Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer says Line 5 of pipeline is a ‘ticking time bomb’ and has ordered it shut down
The Canadian government has invoked a decades-old treaty with the United States in its latest bid to save a pipeline that critics warn could be environmentally catastrophic if it were to fail.
For nearly 67 years, Calgary-based Enbridge has moved oil and natural gas from western Canada through Michigan and the Great Lakes to refineries in the province of Ontario.
Continue reading...Harold Koh, a legal adviser and Obama administration veteran, criticises use of health protocol to expel thousands of migrants
A senior legal adviser in the state department has accused the Biden administration of deporting Haitians illegally through the use of a public health law.
Harold Koh, a veteran of the Obama administration, had been due to leave government service to take up a teaching position at Oxford University. He wrote a letter to the state department leadership, lambasting the expulsions of thousands of Haitians in recent weeks.
Continue reading...This part fiction, part documentary film captures the spontaneity of young friends Leonel and Antuàn
Directed by Pablo Briones, Sean Clark, and Jace Freeman, here is a film that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary as it accentuates bittersweet childhood connections, full of teases, mischief and innocent tenderness. Following Leonel and Antuàn, a pair of friends who grew up in the small Cuban town of Pueblo Textil, this mesmerising promenade through abandoned landscapes doubles as a journey to the cusp of adulthood.
With a script based on the real-life relationship and conversations between the two friends, Baracoa has an authentic spontaneity of children’s interactions so rarely captured in fiction films that rely on precocious child actors. The camera quietly observes the pair’s wanderings through ruined and deserted compounds whose austerity is transformed by the boys’ imagination. At one point, Leonel and Antuàn pretend to drive as they sit atop a broken down, rusted car frame. The moment is poetic, yet also full of melancholy. Soon, they will not find such childish daydreams so entertaining.
Continue reading...As the Tzeltal people resist huge infrastructure projects across Chiapas state, the new national guard barracks springing up are alarming many
Micaela* always stops to kiss a cross at the base of three hills, a lush swath of land in the indigenous ejido of San Sebastián Bachajón, Chiapas. Her ejido, meaning communal land, is shared among more than 5,000 Tzeltal inhabitants. But soon, they will also have to share it with Mexico’s national guard.
The national guard has built 165 barracks in Mexico since it was created only two years ago by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to replace the federal police, which he said was corrupt. Micaela’s community is leading the first lawsuit against one of 500 or so barracks planned across the country.
Continue reading...Pictures of destitute Brazilians searching scraps for food lay bare scale of economic and social crisis
Heart-wrenching photographs of destitute Brazilians scavenging through a heap of animal carcasses for food have laid bare the hunger crisis blighting Latin America’s most populous nation, where millions have been plunged into deprivation by the coronavirus pandemic and soaring inflation.
The images, taken in Rio last week by the prize-winning photojournalist Domingos Peixoto, show the group rummaging for scraps in the back of a lorry that had been transporting the discarded offal and bones to a factory that makes pet food and soap.
Continue reading...Blaze engulfs more than 200 houses and businesses, forcing hundreds of residents to flee
A huge fire destroyed or damaged more than 200 houses and businesses on the Honduran island of Guanaja on Saturday, forcing hundreds of residents to flee for safety and ravaging the tourism-dependent resort, relief authorities said.
Dramatic video footage shared on social media showed rows of seaside houses engulfed in flames and wooden homes collapsing in Guanaja, a Caribbean island about 44 miles (77km) off the north coast of Honduras.
Continue reading...Crowds parade through cities as polling shows president’s ratings sinking to new depths
Tens of thousands of protesters have returned to the streets of Brazil’s biggest cities to demand Jair Bolsonaro’s impeachment, as a poll showed the Brazilian president’s ratings had plumbed new depths.
Huge crowds paraded through downtown Rio on Saturday to voice their outrage at Bolsonaro’s response to a Covid outbreak that has killed nearly 600,000 people and dealt a heavy blow to the South American country’s economy.
Continue reading...Businessman Spavor reunites with family after his release last week from detention along with former diplomat
Canadian citizen Michael Spavor has expressed joy at being reunited with his family after being released from jail in China last week.
“I’m overjoyed to be finally reunited with my family. It’s humbling as I begin to understand the continued support that we’ve received from Canadians and those around the world, thank you,” Spavor said on Friday in a first statement since his release.
Continue reading...The manager of the Ontario store noticed the carroty crustacean was being ‘picked on’ and took it to the Toronto aquarium
An extremely rare orange lobster was rescued from certain death – and the humiliation of spending its final days in a grocery store tank – after the manager noticed it was being “picked on” by the other lobsters.
“Obviously it stood out. It’s not every day you see a lobster that looks like it’s pre-cooked walking around,” said Niki Lundquist, whose husband manages the grocery store in Ontario’s Durham region.
Continue reading...Struggle between cartels to control smuggling routes leads to third – and deadliest – prison riot this year
A bitter struggle between rival Mexican cartels to control cocaine trafficking routes in Ecuador has erupted in a day of bloodshed inside a high-security prison which left 116 inmates dead. Many of the victims were butchered with chainsaws or beheaded with machetes.
