The coal tycoon Chris Cline, a major Republican donor, has died in a helicopter crash outside Big Grand Cay, a string of islands he owned in the Bahamas.
In tweets, Donald Trump expressed sympathy for the loss of a “great businessman and energy expert” and said Cline was “a wonderful man and great Republican!”
Continue reading...One of Canada’s biggest pension funds has quietly divested from two private prison operators responsible for the detention of thousands of migrants along the US-Mexico border.
Late last year, the Guardian reported that the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) held nearly US$8m in stock in Geo Group and CoreCivic, which between them hold the lion’s share of contracts to manage Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities in the US.
Continue reading...In new disclosures, conservative magazine Veja says Sergio Moro, who led Operation Car Wash, guilty of serious ‘irregularities’
Brazil’s justice minister Sérgio Moro is facing renewed pressure to resign after the country’s leading conservative magazine waded into a snowballing scandal over his role in a mammoth anti-corruption investigation that helped reshape South America’s political landscape.
Related: Outcry after reports Brazil plans to investigate Glenn Greenwald
Continue reading...In withering report, human rights chief details how Maduro’s security forces allegedly torture members of the opposition
The UN has issued a withering appraisal of the human rights situation in Venezuela, as horrific details emerged of the injuries inflicted on a navy captain allegedly tortured to death during a crackdown on alleged plotters against president Nicolás Maduro.
A report by UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet – which follows a three-day mission to the South American country last month – accuses Maduro’s security forces of committing a series of “gross violations” against Venezuelan dissenters and urges him to disband a notorious special forces group blamed for a wave of politically-motivated killings.
Continue reading...The trial of Joshua Boyle, the former hostage of a Taliban-linked group in Afghanistan who was accused of violence against his wife, has resumed after the court ruled it would hear testimony about the couple’s sexual history.
Boyle was arrested at the couple’s former Ottawa apartment on New Year’s Eve 2017, just two months after he and Caitlan Coleman were released from five years of Taliban captivity.
Continue reading...Deforestation in Brazil’s portion of the Amazon rainforest rose more than 88% in June compared with the same month a year ago, the second consecutive month of rising forest destruction under the rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro.
According to data from Brazil’s space agency, deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rainforest totaled 920 sq km (355 sq miles).
Continue reading...Federal police reportedly asked money laundering unit to investigate the ‘financial activities’ of the US journalist
Brazil’s Bar Association, journalists and opposition lawmakers have reacted with outrage to reports that the country’s federal police plan to investigate the bank accounts of an American journalist who published leaked conversations between prosecutors and the graft-busting judge who is now Jair Bolsonaro’s justice minister.
The rightwing site the Antagonist (O Antagonista) reported on Tuesday that federal police had asked a money-laundering unit at Brazil’s finance ministry to investigate the “financial activities” of Glenn Greenwald.
Continue reading...Schoolchildren in Caldas take part in a voluntary project using a rubber doll with built-in software programmed to act like a newborn
Continue reading...Best views were in the Atacama desert, where a total eclipse has not occurred since 1592
Hundreds of thousands of tourists scattered across the north Chilean desert on Tuesday to experience a rare and irresistible combination for astronomy buffs: a total eclipse of the sun viewed from beneath the world’s clearest skies.
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, plunging the planet into darkness. It happens only rarely in any given spot across the globe.
Continue reading...Investigation exposes how Brazil’s huge beef sector continues to threaten health of world’s largest rainforest
The cows grazed under the midday Amazon sun, near a wooden bridge spanning a river. It was an idyllic scene of pastoral quiet, occasionally broken by a motorbike growling on the dirt road that cuts through part of the Lagoa do Triunfo cattle farm to a nearby community.
But this pasture is land that the farm has been forbidden to use for cattle since 2010, when it was embargoed by Brazil’s government environment agency Ibama for illegal deforestation. Nearby were more signs of fresh pasture: short grass, feeding troughs, and salt for cattle.
Continue reading...The EU-Mercosur trade deal is good news for Brazil’s huge beef industry but devastating for the rainforest and environment
European leaders have thrown the Amazon rainforest under a Volkswagen bus in a massive cows-for-cars trade deal with Brazil and three other South American nations.
