Finding fangs: new film exposes illicit trade killing off Bolivia’s iconic jaguar

Undercover documentary investigates the trafficking of Latin America’s big cat to meet demand in China

Elizabeth Unger was a 25-year-old biology graduate working as a PhD research assistant for big cat and climate projects in Latin America when she heard about the Bolivian authorities intercepting dozens of packages containing jaguar fangs sent by Chinese citizens to addresses in China.

“I was really blown away as [the story] was completely under the radar,” she says. Six years later, she is making her directorial debut with a film about the trade, which is contributing to a decline in the population of Latin America’s iconic big cat.

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Maradona Jr pleads for DNA donors in search for Argentina’s stolen babies

The son of the footballing legend is carrying on his father’s quest to trace the children taken from parents murdered by the junta

Diego Armando Maradona Jr, son of the late Argentine football legend, is urging Italians to submit DNA to help the Argentinian government trace hundreds of children who were stolen and their parents murdered by the military junta that controlled the country four decades ago.

Maradona Jr is doing radio interviews in Italy and using his 400,000-strong social media following to broaden the search, which has already seen DNA testing programmes rolled out in Madrid and Rome.

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Wife of El Chapo admits helping run Mexican drug cartel in US plea deal

  • Emma Coronel Aispuro pleads guilty to three counts
  • 31-year-old says she conspired in husband’s 2015 prison break

The wife of the Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has pleaded guilty to charges in the US and admitted that she helped her husband run his multibillion-dollar criminal empire.

Emma Coronel Aispuro, wearing a green jail uniform, appeared in federal court in Washington on Thursday and pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiring to distribute illegal drugs, conspiring to launder money and conspiring to assist the Sinaloa drug cartel.

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‘Makes you sick’: fury in Rio as pregnant 24-year-old killed amid police raid

Kathlen Romeu’s death marks latest fatality among Black favela residents as police clash with drug gangs

In early June, Kathlen Romeu posted a photo of herself and her boyfriend on a Instagram, with a caption announcing that she was pregnant. “I am discovering myself as a mother, and I am scared thinking about how it is going to be,” the 24-year old interior designer wrote on 2 June. “I laugh, I cry and I am afraid.”

Related: Police killing hundreds in Rio de Janeiro despite court ban on favela raids

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World’s biggest meat producer JBS pays $11m cybercrime ransom

Brazil-based giant paid ransom in bitcoin after ransomware attack shut down operations across world

JBS, the world’s biggest meat processor, has paid an $11m (£7.8m) ransom after a cyber attack shut down operations, including abattoirs in the US, Australia and Canada.

While most of its operations have been restored, the Brazilian-headquartered company said it hoped the payment would head off any further complications including data theft.

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Uproar after Argentina president says ‘Brazilians came from the jungle’

Misjudged comments to prime minister of Spain sought to play up the South American country’s ties with Europe

Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, has triggered a Twitter storm and a regional race debate with misjudged comments to visiting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain that sought to play up the South American country’s ties with Europe.

“The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came from the jungle, but we Argentines came from the ships. And they were ships that came from Europe,” Fernández said, referring to the many European migrants who arrived in the country. He later apologized for the comments and said his country’s diversity was something to be proud of.

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My Amazon rainforest angel: Claudia Andujar’s best photograph

‘When I first visited the Yanomami tribe, they were completely isolated – they hadn’t seen a camera and didn’t know what photography was’

It was 1971 when I photographed the Yanomami tribe of Brazil for the first time. I knew that it would take time to build our relationship, but I wanted to see if we could become friends. For me, the best photographers are those who are truly interested in their subjects.

The Yanomami is a big population of indigenous people who live in the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela; several thousand live in Brazil alone. A small village can be as few as 40 people, or a big one as many as 200. When I first went to the Yanomami villages, the tribe was completely isolated – some still are today. At that time, 50 years ago, they hadn’t seen a camera and didn’t even know what photography was.

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‘Epidemic of violence’: Brazil shocked by ‘barbaric’ gang-rape of gay man

Activists fear that an increase in attacks on the country’s LBGT community is fuelled by a culture of homophobia at the very top

An act of “barbaric” violence where a 22-year-old gay man was gang-raped and tortured has prompted fierce reaction in Brazil and is evidence of a growing tide of hate crime in the country, according to human rights campaigners.

The man, who has not been named, was attacked last week in Florianópolis by three armed men who used sharp objects during the assault and forced him to carve homophobic slurs into his legs, said activists.

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‘This is a revolution’: the faces of Colombia’s protests

Fifty-eight people have died in six weeks of unrest, but demonstrators say they are more determined than ever to fight for change

Protests in Colombia that began in late April over a proposed tax hike have morphed into a generational outcry over the country’s deep-rooted inequalities.

Related: ‘They can’t take it any more’: pandemic and poverty brew violent storm in Colombia

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AOC condemns Kamala Harris for telling Guatemalan migrants not to come to US

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls comments ‘disappointing’ after vice-president says migrants will not find solace at US border

The progressive New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticized Vice-President Kamala Harris for saying undocumented migrants from Guatemala should not come to the US.

