Category Archives: Americas

‘We’re going to stand up to Trump,’ says Mark Carney in second Canadian election debate

Posted on by

PM focuses on threat from across the border as most polls show his Liberals leading Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party in tight race

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, faced sustained attacks from his Conservative rival at an election debate on Thursday but the Liberal leader sought to focus attention on what he calls Canada’s top threat: Donald Trump, the US president.

Most opinion polls show Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party trailing Carney’s Liberals ahead of the 28 April vote for Canada’s federal government.

Continue reading...

Maryland senator meets Kilmar Ábrego García in El Salvador amid battle over US return

Posted on by

Chris Van Hollen posts photo on X but does not provide update on status of man wrongly deported from US

The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen met in El Salvador with Kilmar Ábrego García, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.

Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Ábrego García’s wife “to pass along his message of love”.

Continue reading...

Video shows Ice agents smashing car window to detain asylum seeker

Posted on by

Lawyer says officials were looking for someone else while taking Juan Francisco Mendez in Massachusetts on Monday

A Massachusetts family is demanding answers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), complaining its agents smashed a car window with a large hammer and detained a man whom they say had applied for asylum.

A lawyer for the family also claims agents were not looking for the man in the car, Juan Francisco Mendez, when they grabbed him on Monday in New Bedford while he was driving to a dental appointment. He is now believed to have been taken into Ice detention.

Continue reading...

Cory Booker to visit El Salvador in effort to return wrongly deported man to US

Posted on by

Democrats press Trump administration to follow supreme court order to bring back Kilmar Ábrego García

Cory Booker plans to travel to El Salvador, a source familiar with the New Jersey senator’s itinerary said, as Democrats seek to pressure the Trump administration to return a wrongly deported Maryland resident.

Booker’s trip to the Central American country would come after the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen traveled there this week to meet with his constituent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian national deported last month in what the Trump administration acknowledged was an “administrative error”. Despite a supreme court ruling saying his administration must “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return, Trump has refused to take steps to do so, and El Salvador’s government on Wednesday denied Van Hollen a meeting with the deportee.

Continue reading...

Kilmar Ábrego García’s wife rejects Trump officials’ depictions of him as ‘violent’

Posted on by

Jennifer Vasquez Sura criticizes DHS’s attempt to smear her wrongly deported husband over 2021 civil protective order

The wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, has strongly criticized the Trump administration’s attempt to smear his character, saying a temporary restraining order against him was “out of caution” and that “he is a loving partner and father” who is being denied justice.

Jennifer Vasquez Sura said she “acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar” when she got the civil protective order in 2021, according to a statement emailed to the Baltimore Sun.

Continue reading...

Macron announces joint commission with Haiti amid calls for reparations

Posted on by

France imposed harsh ‘ransom’ after revolution that campaigners say stunted Caribbean country’s development

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has announced a joint commission with Haiti to examine the countries’ shared past as Haitian campaigners demand a reimbursement of billions of dollars worth of “ransom” paid to France.

Macron announced his intention to create the commission as campaigners renewed calls for reparations on the bicentenary of an agreement to pay 150m francs to France in 1825 to compensate slave-owning colonists after the Haitian Revolution.

Continue reading...

New daily weight-loss pill shows success at clinical trial

Posted on by

Orforglipron also reduced blood sugar levels in participants with type 2 diabetes

A significant trial of a daily weight-loss pill has found that it helped people to shed the pounds and reduce their blood sugar levels, making it a contender to join the new wave of drugs that combat obesity and diabetes.

People who took a 36mg pill of orforglipron lost an average of 7.3kg (16lbs) over nine months, according to results from a phase 3 clinical trial reported by the drug’s manufacturer, Eli Lilly, on Thursday.

Continue reading...

‘Who is going to face Mr Trump’: Canada leaders’ debate dominated by US crisis

Posted on by

Mark Carney’s Liberals have surged in the polls since Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada, scuppering Conservative calls for change after Trudeau era

Prime Minister Mark Carney said the key question in Canada’s upcoming election is who is best to deal with Donald Trump as he faced his Conservative rival in a French-language leaders’ debate on Wednesday.

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said during the debate Canada needs change after a decade of Liberal party rule and Carney is just like his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Carney responded: “Mr Poilievre is not Justin Trudeau. I’m not Justin Trudeau either. In this election the question is who is going to face Mr Trump.”

Continue reading...

US senator says El Salvador denied request to meet Kilmar Ábrego García

Posted on by

Chris Van Hollen condemns ‘unjust situation’ and says vice-president blocked access to wrongly deported man

Maryland’s Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen says the government of El Salvador has denied his request to visit Kilmar Ábrego García, his constituent who was wrongly deported to the Central American country last month.

Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday with the intention of meeting Ábrego García at the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), where US authorities have said that the Maryland resident is being held along with others deported at Donald Trump’s orders.

Continue reading...

US judge finds probable cause to hold Trump officials in contempt over alien act deportations

Posted on by

Judge also warned he could name independent prosecutor if White House stonewalled contempt proceedings

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that there was probable cause to hold Trump officials in criminal contempt for violating his temporary injunction that barred the use of the Alien Enemies Act wartime power to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members.

In a scathing 46-page opinion, James Boasberg, the chief US district judge for Washington, wrote that senior Trump officials could either return the people who were supposed to have been protected by his injunction, or face contempt proceedings.

Continue reading...

