Category Archives: Americas

Racist jokes about Puerto Rico at rally bring anger and disgust: ‘Truly how the Trump party sees us’

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Tony Hinchcliffe’s series of racist jokes at Donald Trump’s rally on Sunday were widely condemned

Some Americans, particularly those of Puerto Rican descent, said that the racist remarks aired at Donald Trump’s Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden in New York helped them decide who to vote for.

The speaker and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe took aim at Puerto Rico, in a series of racist jokes including one in which he called it “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean”.

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Lost Maya city with temple pyramids and plazas discovered in Mexico

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Archaeologists draw on laser mapping to find city they have named Valeriana, thought to have been founded pre-AD150

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have stumbled on a lost Maya city of temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all of which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.

The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came about after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

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Puerto Rico Republican chair demands Trump apology for rally’s racist remarks

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Angel M Cintrón, party’s chair on island, says he will not vote for Trump unless he says sorry for speaker’s comments

The president of the Republican party’s branch in Puerto Rico has said he will not vote for Donald Trump unless he apologises for racist remarks made at his rally referring to the US island territory as a “floating island of garbage”.

Outrage even among fellow Republicans is continuing to mount after the racist insult at the Republican nominee’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, with the podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe coming under fire for his inflammatory comments made about Puerto Rico in the opening speech.

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Trudeau facing ‘iceberg revolt’ as calls grow for embattled PM to step down

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The scale of what lurks beneath the surface could be vast – can the Liberal leader defy the odds and win a fourth term?

Justin Trudeau, who promised “sunny ways” as he won an election on a wave of public fatigue with an incumbent Conservative government, is now facing his darkest and most uncertain political moment as he attempts to defy the odds – and a bitter public – to win a rare fourth term.

The Canadian prime minister appears to have ignored both the demands of a handful of his own MPs calling for him to resign and threats from a separatist party looking to unravel his party’s tenuous hold on power.

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Bolivian minister accuses Evo Morales of ‘staged’ assassination attempt

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Interior minister ridicules ex-president’s claim that government tried to kill him by firing shots at his car

Bolivia’s government has accused former president Evo Morales of staging an attempt on his own life, saying that shots fired at his car on Sunday came after he tried to run a police checkpoint.

“Mr Morales, nobody believes the theater you have staged,” the interior minister, Eduardo del Castillo, told a news conference.

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Uruguay presidential election heads to runoff with center-left candidate in lead

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Yamandú Orsi came out ahead of two conservative rivals as voters rejected a controversial pension reform plan

Uruguay is heading for a tight presidential election runoff next month after a center-left candidate came out ahead of two candidates who split the conservative vote in Sunday’s first round.

Voters also rejected a controversial pension reform plan in one of two plebiscites.

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Evo Morales accuses Bolivian government of trying to kill him

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Ex-leader implicates former ally Luis Arce after his vehicle hit by gunfire amid rising unrest in country

Bolivia’s former leader Evo Morales has accused the government of his one-time ally Luis Arce of trying to kill him after his car was struck by bullets in an early-morning ambush on Sunday, threatening to ignite a political crisis in the Andean nation.

Morales, whose supporters have been organising road blockades for weeks to support the legally embattled former president, posted a video on Facebook that showed him in the front passenger seat and bullet holes in the car’s windshield.

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Crash between cargo truck and bus in Mexico kills 19 and injures six

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Collision occurred when a container filled with corn fell off truck, causing bus carrying 25 people to overturn

A cargo truck collided with a passenger bus in northern Mexico on Saturday, leaving at least 19 people dead and six injured, authorities said.

Officials adjusted the death toll after initially reporting 24 deaths, citing information from first responders.

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‘There is no money’: Cuba fears total collapse amid grid failure and financial crisis

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Repeated blackouts leave residents concerned about food, water supply and Cuba’s future

Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street.

“You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city.

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Venezuelan opposition says detained activist has been murdered

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VP party holds Maduro regime responsible for death of Edwin Santos who had been picked up by security officials

A major Venezuelan opposition party has said that one of its activists was murdered this week after being detained by security officials in the western state of Apure.

Edwin Santos “was murdered after being abducted by members of the state security forces” on Wednesday, Voluntad Popular (VP) party said, blaming the iron-fisted regime of the leftwing president, Nicolás Maduro.

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Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator

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Petition to Ecuador’s copyright office is first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship

A forest in Ecuador could be recognised as the co-creator of a song under a groundbreaking legal proposal.

A petition is to be submitted to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognise the Los Cedros cloud forest as the co-creator of the composition Song of the Cedars. The action by the More Than Human Life (Moth) project is the first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship of a work of art.

