From a Jacobean traveller’s travails in Sindh to the tangled roots of Nigeria, our pick of new nonfiction books that shine a light on Asia, Africa and South America
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You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021
By Alaa Abd El-Fattah
Police update public on investigation for first time in four years, after studying hours of CCTV footage from night couple were killed
Four years after the unsolved murders of pharmaceutical billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, police in Toronto have appealed to the public to help identify a possible suspect in the case.
At a media briefing on Tuesday, homicide DS Brandon Price said police had studied hours of CCTV footage taken in the couple’s neighbourhood the night of the murders and had identified all people caught on camera – except for one person.
Continue reading...Total number of injured still not known after truck carrying gasoline overturned around midnight in the Sanmarie area
More than 60 people have died after a fuel truck overturned and exploded in Haiti’s second-largest city Cap-Haitien, the country’s health ministry has announced.
The death toll is expected to rise after the truck carrying gasoline overturned at about midnight in the area of Sanmarie on the eastern end of the city, according to local media.
Continue reading...Family, friends and fellow musicians pay their final respects to the man known as ‘El Rey’ (the King) following his death at age 81
Mexicans are in mourning for Vicente Fernández, the elaborately mustachioed icon of ranchera music, whose ballads of love and loss, golden baritones and singular stage presence captured the raw emotions of a nation.
Fans flocked to his ranch in western Jalisco state, where family, friends and fellow crooners paid their final respects to the man known as “El Rey” (the King) – and often just by the diminutive “Chente.”
Continue reading...Fatemeh Anvari was told her headwear ran afoul of Bill 21, which bars some public servants from wearing religious symbols
The removal of a Canadian teacher for wearing a hijab in the classroom has sparked widespread condemnation of a controversial law in the province of Quebec, which critics say unfairly targets ethnic minorities under the pretext of secularism.
Fatemeh Anvari, a third-grade teacher in the town of Chelsea, was told earlier this month that she would no longer be allowed to continue in the role because her headwear ran afoul of Bill 21, a law passed in 2019.
Continue reading...Protesters against police brutality were met with more police brutality
Colombian police were responsible for the deaths of 11 protesters during anti-police protests that swept the capital in September 2020, according to a report published on Monday after an independent investigation backed by the mayor of Bogotá’s office and the United Nations.
“It was a police massacre,” wrote Carlos Negret, a former ombudsman of the South American country who led the investigation, in the scathing and lengthy report published on Monday. “A decisive political and operational leadership, based on rights, was needed at national and local levels to avoid this happening.”
Continue reading...Far-right José Antonio Kast and left-wing Gabriel Boric in tight race amid divided political landscape
Chile’s presidential race is hurtling towards its conclusion with the two remaining candidates battling to secure moderate votes in a deeply divided political landscape.
Far-right candidate José Antonio Kast secured a two-point victory in November’s first round, but polls show that Gabriel Boric – the leftwing former student leader he will face in the 19 December runoff – now holds a narrow lead.
Continue reading...Members of Red Command drug faction accused of crime that caused outcry across Brazil
Nearly a year after three young boys vanished near their homes in Rio de Janeiro’s rundown northern sprawl, police have accused members of the city’s largest drug faction of murdering the children in reprisal for stealing an ornamental bird.
The boys – aged nine, 11 and 12 – disappeared on the afternoon of 27 December 2020 after leaving their homes in the Morro do Castelar favela to play. They were last seen in eerie security footage showing them walking towards a local street market.
Continue reading...Film about Carlos Marighella, released in Berlin in 2019, only arrived in Brazil last month after government cancellations
The CIA considered him Che Guevara’s successor when it came to igniting new guerrilla movements in Latin America.
Brazil’s military dictatorship, whose security agents ambushed and killed him in São Paulo in 1969, called him public enemy No 1.
Continue reading...Central American country becomes latest to switch allegiances to Beijing, amid escalating tensions
Nicaragua has switched diplomatic allegiance to China, leaving Taiwan with just 14 governments around the world that formally recognise it as a country.
The announcement by the Central American country’s foreign ministry also recognised Beijing’s claim over Taiwan as a Chinese province, a dispute that is at the heart of escalating tensions in the region.
Continue reading...In 2020, Nayib Bukele’s administration ‘provided financial incentives’ to MS-13 and the Barrio 18 street gangs, US treasury says
The US has accused the government of El Salvador president Nayib Bukele of secretly negotiating a truce with leaders of the country’s feared MS-13 and Barrio 18 street gangs.
The explosive accusation on Wednesday cuts to the heart of one of Bukele’s most highly touted successes in office: a plunge in the country’s murder rate.
Continue reading...Revelations appear at odds with José Antonio Kast’s own statements about his father’s military service
The German-born father of Chilean presidential candidate José Antonio Kast was a member of the Nazi party, according to a recently unearthed document – revelations that appear at odds with the far-right candidate’s own statements about his father’s military service during the second world war.
