Twenty hectares near Inca ruins affected in blaze started by farmers burning grass before sowing crops
Peruvian firefighters were fighting to contain a forest fire near the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu as the blaze threatened to close in on the ancient city in the Andean mountains on Thursday.
The fire, which had engulfed an area about half the size of Vatican City, was started on Tuesday by farmers burning grass and debris to prepare to sow crops.
Continue reading...Members of anti-vax convoy have vowed to maintain a presence over the summer initially mingling with the annual celebrations
Residents of downtown Ottawa are bracing for a Canada Day unlike any other, after “freedom convoy” protesters vowed to return to Parliament Hill on 1 July, and maintain a presence over the remainder of the summer.
Every Canada Day, people congregate on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to watch musical performances and fireworks on the anniversary of Canadian confederation. This year, it will probably be difficult for police to distinguish between celebrators and convoy members – which is what protesters are banking on.
Continue reading...Was it a protest by staff or marketing for a change of programming? Listeners to Kiss Radio 104.9 FM had plenty of time to wonder
Early on Wednesday morning, someone at a pop and soft rock station in Vancouver, Canada, began playing the song Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine.
Then they played it again.
Continue reading...Attacks on the press have increased 85% in the three years since president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power
Yet another Mexican reporter has been shot to death, bringing to 12 the number of journalists killed this year in the country, one of the world’s most dangerous for media workers.
Antonio de la Cruz, 47, was shot on Wednesday as he was leaving his house with his 23-year-old daughter, who was seriously injured, according to state prosecutors and the newspaper that employed him.
Continue reading...Authorities are struggling to identify victims who have no IDs as families in Central America wait in anguish for news
The number of dead migrants found in a stifling trailer in Texas rose to 53 on Wednesday after two more people died, according to the Bexar county medical examiner’s office.
Forty of the victims were male and 13 were female, it said.
Continue reading...Fiasco involves automated system that has led to 200,000 government workers being overpaid, underpaid or not paid at all
A woman in Newfoundland has lost her house after the government of Canada stopped paying her while she was on contract with its own revenue agency.
Joanne Nemec Osmond’s ordeal is the latest case in a debacle surrounding an automated payroll system which has led to 200,000 government workers in the country being overpaid, underpaid – or not paid at all.
Continue reading...President Nayib Bukele vowed to step up its ‘war on gangs’ even as 2% of the country’s population is jailed
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has vowed to escalate his controversial “war on gangs” after three police officers were killed in what appeared to be the first major reaction to a security crackdown that critics have called one of the most dramatic in recent Latin American history.
Bukele’s government claims more than 43,000 Salvadorians have been thrown in jail since it imposed a “state of exception” in late March – leaving almost 2% of the country’s entire adult population behind bars.
Continue reading...Draft shifts country away from Pinochet-era document, enshrining cultural rights and laying out path of autonomy for Indigenous peoples
The process of drafting Chile’s new constitution has come to an abrupt, jubilant end as the final votes were held quickly by the 154-member, gender-equal constitutional convention.
Huddling between the colonnades at the former congress building in Santiago, which has played host to Chile’s constitutional process, the delegates hugged and cheered as the draft was finalised.
Continue reading...Truth commission’s report, touted as a chance to heal after half a century of bloodshed, called for a ‘substantial change in drug policy’
The punitive, prohibitionist war on drugs helped prolong Colombia’s disastrous civil war, the country’s truth commission has found, in a landmark report published on Tuesday as part of an effort to heal the raw wounds left by conflict.
The report, titled “There is a future if there is truth” was the first instalment of a study put together by the commission that was formed as part of a historic 2016 peace deal with the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
Continue reading...Prisons agency boss says fire broke out after inmates lit mattresses during protest at jail in Tuluá
Fifty-one inmates have died during a riot in a prison in the Colombian city of Tuluá in one of the worst recent incidents of its kind in the country.
The director of the national prisons agency said a fire had started during a protest by prisoners overnight.
Continue reading...Mexican foreign minister mourns ‘huge tragedy’ as US investigates effort to smuggle people across border
Fifty-one people believed to be migrants were found dead and at least a dozen others were hospitalized after being found inside an abandoned tractor-trailer rig on Monday on a remote back road in south-west San Antonio, officials have said.
The discovery in Texas may prove to be the deadliest tragedy among thousands of people who have died attempting to cross the US border from Mexico in recent decades.
Continue reading...Incident marks one of the deadliest tragedies involving people attempting to cross US border from Mexico in recent decades
Forty-six people were found dead in a sweltering tractor-trailer that was abandoned on a remote back road in San Antonio, Texas shortly before 6pm local time (12am GMT) on Monday.
Sixteen people were taken to hospital, including four children, and treated for heat stroke and exhaustion.
