Matthew Gibbard was killed and his son Estefan injured in Argentina after being targeted by robbers
A British tourist was killed and his son seriously wounded when they were shot outside a luxury hotel in Buenos Aires during a robbery.
Matthew Gibbard, aged 50 and his son Estefan, 28, were targeted on Saturday by robbers on a motorcycle, supported by accomplices in a car, according to local reports.
Continue reading...Destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest in November more than doubled the same period last year
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon jumped to the highest level for the month of November since record-keeping began in 2015, according to preliminary government data published.
Destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest totalled 563 square kms in November, which is more than double the area in the same month last year, according to the country’s space research agency INPE on Friday.
Continue reading...Erisvan Soares Guajajara’s body was found with knife wounds in Maranhão region
A 15-year-old indigenous boy has been murdered in Brazil on the edge of a heavily-deforested indigenous reserve in the state of Maranhão, on the fringes of the Amazon.
The murder, the fourth from the Guajajara tribe in recent weeks, came as a wave of racist abuse against indigenous people swept social media in the state.
Continue reading...Lawyers for customers of an insolvent cryptocurrency exchange have asked police to exhume the body of the company’s founder, amid efforts to recover about $190m in Bitcoin which were locked in an online black hole after his death.
Miller Thomson LLP sent a letter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Friday, requesting authorities “conduct an exhumation and postmortem autopsy” on the body of Gerald Cotten, founder of QuadrigaCX, citing what the firm called the “questionable circumstances” around his death earlier this year.
Continue reading...More than 17,000 have been hospitalized in what officials say is mounting crisis
Nearly 14,000 people in Canada have died from opioid overdoses in the last four years and more than 17,000 have been hospitalized in what officials say is a mounting crisis that shows few signs of relief.
In a report titled Opioid-related harms in Canada released this week, Canada’s public health agency outlined the scope of the crisis.
Continue reading...Andrew Scheer announced intention to step down shortly before reports he used funds for his children’s eduction
The leader of Canada’s Conservatives has resigned, following mounting frustration over a disappointing performance in October’s general election and reports that he used party funds to help pay for his children’s private school education.
Andrew Scheer announced his intention to step down at an emergency caucus meeting on Thursday morning. Shortly after news of his resignation broke, however, Global News reported that he had used party funds to pay for his children’s private school education – allegedly without knowledge or approval from the funding board.
Continue reading...Melting sea ice is prompting fevered dreams of ever-easier access, and a renewed jockeying among Arctic nations for status, profit and ownership
I could not keep my eyes off the graves, could not stop staring at them even as I walked away, turning repeatedly to look over my shoulder at them as I slogged my way across the gravel-strewn shore of Beechey Island until they disappeared from view.
It was profoundly saddening to contemplate their presence on a low-lying, windswept outpost of the Canadian Arctic, to imagine the fear and loneliness those buried here must have felt as they faced death in the harshest of conditions, thousands of miles and a world removed from their homes. And yet, they were the lucky ones, the first casualties of an expedition that vanished 173 years ago while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage between Atlantic and Pacific, whose remaining members met their doom after their ships became frozen in never-yielding sea ice, who perished one by one waiting for a summer that never came.
Continue reading...Outrage has erupted in Colombia after a young woman participating in anti-government protests was grabbed by riot police in body armour, forced into an unmarked vehicle and driven away.
Video of the incident showed the woman sobbing and screaming “Help! The police have kidnapped me!” through the window of the black Chevrolet sedan as it drove away from the demonstration near the National University in Bogotá on Wednesday night.
Continue reading...Company hails start of the ‘electric aviation age’ after 15-minute test flight in Vancouver
The world’s first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes.
“This proves that commercial aviation in all-electric form can work,” said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Australian engineering firm magniX.
Continue reading...Genaro García Luna, who ran Mexico’s federal police for six years, charged with accepting briefcases of cash to protect Sinaloa cartel
A former minister who was considered an architect of Mexico’s war on drugs has been arrested on charges that he allowed the Sinaloa cartel to operate with impunity in exchange for briefcases stuffed with cash.
Genaro García Luna, who oversaw the creation of Mexico’s federal police, was arrested in Texas on Monday.
Continue reading...Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has derided Greta Thunberg after the teenage climate activist added her voice to growing international condemnation of a surge of anti-indigenous violence in the Amazon.
Related: Amazon indigenous leaders killed in Brazil drive-by shooting
Continue reading...Pascal Canfin says he cannot back deal with South American bloc owing to ‘political context’
The EU’s trade deal with four South American countries will not be ratified in its current form because it contradicts Europe’s plans to confront the climate emergency, a leading MEP has said.
