Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Statement made no mention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor but Canada has tried to build global support to secure their release
China has lashed out against Canada for signing a declaration denouncing the arbitrary detention of foreign citizens, describing the move as a “despicable and hypocritical act” as relations between the two countries remain tense.
Earlier this week, Canada and 57 other nations, including the US, UK, Australia, Germany and Sweden, jointly signed a declaration condemning the use of arbitrary detention for political purposes.
Increasing land grabs endangering forest communities and wildlife as governments expand mining and agriculture to combat economic impact of Covid
Indigenous communities in some of the world’s most forested tropical countries have faced a wave of human rights abuses during the Covid-19 pandemic as governments prioritise extractive industries in economic recovery plans, according to a new report.
New mines, infrastructure projects and agricultural plantations in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Indonesia and Peru are driving land grabs and violence against indigenous peoples as governments seek to revive economies hit by the pandemic, research by the NGO Forest Peoples Programme has found.
Foreign minister says 100 countries have yet to give out vaccine
Three-quarters of all doses administered in just 10 countries
Mexico has made a plea at the UN security council for countries to stop hoarding vaccines against Covid-19 as poorer ones fall behind in the race to vaccinate their citizens.
Three-quarters of the first doses have been administered to citizens in only 10 countries that account for 60% of global gross domestic product (GDP), the Mexican foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, said, while in more than 100 countries no vaccines have been applied at all.
The Fania All-Stars player and record-label impresario worked with Latin music giants including Celia Cruz and fostered a more intense, political salsa sound
Johnny Pacheco, the co-founder of trailblazing salsa label Fania Records, has died aged 85. The cause was complications from pneumonia.
A representative for Fania said Pacheco was “the man most responsible for the genre of salsa music. He was a visionary and his music will live on eternally.”
Gun control campaigners appalled after Brazil’s pro-gun president announces four decrees to facilitate acquiring weapons
Jair Bolsonaro’s latest efforts to make guns more easily available to Brazilians have sparked anger and trepidation with some calling the moves a threat to the South American country’s young democracy.
Brazil’s pro-gun president announced four presidential decrees designed to facilitate legal access to weapons on Saturday morning, as the country’s coronavirus death toll swelled to nearly 240,000.
As the climate crisis worsens, Andrés Manuel López Obrador plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers
The men on the midnight shift smoked cigarettes and cracked jokes in the glow of their helmet lights as they prepared to go underground. They were loading safety equipment and coils of pipe onto wheelbarrows, in readiness for a second shift due to start working later that week.
“We’re reactivating the industry,” said Arturo Rivera Wong, who had just taken on 40 more workers at the mine he owns in the scrublands of the border state of Coahuila.
Peru’s foreign minister has resigned amid uproar over government officials being secretly vaccinated against coronavirus before the country recently received 1m doses for health workers facing a resurgence in the pandemic.
The president, Francisco Sagasti, confirmed that Elizabeth Astete had stepped down and told a local television channel that Peruvians should feel “outraged and angry about this situation that jeopardises the enormous effort of many Peruvians working on the frontline against Covid”.
Menem delivered short-lived economic stability in the 1990s and was known for his tabloid personal life
The flamboyant Argentine ex-President Carlos Menem died on Sunday at age 90 after long-term health problems, the country’s current president, Alberto Fernandez, announced in a tweet.
Menem led a colourful personal life while he pushed Argentina to an economic boom, but his two-term 1989-1999 presidency crumbled under the weight of corruption scandals and he spent years plotting an unlikely comeback.
The press conference in Wellington, held in response to the discovery of three community cases in Auckland, has now finished. As of 11.59PM tonight Auckland will be placed under tougher restrictions, at level three, while the rest of the country will be moved to level two restrictions. (Details of the alert levels can be found online here).
Ardern said she was asking the public “to be strong and to be kind”:
I know we all feel the same way when this happens, we all get that sense of - not again. But remember we have been here before and that means we know how to get out of this again, and that is together. If you know someone in Auckland reach out, please check on them. If you are in Auckland please check on your neighburs and ensure they are looked after and supported.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s director-general of health, said officials were working under the assumption that the new Auckland cases were one of the new variants of Covid-19. “Regardless of where people have come from, these are the common variants and we do know they are more transmissible,” he said.
Ardern said that the decision to introduce tougher restrictions was “not taken lightly”. However, the cost to the economy would be far greater, she said, if the country was slow to react.