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Argentinian police raid hotel where singer Liam Payne fell to his death

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Special investigation unit seized hard drives and camera footage on orders from the public prosecutor’s office

Argentinian police have raided the Buenos Aires hotel where ex-One Direction singer Liam Payne stayed before dying last week after falling from a third-floor balcony.

A police special investigations unit went to the Casa Sur hotel late on Wednesday on orders from the public prosecutor’s office. Officers seized items including computer hard drives and footage from hotel cameras, said a government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

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Justin Trudeau insists he will lead Liberals into next election amid dissent

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More than 20 lawmakers from his party sign letter asking Canadian prime minister to step down before election

Justin Trudeau has insisted that he will lead his Liberal party into the next election, dismissing a request by some party members to not run for a fourth term.

The Canadian prime minister met with his Liberal members of parliament for three hours on Wednesday, where he learned that more than 20 lawmakers from his party signed a letter asking him to step down before the next election.

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Venezuelan opposition leaders win EU parliament’s top human rights honor

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Sakharov prize goes to María Corina Machado and Edmundo González after contested presidential election

The European parliament has awarded its top human rights honor, the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, to Venezuelan opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González for “representing the people of Venezuela fighting to restore freedom and democracy”.

Machado was set to run as the democratic opposition candidate against the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela’s contested 2024 election, but she was disqualified by the government, so González took her place. He had never run for office before the presidential election.

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Keir Starmer urged to ‘engage’ on reparations at Commonwealth summit

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Call from head of Caribbean reparations body comes as Bahamas foreign minister claims UK PM will change his position

Britain has a legal and moral case to answer over its historical role in slavery, the chair of the Caribbean’s slavery reparation commission has said, as Keir Starmer continues to reject calls to put the issue on the agenda at the Commonwealth summit.

Responding to the British prime minister’s insistence to “look forward” rather than have “very long endless discussions about reparations on the past” when he meets 55 other country leaders on Friday, the distinguished Caribbean historian Sir Hilary Beckles, who chairs the Caribbean governments’ reparations body, articulated the region’s call to the British government and institutions to “engage in a compassionate, intergenerational strategy to support postcolonial reconstruction”.

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Justin Trudeau pressured to resign by backbench MPs within own party

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Disgruntled members of Liberal party give Canadian leader deadline of 28 October to step down before likely electoral drubbing

Disgruntled members of Canada’s Liberal party have given Justin Trudeau an ultimatum: decide early next week if you want to stay on as leader, or face the prospects of a caucus revolt.

The prime minister met with Liberal lawmakers in a closed-door caucus meeting on Wednesday where 20 MPs – none of them cabinet members – called on their leader to resign before a likely electoral drubbing in the next election.

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Putin calls for alternative international payment system at Brics summit

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Russian president’s goal to de-dollarize world economy alarms members that do not want bloc to turn against west

Vladimir Putin has opened the expanded Brics summit by issuing a call for an alternative international payments system that could prevent the US using the dollar as a political weapon.

But the summit communique indicated that little progress had been made on an alternative payment system.

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Gustavo Gutiérrez, Peruvian priest and ‘father of liberation theology’, dies at 96

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Dominican friar hailed as ‘prophet of the poor’ for belief that the church had political duty to end poverty

Gustavo Gutiérrez, the influential Peruvian priest known as “the father of liberation theology” and hailed as a “prophet of the poor”, has died in Lima at the age of 96.

Gutiérrez, a theologian and Dominican friar, was a celebrated – and sometimes controversial – proponent of the idea that the church needed to side with the poor and to fight to improve their lot.

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Two men plead guilty to contract killing of Sikh man in Canada but don’t say who hired them

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Tanner Fox and Jose Lopez trade blows in court after confessing to shooting Ripudaman Singh Malik

Two men have pleaded guilty to the contract killing of a Sikh man who was acquitted in the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight from Montreal to Mumbai.

According to an agreed statement of facts released by a British Columbia court on Monday, Tanner Fox and Jose Lopez confessed to shooting Ripudaman Singh Malik in 2022. But they remained silent over who hired and paid them for the murder.

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Surrogacy ring accused of exploiting vulnerable women in Argentina

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Prosecutors say ‘criminal enterprise’ charged foreign couples $50,000 and denied payments for miscarriages

An international surrogacy ring exploited impoverished women, denied payments for miscarriages, and “commercialised” babies in Argentina, prosecutors have alleged.

A team of prosecutors said they had discovered a “criminal enterprise” which has been charging foreign couples about $50,000 for a baby born by surrogacy in Argentina.

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