Pascal Canfin, a Frenchman who chairs the European parliament’s environment committee, said he could not vote in favour of the EU trade deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay (the bloc known as Mercosur).
Continue reading...The veteran Spanish socialist has a reputation for plain speaking, and a brief to build a more assertive EU
It has been called Europe’s “valley of tears”. But it isn’t in National Geographic; rather it is the monthly pilgrimage of the European Union’s 28 foreign ministers to Brussels or Luxembourg to discuss the woes of the world.
And the man who coined the phrase, Josep Borrell, a socialist veteran of Spanish politics, was not paying a compliment. He described the EU foreign affairs council as “more a valley of tears than a centre of decision-making” because “it’s where all the open sores of humanity come. They tell us their sufferings, we express our condolences and concern … but no capacity for action comes out of it and we just move on to the next one.”
Continue reading...If you drink the water in Ciudad Juárez, there you’ll stay, goes the saying – Se toma agua de Juárez, allí se queda. It’s not a reference to the quality of drinking water (about which polemic abounds because it is so dirty) but to the beguiling lure of this dusty and dangerous yet strong and charismatic city. It’s a dictum that might be applied to the whole 2,000-mile Mexico-US borderland of which Juárez and its sister city on the US side, El Paso, form the fulcrum.
Ten years ago, I returned from several months’ immersion along that frontier, reporting on a narco-cartel war for this newspaper and eventually writing a book, Amexica, about the terrain astride the border, land that has a single identity – that belongs to both countries and yet to neither. A frontier at once porous and harsh: across which communities live and a million people traverse every day, legally, as do hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods annually.
Continue reading...As conflict racks the nation and anger at a political scandal grows, Haitians are rallying to the country’s founding father more than 200 years after his assassination
On the walls across Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a stencilled image can be found. Depicting a figure in a Napoleonic-era cocked hat and military frock coat, it first emerged amid the country’s long-running political and security crisis that began last year.
The man portrayed is Jean-Jacques Dessalines – Emperor Jacques I of Haiti – the rebel general who defeated French forces at the battle of Vertières to found the state of Haiti in 1804. And it is not only in graffiti that Dessalines’s two centuries-old legacy has been seen in the recent months of political turmoil that has gripped the country.
Continue reading...As air quality plummets on the Australian east coast as a result of devastating bush fires, residents of cities clogged with smog share their coping strategies
The east coast of Australia is in the grip of a bushfire and air pollution crisis. But plummeting air quality levels are a regular occurrence in cities in India, Latin America and China. Here, residents and experts from Delhi, Beijing and Mexico City explain how they survive the smog.
Continue reading...Bolivia’s toppled president flies out of Mexico for what his former health minister says is a medical appointment
Bolivia’s recently toppled president, Evo Morales, has left Mexico for Cuba as part of what some observers suspect is the first step in a bid to stage a dramatic political comeback.
On Friday night, less than a month after being forced into exile in Mexico, Morales flew out of the country on a plane bound for Havana.
Continue reading...A Chilean protest song about rape culture and victim shaming has become an anthem for feminists around the world.
Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path) was first performed in late November as Chile’s nationwide uprising against social inequality entered its second month.
Here's a look at how the song, and its accompanying dance moves, have spread across Latin America and the world.
Continue reading...Stingless insects also improve livelihoods of rainforest’s people, say environmentalists
Under an Amazonian canopy of guava and Xylopia trees, Neida Pereira lifts the lid of a beehive, gently lowers an unprotected hand into the swarm, and smiles as she lifts it out unscathed but covered in pollinators and honey.
For the 49-year-old educator and environmentalist, the stingless Amazonian insects are the greatest ally she has found in a decades-long campaign to halt the destruction of the rainforest and improve the livelihoods of its people.
Continue reading...The crisis that toppled Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, last month has – for now, at least – settled into a political conflict rather than a struggle on the streets. But Bolivia’s prospects depend upon the rightwing interim government’s swift delivery of free and fair elections and its willingness to reach out to all communities.
Though the government has now pulled back to some degree, its initial actions instead made its leading figures and supporters look vindictive, ruthless and bigoted. Interim president Jeanine Áñez vowed to unify the country when she took power – but packed the cabinet with members of the conservative elites and boasted that “God has allowed the Bible back into the palace” of a secular country. She exempted the military from criminal prosecution when maintaining public order; at least 17 indigenous protesters died after security forces opened fire. Police cut the indigenous Wiphala flag from their uniforms and anti-Morales demonstrators set fire to it. The interior minister has vowed to jail Mr Morales, in exile in Mexico, for 30 years for terrorism and sedition.
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