Canada’s Green party removed at last minute from election debates

Posted on by

Upheaval follows decision to shift timing of first debate over fears of clash with Montreal Canadiens ice hockey game

Canada’s Green party has been removed from the country’s two election debates amid accusations it would “undermine the integrity” of the events, just hours before leaders square off in Montreal.

The last-minute upheaval follows a decision to shift the timing of the first televised debate on Wednesday evening over fears the French language showdown would clash with a closely watched Montreal Canadiens ice hockey game.

Continue reading...

Ecuador’s VP accuses president of ‘violating democracy’ in election win

Posted on by

Verónica Abad claims Daniel Noboa, her former running mate, used state power to tilt the vote

Ecuador’s vice-president, Verónica Abad, has accused the country’s president – her former running mate Daniel Noboa – of “violating the democratic code” by using the state apparatus to gain an advantage over the other candidates in the country’s runoff election.

In Sunday’s vote, the rightwing incumbent defeated the leftist Luisa González by a considerable margin after narrowly beating her in the first round.

Although Abad said she did not support the opposition’s claim that electoral fraud occurred during the vote, she argued that the election was unfair because Noboa refused to step down from office while running – as required by the constitution.

Continue reading...

The great Mississippi tops list of most endangered rivers amid fears over Trump rollbacks

Posted on by

Cuts to disaster agency and deregulation of fossil fuels, plus rise of water-guzzling datacentres, highlighted in new report

The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal climate disaster agency – and the full-throttle deregulation of fossil fuels and water-guzzling datacentres – could prove catastrophic for America’s endangered rivers, threatening the food, water and livelihoods of millions of people, according to a new report.

American Rivers’ annual most-endangered rivers list lays bare a myriad of human-made threats including floods, drought and other extreme weather events driven by the climate crisis, as well as industrial pollution and poor river management – all of which Trump’s regulatory rollbacks will almost inevitably make worse.

Continue reading...

Democratic senator heads to El Salvador to try to visit Kilmar Ábrego García

Posted on by

Chris Van Hollen warns of ‘constitutional crisis’ and says he hopes to report back to family on Maryland man’s condition

Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland will travel to El Salvador on Wednesday and attempt to visit Kilmar Ábrego García, a constituent whose deportation and incarceration in the Central American country, he warns, has tipped the United States into a constitutional crisis.

In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Van Hollen said he hopes to learn of Ábrego García’s condition and convey it to his family, who also live in the state he represents.

Continue reading...

Canadian universities report jump in US applicants amid Trump crackdown

Posted on by

UBC and others report spike in interest from US citizens as Trump withholds funds and revokes foreign student visas

More students living in the United States are applying to Canadian universities or expressing interest in studying north of the border as Donald Trump cuts federal funding to universities and revokes foreign student visas.

Officials at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Vancouver campus said the school reported a 27% jump in graduate applications as of 1 March from US citizens for programs starting in the 2025 academic year, compared with all of 2024.

Continue reading...

Ex-Peru president Ollanta Humala given 15-year sentence for money laundering

Posted on by

Sentenced with wife Nadine Heredia, Humala is third president of Peru imprisoned for corruption in past 20 years

A Peruvian court has sentenced former president Ollanta Humala and his wife, Nadine Heredia, to 15 years in prison for laundering funds received from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to finance Humala’s 2006 and 2011 campaigns.

The judges of the national superior court found that Humala and Heredia received several million dollars in illegal contributions for these campaigns from Odebrecht and the government of the then Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.

Continue reading...

Ice deports Venezuelan teen despite reportedly knowing he was not a target

Posted on by

Merwil Gutiérrez sent from New York to El Salvador prison although family says he has no criminal history or gang ties

A 19-year-old Venezuelan in New York City reportedly was apprehended by Trump administration immigration authorities and deported to El Salvador despite agents’ realizing he was not whom they meant to arrest in a targeted operation.

Merwil Gutiérrez, whose family opened an asylum case after arriving in the US, was deported from the Bronx to the notorious Cecot prison in El Salvador despite his relatives’ insistence that he has no gang ties or criminal history, according to Documented, a newsroom dedicated to telling the stories of immigrants in New York City. The Gutiérrez family says it has been left without information or answers.

Continue reading...

Trump officials step up defiance over man wrongly deported to El Salvador

Posted on by

Administration advances new misrepresentations of US supreme court order in case of Kilmar Abrego García

The Trump administration on Monday misrepresented a US supreme court decision that compelled it to return a man wrongly deported to El Salvador, using tortured readings of the order to justify taking no actions to secure his release.

The supreme court last week unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego García, who was supposed to have been protected from deportation to El Salvador regardless of whether he was a member of the MS-13 gang.

Continue reading...

The Trump administration trapped a wrongly deported man in a catch-22

Posted on by

The US says it can’t aid in his return as he’s in El Salvador; El Salvador says to help would be like ‘smuggling’ him back

It is difficult to find a term more fitting for the fate of the Maryland father Kilmar Abrego García than Kafkaesque.

Abrego García is one of hundreds of foreign-born men deported under the Trump administration to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a macabre partnership with the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele.

Continue reading...

El Salvador president refuses to order return of wrongly deported US man

Posted on by

Trump officials claim they’re not legally bound to bring Kilmar Abrego García back despite supreme court ruling

The president of El Salvador said in a meeting with Donald Trump in the White House on Monday that he would not order the return of a Maryland man who was deported in error to a Salvadorian mega-prison.

“The question is preposterous,” Nayib Bukele said in the Oval Office on Monday, where he was welcomed by Trump and spoke with the president and members of his cabinet. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”

Continue reading...