Lockdown hit LGBTQ+ communities hard but even as Pride events are called off there is hope and a promise that the parades will return
This month, for the second year in a row, there was no Pride parade in San Francisco, arguably the city most laden with history and symbolism for the LGBTQ+ community.
It is a decision Fred Lopez, who took over as executive director of San Francisco Pride at the beginning of last year describes as “heartbreaking”.
Continue reading...Adults will be able to apply for permits to grow and consume cannabis after decision that moves country toward legalisation
Mexico’s supreme court has struck down laws prohibiting the use of recreational marijuana, moving the country toward cannabis legalisation even as the country’s congress drags its feet on a legalisation bill.
In an 8-3 decision on Monday, the court ruled that sections of the country’s general health law prohibiting personal consumption and home cultivation of marijuana were unconstitutional.
Continue reading...Two more Catholic churches on First Nations reserves in western Canada have been destroyed by fires that investigators are once again treating as suspicious.
Over the weekend, crews in southern British Columbia responded to early morning blazes at St Ann’s Church on Upper Similkameen Indian Band land, and the Chopaka Church on the lands of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band. Both churches, built from wood and more than 100 years old, were burned to the ground.
Continue reading...Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Pride month is celebrated in June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Manhattan. Although the coronavirus pandemic curtailed festivities, many revellers adapted to the new circumstances
Continue reading...How did a lorry carrying 273 dead bodies end up stranded on the outskirts of Guadalajara? By Matthew Bremner
Continue reading...British Columbian village sets new record, with most of western Canada subject to heat warning
Canada has set its highest temperature on record after a village in British Columbia reached 46.1C (115F) on Sunday.
The temperature in Lytton, in the south of Canada’s western-most province, surpassed the previous national high of 45C (113F), set in Saskatchewan in 1937.
Continue reading...The man who led the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission insists an independent investigation into decades of abuse of Indigenous children is essential
Canada urgently needs an independent investigation into the deaths of thousands of Indigenous children at church-run residential schools if the country ever hopes to finally confront the horrors of its colonial past, the man who led the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has told the Guardian.
Murray Sinclair, a former senator and one of the country’s first Indigenous judges, warned that the “undiscovered truths” of the schools are probably far more devastating than many Canadians realize – including the deliberate killing of children by school staff and the likelihood that such crimes were covered up.
Continue reading...Vice-president faced with colossal task as migrants live with brutal reality of arduous journey and border restrictions
The sun beat down on the 30ft border fence that separates El Paso, Texas from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as temperatures headed towards 100F on the southern border that stands as a symbol for so much in American politics.
Related: Kamala Harris says US-Mexico border situation is ‘tough’ but claims progress
Continue reading...Iván Duque says ‘cowardly’ attack will not stop him tackling drug trafficking, terrorism and organised crime
Colombia’s president, Iván Duque, said a helicopter carrying him and several senior officials came under fire in the southern Catatumbo region bordering Venezuela, in a rare instance of a direct attack on a presidential aircraft.
Duque said everyone on board the helicopter was safe, including the defense minister, Diego Molano; the interior minister, Daniel Palacios and the governor of Norte de Santander state, Silvano Serrano.
Continue reading...• PM responds to discovery of graves at Indigenous schools
• Trudeau stops short of ordering national investigation
Justin Trudeau has said that Canadians are “horrified and ashamed” by their government’s longtime policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend boarding schools where nearly 1,000 unmarked graves have now been discovered – but stopped short of launching a national investigation.
An estimated 751 unmarked graves were recently discovered on the grounds of the former Marieval Indian residential school in Saskatchewan which operated from 1899 to 1997. Last month, 215 remains were reported at a similar school in British Columbia.
Continue reading...Televised congressional investigation looks at political decisions that lead to crisis that has killed half a million
A congressional inquiry into Brazil’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic has found mounting evidence that Jair Bolsonaro’s administration committed “crimes against life”, according to the senior politician leading the investigation.
Launched in April to scrutinize the government’s handling of a crisis that has killed half a million citizens, the nationally televised investigation is digging into the political decisions that led up to one of the cruelest moments in the country’s history.