As security forces battled to retake the Litoral penitentiary in the coastal city of Guayaquil on Wednesday, scores of bodies were found dumped in bathrooms and corridors, piled and burned in courtyards, or even stuffed into air ducts.
Continue reading...Clash is the most deadly act of violence ever reported in the country’s prison system
The death toll in a gang battle at one of Ecuador’s largest prisons rose to 116, president Guillermo Lasso said, as authorities discovered the bodies of more victims including at least six that had been beheaded.
Another 80 inmates were injured during the Tuesday night clashes at the Penitenciaria del Litoral in Guayas province, which has been the scene of bloody fights between gangs for control of the prison in recent months.
Continue reading...A federal court in Canada has paved they way for billions in compensation to First Nations children who suffered discrimination in the welfare system, after a judge dismissed a pair of legal challenges by the government.
Two years ago, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government had “wilfully and recklessly” discriminated against Indigenous children living on reserves by failing to properly fund child and family services.
Continue reading...Group of whistleblowing doctors gave 10,000-page dossier to investigators last month with allegations against Prevent Senior
One of Brazil’s biggest healthcare providers has been accused of covering up coronavirus deaths, pressuring doctors to prescribe ineffective treatments, and testing unproven drugs on elderly patients as part of ideologically charged efforts to help the Brazilian government resist a Covid lockdown.
Related: Trump may be gone, but Covid has not seen off populism
Continue reading...Analysis: Beijing’s increasingly hardline approach sends a chilling message
The release of two Canadian hostages by China has ended a lengthy feud between the two countries, but experts caution the saga foreshadows a deepening rift between the two nations.
After facing charges of espionage and spending more than 1,000 days in detention, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were set free by Chinese authorities late last week. Accompanied by Canada’s ambassador to China, the pair arrived home early on Saturday morning.
Continue reading...Judge blocks Teal Cedar Products’ extension request and says police conduct on Vancouver Island has put court at risk
A provincial court in Canada has refused to extend an injunction against protesters demonstrating against old-growth logging, ruling that police conduct has been so troubling that to extend the order would place the court’s own reputation at risk.
Related: Rescue of trapped Ontario miners involved gruelling climb to surface
Continue reading...Spain brought Catholicism, civilisation and freedom to Americas, says Isabel Díaz Ayuso
The rightwing president of the Madrid region has taken issue with the pope’s recent apology for the church’s “very painful errors” in Mexico, and said Spanish conquistadors brought Catholicism, civilisation and freedom to Latin America.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, touted as a possible future leader of Spain’s conservative People’s party, has a history of provocative pronouncements.
Continue reading...We thought the days when our country treated asylum-seekers with cruelty and disdain might be ending. This month we learned we were wrong
We thought the days when our country treated asylum-seekers with cruelty and disdain might be ending. This month we learned we were wrong.
Most of us were shaken and horrified, and the country rightfully embarrassed, by images of US border patrol agents on horseback attacking asylum seekers, including at least one child, in Texas. Thankfully, that has been stopped and an investigation is now underway. We need more than an investigation, though: we need to know that nothing like that will ever happen again.
Continue reading...Confident microbudget feature zones in on one woman’s unhappiness, and how skydiving provides an unlikely but dramatic release
Deragh Campbell is an award-winning Canadian actor and film-maker whose recent movie MS Slavic 7 I have to confess to finding weirdly inert and indulgent. She has a starring role in this movie, which is a confident, intimate microbudget feature shot almost entirely in searching closeup, directed by Campbell’s longtime collaborator Kazik Radwanski. It is a more approachable piece of work and Campbell’s performance is unsettlingly real.
She plays Anne, an unhappy young woman with a job in a children’s daycare centre and an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, whose life is turned upside down when she tastes the ecstatic thrill of skydiving. Anne gets on pretty badly with her grumpy, humourless colleagues – who may nevertheless have a point about her unprofessional, casual and derisive attitude – and argues with her mother. She meets a nice guy called Matt (Matt Johnson) at a co-worker’s wedding, though she may well be about to alienate him too. But all this is against the background of skydiving, which she took part in as part of the bachelorette party: the bride and all the maids-of-honour did it once, but Anne wants this amazing and passionate experience again and again. Could it be a miraculous therapy for her? Or is skydiving simply enlarging and intensifying her already troublesome and anarchic personality?
Continue reading...Severe drought that began in late 2019 continues to punish the region while experts say climate change and deforestation may be intensifying the phenomenon
In the shadow of towering grain silos that line the bank of the River Paraná, South America’s second-longest waterway, Lucas Krivenchuk stands watching workers rush to load a barge with soybeans.
“Twelve barges had to leave today, but only six will make it out: there’s no time, the water’s dropping too fast,” said Krivenchuk, general manager of the Trociuk private port in southern Paraguay. “It’s the first time that any have left in two months.”
Continue reading...The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Sunday defended the Biden administration’s decision to send thousands of Haitians to a home country they fled because of natural disasters and political turmoil.
Related: White House criticizes border agents who rounded up migrants on horseback
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