazil without Elis,” mourned one front page after the legendary singer Elis Regina unexpectedly died at the age of 36.

So when Elis Regina recently re-emerged, performing a soul-stirring duet with her daughter, the Grammy-winning singer Maria Rita, there were similarly charged scenes of catharsis and nostalgia.

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Guatemala prosecutor suspends party of anti-corruption election candidate

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Prosecutor suspends Movimiento Semilla after Bernardo Arévalo unexpectedly reached second round

Guatemala’s presidential election has been thrown into confusion after the country’s top prosecutor moved to suspend the party of a centre-left anti-corruption candidate who unexpectedly made it to the second round and officials from the attorney general’s office raided the headquarters of the electoral authority.

Observers had voiced fears that the Central American country’s political establishment might try to force Bernardo Arévalo from August’s runoff after he unexpectedly came second in last month’s vote.

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Mexico: IEDs kill four police officers and two civilians in ‘brutal’ cartel ambush

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Another 14 wounded after seven improvised devices set off in attack by organized crime group in Tlajomulco, Jalisco state

Four police officers and two civilians have been killed by bombs planted in a road in western Mexico that officials said were an ambush set by a drug cartel.

The attack late on Tuesday appeared to mark the first time that Mexican criminals have successfully targeted law-enforcement personnel with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in the latest example of the brazen military challenge posed by organized crime groups in the country.

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Giant sloth pendants indicate humans settled Americas much earlier than thought

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Scientists studied jewelry made from now extinct creatures and theorize that humans arrived in Americas 27,000 years ago

New research suggests humans lived in South America at the same time as now extinct giant sloths, bolstering evidence that people arrived in the Americas earlier than once thought.

Scientists analyzed triangular and teardrop-shaped pendants made of bony material from the sloths. They concluded that the carved and polished shapes and drilled holes were the work of deliberate craftsmanship.

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California man charged with femicide in deaths of three women in Mexico

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Mexican authorities will seek to extradite Bryant Rivera of the Los Angeles area for the death of Angela Carolina Acosta Flores

US authorities have arrested a California man accused of killing three women in the Mexican border city of Tijuana and crossing back and forth across the international line after each of the deaths, which occurred over the course of nearly a year starting in 2021.

According to US court records, 30-year-old Bryant Rivera, a resident of the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, was arrested on 6 July on a femicide charge in the strangulation death of Angela Carolina Acosta Flores, whose body was found in a hotel room in Tijuana on 25 January 2022.

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‘It’s party time’: Jair Bolsonaro opens themed online store

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Products include ‘party kits’ with hats, cake decorations and banners bearing Brazilian ex-president’s face

Some politicians go on lucrative speaking tours when their days in power are done. Others start foundations, distill whiskey, raise cattle or buy luxury sheds.

Jair Bolsonaro has chosen a different path and opened a shop where, for the price of a hardback, you can order a Bolsonaro-themed birthday pack complete with party hats, cake decorations and a plastic banner carrying a festive message from Brazil’s former president.

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Life imitates art as El Salvador pressures book fair to bar dissenting writer

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Barbers on Strike, author Michelle Recinos’s collection of short stories, has apparently upset strongman president Nayib Bukele

First the soldiers came for those with mohawks. Then they came for the hairdressers themselves.

“They were good kids,” quips the narrator in one of the latest tales by the Salvadorian author Michelle Recinos, “although I’d never trusted them with my hair.”

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‘It’s pillage’: thirsty Uruguayans decry Google’s plan to exploit water supply

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Country suffering its worst drought in 74 years, with government even mixing saltwater into drinking supply

A plan to build a Google data centre that will use millions of litres of water a day has sparked anger in Uruguay, which is suffering its worst drought in 74 years.

Water shortages are so severe in the country that a state of emergency has been declared in Montevideo and the authorities have added salty water to the public drinking water supplies, prompting widespread protests.

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Brazil says illegal miners driven from Indigenous territory, but ‘war’ not over

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Country’s top cop said 90% of miners despoiling Yanomami land had been expelled, though experts say they are only displaced

Brazil’s top federal police chief for the Amazon has celebrated the government’s success in driving thousands of illegal miners from the country’s largest Indigenous territory but warned the “war” against environmental criminals is not yet over.

Speaking during a visit to the Amazon city of Belém, Humberto Freire estimated environmental and police special forces had expelled 90% of the 20,000 miners who had been devastating the protected Yanomami territory, since launching their clampdown in February.

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Weather tracker: heat dome raises temperatures in Spain and Portugal

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Phenomenon is forecast to expand as it strengthens, triggering conditions of more than 30C in parts of Europe

Parts of southern and western Europe have been experiencing unusually high temperatures. Areas of Spain and Portugal have recorded daily maximum temperatures in the high 30s celsius for more than a week, exceeding 40C in parts of southern Spain on Sunday. Italy, France, Germany and the Benelux region also reached the low- to mid-30s celsius in places at the weekend.

The heat is caused by a large area of high pressure that is stagnating over Europe and preventing the usual pattern of low pressure systems moving eastwards into Europe from the Atlantic. This is known as a blocking high and results in very dry and stable conditions, as the fronts associated with more dynamic weather patterns are forced away by the high pressure.

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Mexico: body of missing journalist found in Nayarit state

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La Jornada said the body of Luis Martín Sánchez Iñiguez was found on the outskirts of Tepic, capital of the coastal state

A journalist from Mexican national newspaper La Jornada has been found dead in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, the publication has said.

La Jornada reported on Saturday the body of Luis Martín Sánchez Iñiguez was found on the outskirts of the state capital, Tepic.

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Canada faces ‘long, tough summer’ of wildfires with even hotter temperatures

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More than 9m hectares of country had burned, federal data shows, shattering 34-year record

Canadian officials have warned that the country faces a “long, tough summer” of wildfires as the current season shatters previous records and forecasts predict even hotter temperatures to come.

Federal data showed that on Friday more than 9m hectares (22.2m acres) of the country had burned, shattering a 34-year record.

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