• Indigenous community seeks Canada state and church records
• Report on finding of 215 unmarked graves calls for wider search
The First Nations community that shocked Canada with the discovery of unmarked graves says school records will be critical in identifying victims – and that a much greater area needs to be searched to understand the true scale of the tragedy.
Related: The Indigenous children who died at Canada’s residential schools – podcast
Continue reading...Conviction of businessman who conspired in murder of indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres raises hopes of end to impunity
When Bertha Zuñiga heard that a former Honduran army intelligence officer and businessman had been found guilty of collaborating in the murder of her mother, Berta Cáceres, she breathed a big sigh of relief. Five years after the environmental campaigner was assassinated by hired hitmen, this was the verdict her family and friends had been waiting for.
“I know there is still a long road, maybe very long and very hard, but to have achieved a guilty verdict against the [former] president of a corporation, [who is] connected to the armed forces: it is unprecedented in our country,” says Zuñiga, 30.
Continue reading...President transferred to São Paulo to determine if procedure necessary after surgeon diagnoses him with bowel obstruction
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, may be forced to undergo emergency surgery after he was rushed to hospital in the early hours of Wednesday complaining of abdominal pain.
Related: Haiti authorities seek three more people after killing of president
Continue reading...Historically musicians steered clear of addressing political topics that risk reprisals at home but Sunday’s explosion changed that
High-profile Cuban musicians from salsa band Los Van Van and jazz pianist Chucho Valdés to pop star Leoni Torres have offered rare public support to protesters and criticized Communist authorities’ handling of the worst unrest in decades.
Thousands of Cubans joined rare protests nationwide on Sunday over shortages, Covid-19 and political rights. The government blamed US-financed “counter-revolutionaries” exploiting economic hardship caused by US sanctions.
Continue reading...Criminalisation disproportionately affects indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian women and exacerbates inequality, says Human Rights Watch
Gladys, an indigenous woman from rural Ecuador, went to hospital after injecting poison into her stomach to end her pregnancy. Doctors went straight to the police, and she was sentenced to two months in jail for having an abortion with consent.
Elsewhere in the South American country, a 20-year-old Afro-Ecuadorian woman went to hospital after a fall, and found out she was pregnant and miscarrying. She was swiftly arrested and spent four months awaiting trial, where she was cleared.
Continue reading...As scorching temperatures spread, the search for ways to protect against heat stress is becoming ever more urgent
William Martínez, who as a child worked on a sugarcane plantation in rural Nicaragua, learned the hard way what many in the US and Canada are now realising: that rising temperatures are costing lives and livelihoods.
Martínez, along with fellow villagers in La Isla, found himself getting sicker as he worked long, gruelling days in the fields under the beating Nicaraguan sun two decades ago. Workers at the nearby mill, which supplies molasses to alcohol companies, began to suffer kidney failure, and would be forced out of the workforce and into expensive and time-consuming dialysis. His father and uncles, addled with the same affliction, had died when Martínez was a boy, forcing him to join the workforce.
Continue reading...Activists, protesters and journalists, including a reporter for one of Spain’s leading newspapers, reportedly in custody
Scores of Cuban activists, protesters and journalists, including a reporter for one of Spain’s leading newspapers, have reportedly been detained as Communist party security forces seek to smother Sunday’s historic flare-up of dissent.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas director, said at least 140 Cubans were believed to have been detained or had disappeared in the aftermath of Cuba’s largest demonstrations in decades.
Continue reading...Anti-government protests have rocked the communist-ruled island, supercharged by shortages, social media and sanctions
Liuba Álvarez leaves her house three times a week at 3.45am to queue outside her local supermarket for basic goods like meat, oil and detergent. Her last queue was “relatively short”: after eight hours she came home with some minced meat in time for lunch. Other days she doesn’t get back until 5pm.
Related: Thousands march in Cuba in rare mass protests amid economic crisis
Continue reading...A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school – the latest in a series of grim announcements from across the country in recent weeks.
Members of the Penelakut Tribe in south-western British Columbia said in a statement late on Monday that the graves had been discovered near the site of the Kuper Island industrial school on Penelakut Island, nearly 90km north of the provincial capital Victoria.
Continue reading...A nanofiber mesh makes the traps more efficient and could help provide clean drinking water
Chile’s Atacama desert is famously dry, with virtually no measurable rainfall. It is coastal though, with a sea breeze blowing inland. New technology could help draw precious water from the sea air.
Fog traps are mesh screens that capture droplets of fog; when enough water accumulates it runs down into a collector. Fog traps have been used on a small scale since the 1960s, with a square metre of mesh collecting enough drinking water for one person.