Exclusive: US chains Walmart, Costco and Kroger selling Brazilian beef produced by JBS linked to destruction of Brazilian rainforest
Three of the biggest US grocery chains sell Brazilian beef produced by a controversial meat company linked to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, an investigation has revealed.
Food giants Walmart, Costco and Kroger – which together totalled net sales worth more than half a trillion dollars last year – are selling Brazilian beef products imported from JBS, the world’s largest meat company, which has been linked to deforestation.
Robert D Kaplan’s outstanding book makes a strong case for US engagement based on human rights and helping refugees
What adjective should describe “the American” active in foreign policy? Graham Greene chose “quiet”, as his character harmed a country he did not understand. Eugene Burdick and William Lederer used “ugly”.
Robert D Kaplan, one of America’s most thoughtful chroniclers of foreign affairs, proposes “good” to describe Bob Gersony, who in “a frugal monastic existence that has been both obscure and extraordinary” has devoted his life to using the power and treasure of the US to serve others through humanitarian action.
The new chief of defence staff has apologised after his message of ‘diversity, inclusion and culture change’ missed the mark
Institutions around the world are keenly aware that it is important not only to increase diversity and inclusion – but to do so in a transparent and public way.
The death of Keyla Martínez, 26, is being treated as a murder – she is one of 29 women killed in the country so far this year
Keyla Martínez screamed for help from inside the police cell, but no one came to save her.
Martínez, a 26-year-old trainee nurse from La Esperanza, western Honduras, died in police custody last weekend after being detained for breaching a coronavirus curfew.
A sleepy town in the Brazilian countryside has found itself at the centre of a coronavirus-fuelled real estate rush after plans to vaccinate its entire adult population were unveiled.
The research institute Butantan announced last weekend that it would vaccinate the entire adult population of Serrana, a little-known backwater 200 miles north of São Paulo, as part of a study into herd immunity.
Ontario’s special investigations unit concludes gunfire was cause of one-year-old’s death in Kawartha Lakes
Nearly three months after an armed confrontation in rural Canada, a police watchdog has concluded that a police bullet killed a one-year-old baby when officers opened fire on his father’s truck.
In its first public finding on Thursday, Ontario’s special investigations unit said that a review of evidence indicated police gunfire was the cause of the child’s death on 26 November.
Medical teams working to immunise Brazil’s remote indigenous villages against the coronavirus have encountered fierce resistance in some communities where evangelical missionaries are stoking fears of the vaccine, say tribal leaders and advocates.
On the São Francisco reservation in the state of Amazonas, Jamamadi villagers sent health workers packing with bows and arrows when they visited by helicopter this month, said Claudemir da Silva, an Apurinã leader representing indigenous communities on the Purus river, a tributary of the Xingú.
Two-thirds of those killed worked to protect environmental, land and indigenous peoples’ rights, while those providing Covid relief also faced reprisals
At least 331 human rights defenders promoting social, environmental, racial and gender justice in 25 countries were murdered in 2020, with scores more beaten, detained and criminalised because of their work, analysis has found.
Latin America, the most dangerous continent in the world in which to protect environmental, land and human rights, accounted for more than three-quarters of all the murders of human rights defenders in 2020. In Colombia, where activists are routinely targeted by armed groups despite a 2016 peace deal, 177 such deaths were recorded, more than half of the global total. The Philippines was the second deadliest country with 25 murders, followed by Honduras, Mexico, Afghanistan, Brazil and Guatemala.
Two men and a woman swam to Anguilla Cay after boat capsized
Unclear if Cubans were trying to reach United States
The US Coast Guard rescued three Cuban nationals stranded on a desert island for roughly five weeks, after officers saw the group waving a makeshift flag to gain their attention.
The group, including two men and a woman, had been living on an uninhabited Bahamian island, Anguilla Cay, for 33 days after their boat capsized.
Growing opposition to the lifting of mining protections in Alberta has forced the Canadian province to backtrack
To the east of the Bluebird Valley ranch, the grasslands of the Canadian prairies extend beyond the horizon. To the west, the fields rise, and then sharply erupt into the Rocky Mountains.
Cattle graze the 3,600 hectares (9,000 acres) of the Bluebird, an hour south-west of Calgary, and on hot summer days rancher Jolayne Gardner’s children jump into the chilly waters of a creek that threads the rolling hills.