German officials have confirmed that an ID card in the country’s federal archive shows that an 18-year-old named Michael Kast joined the National Socialist German Workers’ party, or NSDAP, in September 1942, at the height of Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union.
Continue reading...There are fears the decision will reverse the gains made by a successful vaccination campaign
The Brazilian government has been accused of seeking to turn the South American country into a haven for unvaccinated tourists after it shunned calls – including from its own health regulator – to demand proof of vaccination from visitors.
The decision – announced on Tuesday by the health minister, Marcelo Queiroga – sparked anger in a nation that has lost more than 615,000 lives to a Covid outbreak the president, Jair Bolsonaro, stands accused of catastrophically mishandling.
Continue reading...Vote seen as a blow to conservative presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, who won majority of votes in November’s first round
A historic vote granting equal marriage rights to same-sex couples in Chile has been heralded by activists as a triumph and a blow to the conservative agenda of presidential candidate José Antonio Kast.
Kast won the majority of votes in November’s first-round vote, instilling a wave of fear among the country’s LGBTQ+ community. A tight runoff between Kast and his progressive opponent, former student protest leader Gabriel Boric, is scheduled on 19 December.
Continue reading...The Royal Ballet’s phenomenal principal dancer was the fixed star at the heart of an extraordinary year for the company
It’s been an oddly fractured year for dance. Repeated lockdowns stifled talent, thwarted new ideas. Online and outdoor offerings provided some release but when theatres reopened in May, dancers emerged as if from hibernation, full of life, anxious to get on with their notoriously short careers.
None more so than Marianela Núñez. The Royal Ballet has excelled as a company this year, but she is the fixed star gleaming at its heart, never disappointing, always moving towards her aim of perfection. Her smile irradiates the stage, but it is the purity of her classical technique, the sense that you are watching someone at the absolute peak of their abilities.
Continue reading...Animals brought illegally to Colombia by the drug kingpin have been allowed to roam free and are now disrupting the fragile ecosystem
Myths and legends continue to surround Colombia’s most notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar 26 years after his death. But his legacy has had an unexpectedly disastrous impact on some of the country’s fragile ecosystems. A herd of more than 80 hippos roam free, the descendants of animals smuggled to Colombia from Africa in the 1980s and now flourishing in the wild.
Reporter Joe Parkin Daniels tells Michael Safi that when Escobar was shot dead by police on a rooftop in his hometown of Medellín, the authorities seized his estate and the animals on it. While most were shipped to zoos, the logistics of moving his four hippos proved insurmountable and they were left to wander the Andes.
Continue reading...Mother-and-daughter team scoop gong at Gourmand awards in Paris for volume of traditional leaf-wrapped recipes
A Colombian mother and daughter’s celebration of their country’s traditional leaf-wrapped dishes has been named best cookbook in the world at the Gourmand awards in Paris.
Colombia’s envueltos are part of a culinary heritage that stretches across much of Latin America, from the tamales of Mexico and Guatemala to the humitas of Chile.
Continue reading...Tulum, jewel of the Mayan Riviera, risks emulating Acapulco, another once glamorous resort now overwhelmed by violence
Bright yellow police tape fluttered in the breeze outside a restaurant just off the main strip in the Mexican resort town of Tulum, as the lights of a nearby police truck flashed blue and red.
Troops in camouflage fatigues stood guard outside the deserted late-night eatery La Malquerida, “The Unloved” – the site of a gangland shooting that killed two female tourists and wounded another three holidaymakers.
Continue reading...Maximiliano Contenti’s horror flick attempts to unpick voyeurism but lacks the sophistication of others in the genre
Nostalgia for idiosyncratic analogue film style is the simplest explanation for the recent giallo revival – but maybe there’s more to it than that. This most stylised of horror modes is perfect for our over-aestheticised age, so the newcomers – such as Berberian Sound Studio, Censor and Sound of Violence – make artists and viewers accessories to violence, often unleashed through that giallo mainstay, the power of the gaze. Set almost entirely in a tatty Montevideo rep cinema, Uruguayan slasher The Last Matinee joins this voyeuristic club, even if it ends up more in the raw than the refined camp.
On a rainswept night in 1993, engineering student Ana (Luciana Grasso) insists on taking over projectionist duties for a screening of Frankenstein: Day of the Beast (an in-joke – it was released in 2011 and was directed by Ricardo Islas, who plays the killer here). She shuts herself in the booth, trying to ignore the inane banter of usher Mauricio (Pedro Duarte) – but neither have noticed a heavy-set trenchcoated bogeyman enter the auditorium to size up that night’s film faithful: three teenagers, an awkward couple on a first date, a flat-capped pensioner and a underage kid stowaway (Franco Durán).
Continue reading...A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Manila
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