Continue reading...Cuban officials blame the US for Sunday’s demonstrations as Biden calls on island’s leaders to hear citizens’ ‘clarion call for freedom’
The Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has attacked the “shameful delinquents” he claimed were trying to “fracture” his country’s communist revolution after the Caribbean island witnessed its largest anti-government protests in nearly three decades.
As Cuban officials blamed the US for Sunday’s demonstrations, Joe Biden called on the island’s leaders to hear its citizens’ “clarion call for freedom”.
Continue reading...The biggest mass demonstrations for three decades have rippled through Cuba, as thousands took to the streets in cities throughout the island, demonstrating against food shortages, high prices and communist rule. President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed the unrest on foreign influence and said that ‘destabilisation in our country’ would be met with a ‘revolutionary response’. Cubans are living through the gravest economic crisis the country has known for 30 years
Continue reading...Only a few things are known for sure about the killing of Jovenel Moïse, with many unanswered questions
There are few things that can be said with absolute certainty about the assassination save for the fact that at some point during the night of Wednesday 7 July, the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, was shot and killed at his private residence in the hills above the capital, Port-au-Prince, during an attack in which his wife, Martine, was also severely injured. Although the official account of the attack places it at about 1am, even that timeline has been questioned.
Continue reading...Items found at Christian Emmanuel Sanon’s house include bullets, gun parts and US drug agency hat
Police in Haiti say the latest suspect arrested in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse is a Haitian living in Florida who acted as a middleman between the alleged hitmen and the plot’s unnamed masterminds.
The suspect was identified by police as Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian in his 60s living in Florida who describes himself as a doctor and has accused his homeland’s leaders of corruption.
Continue reading...US sanctions and coronavirus crisis lead to food shortages and high prices, sparking one of the biggest such demonstrations in memory
The biggest mass demonstrations for three decades have rippled through Cuba, as thousands took to the streets in cities throughout the island, demonstrating against food shortages, high prices and communist rule.
The protests began in the morning, in the town of San Antonio de los Baños in the west of the island, and in the city of Palma Soriano in the east. In both cases protesters numbered in the hundreds.
Continue reading...Duberney Capador, killed after assassination of Jovenel Moïse, was hired by security firm to protect ‘important people’, says sister
The sister of one of the alleged Colombian hitmen accused of assassinating Haiti’s president has insisted he is innocent and vowed to clear her dead brother’s name, as a potentially destabilising power struggle gripped the Caribbean country.
Duberney Capador, a retired member of Colombia’s special forces, was one of two Colombians reportedly killed by Haitian security forces last week after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in Port-au-Prince. More than a dozen citizens of the South American country have so far been arrested, as well as two Haitian Americans.
Continue reading...Call comes as outrage over Covid and corruption drags president’s ratings to lowest ever level
One of Brazil’s leading conservative newspapers has demanded the removal of the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, as public outrage over his coronavirus response and corruption dragged the rightwing populist’s ratings to their lowest ever level.
“Jair Bolsonaro is no longer in a position to remain in the presidency,” O Estado de São Paulo declared on Sunday as polls showed that for the first time a majority of citizens backed impeachment and considered their leader incapable of governing.
Continue reading...The five-year rule of the Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, who has died aged 53 after being assassinated at his home, was dominated by allegations of corruption and brutality. At the time of his death there was a dispute about the handover of power, and Moïse, who last year had dissolved the country’s parliament, was essentially running Haiti by decree, much as Napoleon had done more than 200 years before.
In 2016, Moïse inherited a country still trying to recover from the 2010 devastating earthquake as well as Hurricane Matthew, which had hit just a month before. However, under his presidency, Haitians endured worsening living standards, including rampant unemployment, in a nation where more than half the population live below the poverty line. Inflation spiralled upwards and food and fuel became scarcer.
Continue reading...The hospitalised wife of Haiti's assassinated president, Jovenel Moïse, has given her first public statement since being wounded in the attack that killed him, accusing enemies of wanting 'to kill his dream, his vision, his ideology'. But fresh questions have been raised over Haiti’s official narrative for the assassination, as uncertainty gripped the Caribbean country and the streets of the capital remained eerily quiet amid fears Haiti is lurching into a new phase of political and social upheaval
Continue reading...A voice recording on Martine Moïse’s Twitter page accuses enemies of trying to stop democratic change
The widow of the murdered Haitian president Jovenel Moïse has accused shadowy enemies of organising his assassination to stop democratic change, as a struggle for power intensified in the Caribbean nation.
Haiti has been reeling since Moïse was gunned down early on Wednesday at his home in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Martine Moïse, who was wounded in the attack, said her husband was targeted for political reasons.
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