The EU-Mercosur agreement – the largest in Europe’s history, according to officials – will make it cheaper for Brazilian farmers to export agricultural products, particularly beef, despite growing evidence that cattle ranching is the primary driver of deforestation.
Continue reading...Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Angie Valeria were brought to their final rest in ceremony attended by 200 relatives and friends
A Salvadoran man and his young daughter who drowned trying to cross into Texas were brought to their final rest on Monday, a week after a heartbreaking image of their bodies floating in the Rio Grande cast a spotlight on America’s migration crisis.
About 200 relatives and friends followed a hearse bearing the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, to La Bermeja municipal cemetery in southern San Salvador. The ceremony was private, and journalists were not allowed access.
Continue reading...Vehicles have been buried under several feet of hail after a severe storm in the western city. About 50 cars were swept away by an icy flash flood and several hundred buildings were reportedly damaged by hailstones
Continue reading...López Obrador remains broadly popular, likely due to success at upending a political system most voters perceived as riddled with corruption
His government has just signed off on a new trade deal with Canada and the US, and his diplomats managed to fend off punitive US tariffs, but Andrés Manuel López Obrador has long showed a crushing lack of interest in foreign affairs.
So instead of hobnobbing with other G20 leaders in Japan, the president known popularly as “Amlo” was in Mexico City, preparing to address thousands of supporters in the city’s central square on Monday.
Continue reading...The musky aroma hits you from the car park at the headquarters of Canopy Growth, the world’s largest cannabis company.
Inside this nondescript warehouse – an abandoned Hershey’s chocolate factory in Smiths Falls, Canada – awaits the stuff of a stoner’s wildest dreams. Myriad rooms teem with row upon row of bushy marijuana plants at various stages of maturity, under intense lamplight, swaying in the breeze of dozens of fans.
Continue reading...Air Canada’s planned C$520m purchase of Air Transat could be bad news for passengers who already pay double what Americans do
For most Canadians, flying from one corner of their country to the other can be a pricey endeavour – so expensive, in fact, that they could fly to Europe or Asia for nearly the same price.
Online travel agency Kiwi noted in its 2017 flight price index that Canadians pay more than twice the price Americans do for similar-distance domestic flights.
Continue reading...The US has imposed sanctions on Nicolasito, 29, who claims to be an economist and a flautist and has faced claims of nepotism
The Trump administration has slapped sanctions on the son of Nicolás Maduro, in the latest attempt to tighten the screws on Venezuela’s embattled leader.
The move by the US treasury department freezes any US assets belonging to the president’s son – Nicolás Maduro Guerra, or Nicolasito – and bars Americans from doing business with him.
Continue reading...Horror builds with each new report – children kept in cages, children taking care of infants, mothers who have been torn from their babies. What if it was your child?
Warning: graphic images
For as long as I have been a mother, I’ve had recurrent nightmares about water carrying my children away. In the dreams, my sons slip quietly beneath the surface, becoming blurry underwater shapes, and then disappearing completely. My panic is animal – a pulsing in my ears, static in my brain, a scream-howl building in my chest. I wake up thrashing against the water, searching desperately for my boys.
When the news broke of 23-month-old Valeria and her father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Salvadoran migrants who had been swept away by the Rio Grande, I was camping along a river in northern Arizona, without access to the internet. I had been photographing plants and making videos of the river to show my desert children, who were at home in Tucson with my parents. When I emerged from the woods, I came face-to-face with a gas station newspaper and saw it.
Continue reading...Hotel occupancy rates have dropped as concern grows that the seaweed is threatening key industry in the Mayan Riviera
Trying to ignore the rotten-eggs whiff drifting in from the shoreline, a team of municipal workers was scooping up wads of rotting brown seaweed from the beach of this Mexican beach town 40km (25 miles) south of Cancún.
But almost as fast as they could be cleared away, more clumps of algae were washing ashore, forming foul-smelling mounds across the white sands of the beach.
Continue reading...Dengue fever is one of the most deadly mosquito-borne diseases – half the world’s population is at risk from it. Adrienne Surprenant’s photos from the World Mosquito Program in Brazil capture the fight against it