President Alberto Fernández says he intends to put a bill before congress in next 10 days
Argentina is on track to become the first major Latin American country to legalise abortion.
Its president, Alberto Fernández, said on Sunday that he intends to send a legal abortion bill to congress in the next 10 days.
Continue reading...Researchers enter row over legitimacy of ex-Bolivian president, who quit after violent protests
A row over the legitimacy of Bolivia’s longest-serving leader, Evo Morales, has been reignited after researchers in the US questioned allegations that fraud was used to help the country’s leader of 14 years win the last election.
Writing in the Washington Post, the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data and science lab have entered what has become a fraught debate about Morales’s legacy and whether he was forced to step down due to an attempt to manipulate the vote or, rather, pushed out as part of a military coup.
Continue reading...High street coffee shop giant Starbucks has been caught up in a child labour row after an investigation revealed that children under 13 were working on farms in Guatemala that supply the chain with its beans.
Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte. The beans are also supplied to Nespresso, owned by Nestlé. Last week, actor George Clooney, the advertising face of Nespresso, praised the investigation and said he was saddened by its findings.
Continue reading...Vincent Brown’s military history sheds precious light on a brutally suppressed revolt which paved the road to abolition
By 1690, Jamaica was the jewel of Britain’s American possessions. An economy largely based on the production of sugar brought wealth and led to the beginnings of an imperial system.
Related: Another Mother review: Jamaica memoir skips island's darker history
Continue reading...Case brought by three Eritreans against Nevsun Resources can continue as companies operating overseas face new legal risk
A Vancouver-based mining company can be sued in Canada for alleged human rights abuses overseas including allegations of modern slavery, Canada’s supreme court has ruled.
The decision means three Eritreans who filed a civil suit against Nevsun Resources in British Columbia can continue their case in a lower court.
Continue reading...An unprecedented movement has been triggered by police raids on Indigenous land – and dialed up the pressure on Justin Trudeau
Since a police raid on an Indigenous territory at the start of February, a wave of civil disobedience has surged over Canada.
Mohawks in Ontario and Quebec have erected rail blockades that paralyzed passenger and freight travel on some lines. Other protesters – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – have followed suit, blockading tracks across the country. Thirty-seven people were arrested in Toronto this week for standing on commuter tracks during evening rush hour, paralyzing the city’s Union Station.
Continue reading...Scheme provides clean water and helps foster trust between indigenous groups
Romelia Mendúa was handing out plantain drinks served in aluminium bowls. Guests were seated in a hammock and on the bare wooden floor. Beyond the window was the lush vegetation of Ecuador’s north-eastern Amazon.
Chocula, as the drink is called, is made by mashing plantains into water, and is a common refreshment in the Amazon. But the water in Mendúa’s chocula was no ordinary water. It came through a tap in her kitchen connected to two tanks outside collecting and filtering rainfall.
Continue reading...My friend Jenny Vernon, who has died aged 75, was a museum curator who worked at Gainsborough Old Hall in Lincolnshire and later became keeper of Lincoln Castle. But she also had a keen interest in, and knowledge of, Arctic Canada, which she nurtured throughout her adult life.
Jenny was born in Bromley, Kent, to George Vestey, a metallurgist, and Violet (nee Grant), a clerical worker. She spent most of her childhood in Hertfordshire, where she went to school in St Albans. After studying geography at Manchester University she landed a job in 1966 as a geographer with the Canadian government, carrying out field work in the maritime provinces and publishing reports on settlement patterns.
Continue reading...Jair Bolsonaro’s apparent endorsement of protests designed to cow Brazil’s democratic institutions has sparked outrage across the political spectrum with one lawmaker warning of a return to the dark days of dictatorship if the demonstrations are not opposed.
Hardcore supporters of Brazil’s far-right president are planning nationwide protests on 15 March and have been flooding social media with propaganda videos and fliers attacking members of Congress – and even proposing a return to military rule under Bolsonaro.