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Mexico’s health ministry on Thursday reported 5,340 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country and 221 more fatalities, Reuters reports.
It brings the total figures to 2,493,087 infections and 232,068 deaths.
Italy reported 28 coronavirus-related deaths on Thursday compared to 30 the day before, Reuters reports.
The health ministry said the daily tally of new infections fell to 927 from 951 on Wednesday.
Continue reading...A First Nation in Canada’s Saskatchewan province is treating a now-defunct residential school as a “crime scene” following the discovery of 751 unmarked graves just weeks after a similar discovery in British Columbia prompted a fresh reckoning over the country’s colonial past.
Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation said that the graves were found on the site of the Marieval Indian residential school, also known as Grayson, after a search with ground-penetrating radar was launched on 2 June.
Continue reading...• Three protesters injured and three police hit by arrows
• Congress mulls diluting protection for indigenous territories
Riot police have fired teargas and rubber bullets at indigenous activists protesting outside Brazil’s congress against new legislation that would undermine legal protections for indigenous territories, and open them up to commercial agriculture and mining.
Thick clouds of teargas enveloped the demonstrators, including children and the elderly, as police attempted to clear the camp in Brasília on Tuesday where they have been protesting for the past two weeks.
Continue reading...Nicaragua’s most prominent journalist has fled the country for a second time after police raided his house during a widening crackdown on opposition figures by the country’s Sandinista rulers.
Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the editor of the Confidencial website and a member of one of the country’s most influential political families, said on Tuesday he had left the Central American country to “safeguard his freedom”.
Continue reading...C-230 would require government to study effect of pollution and industry on marginalized people but conservatives could sink plan
For generations, marginalized communities in Canada have feared that heavy industry is slowly poisoning their air, land and water.
Related: America's dirty divide: how environmental racism leaves the vulnerable behind
Continue reading...Protest leaders have agreed to pause mass marches as hospital ICUs struggle to cope with surging coronavirus cases
Related: ‘This is a revolution’: the faces of Colombia’s protests
Marisol Bejarano, an intensive care unit doctor at El Tunal hospital in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, has watched people die – slowly and far from family – since the pandemic began.
Continue reading...They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature
Visions of “lost cities” in the jungle have consumed western imaginations since Europeans first visited the tropics of Asia, Africa and the Americas. From the Lost City of Z to El Dorado, a thirst for finding ancient civilisations and their treasures in perilous tropical forest settings has driven innumerable ill-fated expeditions. This obsession has seeped into western societies’ popular ideas of tropical forest cities, with overgrown ruins acting as the backdrop for fear, discovery and life-threatening challenges in countless films, novels and video games.
Throughout these depictions runs the idea that all ancient cities and states in tropical forests were doomed to fail. That the most resilient occupants of tropical forests are small villages of poison dart-blowing hunter-gatherers. And that vicious vines and towering trees – or, in the case of The Jungle Book, a boisterous army of monkeys – will inevitably claw any significant human achievement back into the suffocating green whence it came. This idea has been boosted by books and films that focus on the collapse of particularly enigmatic societies such as the Classic Maya. The decaying stone walls, the empty grand structures and the deserted streets of these tropical urban leftovers act as a tragic warning that our own way of life is not as secure as we would like to assume.
Continue reading...Fear has invaded the Mexican border city of Reynosa after a weekend of violence in which 19 people were killed, including taxis drivers, workers and a nursing student, and security forces responded with operations that left four suspects dead.
This city across the border from McAllen, Texas, is a key trafficking point, and has long been accustomed to cartel violence. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Monday that evidence indicated that 15 of the victims were innocent bystanders. The other four dead were suspected gunmen from a group that drove into the northern border city of Reynosa and opened fire indiscriminately.
Continue reading...Country at a ‘tipping point’ that could affect wider region, experts warn, as ‘donor fatigue’ causes aid shortfall
The continuing exodus of millions of Venezuelans is reaching “a tipping point” as the response to the crisis remains critically underfunded.
More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships. It has become the largest external displacement crisis in the region’s history, and the most underfunded.
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