On her first foreign trip as vice-president, Harris visited Guatemala on Monday. At a press conference with Guatemala’s president, Alejandro Giammattei, the former California senator spoke about investigating corruption and human trafficking in Central America and described a future where Guatemalans could find “hope at home”.

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Relatives of Muslim family killed in truck attack urge Canadians to stand against hate

  • Afzaal family killed on Sunday in attack in London, Ontario
  • Trudeau: incident was ‘terrorist attack, motivated by hatred’

Relatives of the four Canadian Muslims killed in what police describe as “a hate attack” have described them as a “model family” and called on the country to stand against hate and Islamophobia.

The victims – three generations of the same family who migrated from Pakistan 14 years ago – died on Sunday after a 20-year-old man drove his pickup truck at them in what the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, described as a “terrorist attack, motivated by hatred”.

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British woman in coma after twin fights off crocodile in Mexico

Sister punched crocodile in head after it attacked in a lagoon where they had been swimming

A British woman is in a medically induced coma in Mexico after she was attacked by a crocodile in a lagoon where she and her twin sister had been taken by a tour guide.

Melissa and Georgia Laurie, 28, from Berkshire, had been swimming in the lagoon, about 10 miles from Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, on the south-east coast of the country, when Melissa was attacked.

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Canadian man charged with murder after allegedly driving into Muslim family

Two women, a man and a girl were killed on Sunday when Nathaniel Veltman drove a pickup truck into pedestrians, police say

A 20-year-old Canadian man has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder after driving his pickup truck into a Muslim family in what police described as “a premeditated attack”.

Two women, aged 74 and 44, a 46-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl a grandmother, mother, father and their teenage daughter were killed on Sunday night when Nathaniel Veltman ploughed his black pickup truck into a group of pedestrians in the city of London, Ontario, police said.

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Kamala Harris faces doubts over retooled US policy in Central America

Critics question whether push against corruption and human trafficking marks genuine change amid growing poverty

Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, has announced a new anti-corruption drive, economic aid and tougher enforcement against human trafficking during a visit to Guatemala.

But Harris, on her first foreign trip as vice-president, faced sceptical questions over whether the measures she announced would represent a real change in US policy in the region, at a time of worsening poverty and corruption.

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Mexico elections: President Amlo fails to win super-majority in midterms

But president’s Morena party keeps its majority in the lower house of congress

Mexican voters have denied President Andrés Manuel López Obrador a mega-majority in midterm elections, though his Morena party kept its majority in the lower house of congress with the support of a controversial ally.

Voters also showed little enthusiasm for Mexico’s rightwing opposition, which remains reviled after its decisive 2018 defeat by López Obrador, who swept to power promising to curb corruption and put the poor first.

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Leftist teacher holds razor-thin lead in Peru presidential election

Pedro Castillo is about 0.2% ahead of his far-right opponent, Keiko Fujimori, with more than 94% of the vote counted

The scion of a jailed autocrat and the son of illiterate peasant farmers are fighting vote by vote for the presidency of Peru, in an election which has thrown into sharp relief the Andean country’s deep fault lines of class and geography.

Related: Peru faces poll dilemma: a leftist firebrand or the dictator’s daughter?

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Spat at, abused, attacked: healthcare staff face rising violence during Covid

Data shows increased danger for those on the frontline in the pandemic, with misinformation, scarce vaccines and fragile health systems blamed

Hundreds of healthcare workers treating Covid patients around the world have experienced verbal, physical, and sometimes life-threatening attacks during the pandemic, prompting calls for immediate action from human rights campaigners.

Covid-related attacks on healthcare workers are expected to rise as new variants cause havoc in countries such as India and rollouts of vaccination programmes belatedly get under way in some countries, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to health.

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‘They stormed the ICU and beat the doctor’: health workers under attack

From Brazil to Myanmar, five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients share their experiences

Since the pandemic began, healthcare workers have been venerated for treating patients with Covid-19, but they have also been attacked for doing their job.

Five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients, some of whom asked to be kept anonymous, recount their experiences.

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Pope Francis stops short of apology over deaths in ex-Catholic school in Canada

Pontiff fails to issue direct apology for church’s role in residential schools where children were abused

Pope Francis has said he was pained by the discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former Catholic school for indigenous students in Canada and called for respect of the rights and cultures of native peoples, but stopped short of the direct apology some Canadians had demanded.

Speaking to pilgrims and tourists in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican during his weekly blessing, Francis urged Canadian political and Catholic religious leaders to “cooperate with determination” to shed light on the finding and to seek reconciliation and healing.

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Peru faces poll dilemma: a leftist firebrand or the dictator’s daughter?

Novelist Carlos Dávalos says his homeland has an unenviable choice in bitterly divisive presidential election

“Peru has always been a gloomy country; it’s not the Caribbean,” says the writer and journalist Carlos Dávalos as the traffic rolls down the Gran Vía in Madrid on a sunny June morning. “There’s that sense of a kind of Andean melancholy.”

Although Dávalos’s debut novel, La Furia del Silencio (The Fury of Silence), has drawn comparisons with both The Catcher in the Rye and Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning Roma, the coming-of-age tale is profoundly, and inescapably, Peruvian.

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