A San Antonio fire department official said they found “stacks of bodies” and no signs of water in the truck. “The patients that we saw were hot to the touch, they were suffering from heat stroke, exhaustion,” the San Antonio fire chief, Charles Hood, told a news conference. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer but there was no visible working A/C unit on that rig.”
A city worker heard a cry for help from the truck and discovered the gruesome scene, the police chief, William McManus, said.
A spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said that its Homeland Security Investigations division was investigating “an alleged human smuggling event” in coordination with local police.
San Antonio mayor Ron Nirenberg said the 46 who died had “families who were likely trying to find a better life … This is nothing short of a horrific human tragedy.'”
Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican running for reelection, said in a tweet: “These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies.”
Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, called the suffocation of the people in the truck the “tragedy in Texas” on Twitter and said consular officials would go to the hospitals where victims had been taken to help “however possible”.
A spokesman for the Honduran foreign ministry told Reuters the country’s consulates in Houston and Dallas would be investigating the incident. Ebrard said two Guatemalans were sent to hospital and Guatemala’s foreign ministry said on Twitter that consular officials were going to the hospital “to verify if there are two Guatemalan minors there and what condition they are in”.
The incident is among the deadliest tragedies to have claimed thousands of lives of people attempting to cross the US border from Mexico in recent decades. Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped inside a truck that was parked at a Walmart in San Antonio.
South Texas has long been the busiest area for border crossings. People ride in vehicles though border patrol checkpoints to San Antonio, the closest major city, from which point they disperse across the United States.
President Guillermo Lasso announces cut to gas prices in effort to quell protests demanding lower fuel and food prices
Ecuadorian Indigenous organizations have said they will meet with the government to discuss demands for lower fuel and food prices which have sparked two weeks of protests, hitting the country’s weakened economy and threatening its oil production.
President Guillermo Lasso late on Sunday announced a 10-cent per gallon cut to gasoline and diesel prices, the latest concession to try to quell the sometimes-violent demonstrations, which began on 13 June.
Continue reading...Chaos overtakes city of Espinal after wood and bamboo stands collapse during cultural festival
At least four people were killed and hundreds injured in Colombia on Sunday after spectator stands at a bullfight collapsed, authorities said.
The bull reportedly escaped from the plaza hosting the spectacle and was causing panic in the streets of Espinal, Tolima, a city of nearly 60,000 people about 145km (90 miles) south-west of Bogotá, the capital.
Continue reading...Discovery in the Klondike ranks as the most complete mummified mammal found in the Americas
It was a young miner, digging through the northern Canadian permafrost in the seemingly aptly named Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front-end loader struck something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields.
What he had stumbled upon would later be described by the territory’s palaeontologist as “one of the most incredible mummified ice age animals ever discovered in the world”: a stunningly preserved carcass of a baby woolly mammoth thought to be more than 35,000 years old.
Continue reading...My brother was killed because he tried to tell the world what was happening to the rainforest, says Sian Phillips
The British journalist Dom Phillips has been laid to rest in Brazil, exactly three weeks after he was gunned down while journeying through the Amazon with the Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira.
Pereira and Phillips, a longtime Guardian contributor, disappeared while travelling on the Itaquaí River on Sunday 5 June.
Continue reading...Nieces of journalist killed in the Amazon pay tribute to their uncle, who sent frequent and funny emails about life in Brazil
Dom Phillips was a storyteller. Through his career as a journalist, he told the stories of those who were unable to speak out and whose views were overlooked. His second book, How to Save the Amazon, aimed to do exactly this – to speak the story of the Amazon and the Indigenous people within it, and provide solutions to preserve their culture in conjunction with current Brazilian society.
For us, however, he was always Uncle Dom. He has been present in our lives since we were born and was very much involved with our upbringing when we were small children. He remained a positive influence, even when he moved to Brazil in 2007.
Continue reading...During demonstrations, started by an Indigenous federation, roads were blocked and vehicles torched, and police fired teargas
Ecuador has been brought to a near standstill after two weeks of tumultuous protests over a spike in fuel and food prices as global inflation inflames discontent over widening inequality across Latin America.
At least five people have died after demonstrators blocked roads, torched vehicles and hurled stones, while police responded with teargas during several days of clashes. Ecuador’s health ministry has said two people died in ambulances delayed by road blockades. Twelve police officers are reported injured.
Continue reading...By funding and stocking products from Brazilian meat giant JBS, firms have also supported land-grabbing, investigation claims
Continue reading...Funeral held in Pernambuco of Indigenous expert who was killed in Amazon region with journalist Dom Phillips
The murdered Indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira has been buried in his home state of Pernambuco in Brazil after a small ceremony attended by family members and local tribes.
Dozens of Indigenous people from the Xukuru tribe paraded around his coffin chanting farewell rituals to the beat of their percussion instruments on Friday.
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