Continue reading...The group played a key role in the election of the country’s far-right president and have become increasingly assertive
With drummers pounding out samba rhythms through the rain, this might almost have been just another one of the hundreds of street parties of Rio’s world-famous carnival.
But nobody at the I’m Full of Love Samba Street Party on Copacabana Beach was drunk or in costume, few bystanders were dancing – and the group on the sound truck was singing about Jesus.
Continue reading...The carnival in Coyolillo, a town in the coastal state of Veracruz in Mexico, dates back more than 100 years. This non-religious festival includes parades, dances, music and feasting and is the heritage of sugar cane workers and slaves of African origin freed from farms. The event is known for the colourful robes, capes and animal masks – of bulls, deer, goats and cows – worn by participants. As such, the carnival is a unique expression of African-Mexican folk art
Continue reading...A Costa Rican indigenous defender has been killed by an armed mob while trying to reclaim ancestral land – the latest in a spate of violence targeting native communities in Central America’s safest country.
Yehry Rivera, 45, from the Brörán community in Térraba, was shot dead around 11pm on Monday after being surrounded by a group of angry locals armed with sticks, machetes, stones and at least one gun.
Continue reading...Proposal would include for the first time people who are not in immediate risk of dying
Canada’s government has proposed broadening a 2016 law on medically assisted death to include for the first time people who were not at immediate risk of dying.
Ottawa made the announcement after a court in the province of Quebec last September said part of the law on physician-assisted suicide was too limited and should therefore be considered unconstitutional.
Continue reading...One of every three people in Venezuela is struggling to put enough food on the table to meet minimum nutrition requirements as the nation’s severe economic contraction and political upheaval persists, according to a new study by the UN World Food Programme.
A nationwide survey based on data from 8,375 questionnaires reveals a startling picture of the large number of Venezuelans surviving off a diet consisting largely of tubers and beans as hyperinflation renders many salaries worthless.
Continue reading...Several members of the Tyendinaga Mohawk nation arrested in growing political crisis for Justin Trudeau
Police in Canada have removed Indigenous activists from a railway line in Ontario, where a two-week protest against a contentious natural gas pipeline has blocked train traffic and fueled a growing political crisis for prime minister Justin Trudeau.
The Wet’suwet’en nation have lived on their territories in what is now British Columbia for thousands of years. They have never signed treaties or sold their land to Canada.
Continue reading...Fears are growing over an increasingly febrile security situation in Haiti after police and soldiers fought a deadly gun battle which lasted for hours outside the country’s presidential palace.
The exchange of gunfire on Sunday shattered the opening of Haiti’s annual carnival as police and soldiers exchanged volleys of gunfire sending bystanders diving for cover.
Continue reading...Brazil’s famed carnival kicked off in earnest on Saturday as millions of revellers poured into the streets, some of whom took aim at the nation’s deeply polarised politics. Most partiers, though, were dressed in distinctly apolitical garb, ranging from mermaid to cowboy costumes, suggesting that during carnival, Brazilians are focused on revelry first, and politics second
After six years of economic crisis in their neighboring country, Brazilian officials say more and more unaccompanied minors are arriving
Jesús Pérez was 16 when he crossed into Brazil in June, fleeing a life of hunger on the streets of his disintegrating homeland.
In Pacaraima, the Brazilian border town that is the main entry point for fleeing Venezuelans, he told social workers he hoped for a fresh start.
Continue reading...PM demands end to ‘untenable and unacceptable’ rail blockades erected in support of Indigenous activists fighting gas pipeline
Justin Trudeau has demanded that protesters lift railway blockades that have been erected across Canada in support of Indigenous activists who are fighting a natural gas pipeline.
“The situation as it currently stands is unacceptable and untenable,” the prime minister said on Friday afternoon. “Canadians have been patient. Our government has been patient. But it has been two weeks, and the barricades need to come down now.”
Continue reading...Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has dispatched army and national guard troops to the north-eastern state of Ceará in an attempt to quell a brewing security crisis triggered by a police officers’ strike.
Related: Rio Carnival takes a stand against Bolsonaro's divisive rhetoric
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