Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Pair were taken away by armed men on motorbikes and later found shot dead on edge of town
The murder of two boys for allegedly shoplifting in Colombia has evoked memories of some of the country’s darkest days of armed conflict.
The pair, who were 12 and 18, were allegedly trying to rob a clothing store in Tibú, a small town near the Venezuelan border, last Friday when they were apprehended by bystanders who taped their hands together, according to witnesses quoted by local media.
Country’s topography means local variations in temperature and rainfall can be very pronounced
The most northerly country in South America, Venezuela is also the sixth largest – roughly one-and-a-half times the size of France or Texas. It is very varied topographically, from the northernmost part of the Andes mountains in the west, via the Orinoco River, which runs across the country towards its coastal delta, to the Guiana Highlands in the east.
Being so close to the equator, there is very little variation in temperature from month to month: the capital, Caracas, has typical daily maxima in the mid-20s, and night-time temperatures in the mid-teens, throughout the year. It is noticeably cooler than coastal cities because of its higher altitude: roughly 1,050 metres (3,420ft) above sea level.
Gen Hugo Carvajal, who for over a decade was Hugo Chávez’s eyes and ears in the military, was arrested on Thursday night at a small apartment where he had been holed up.
Necoclí, population 20,000, faces bottleneck as Covid rules lift and unrest, poverty and violence grow across region
When the loudspeaker announced that the day’s last boat across Colombia’s Gulf of Urabá would begin boarding, a desperate scrum of Haitians rushed forward, jostling for spaces on the rickety craft.
Colombian health workers struggling to cope as malnutrition and dirty water ravage new arrivals in Maicao’s swelling shanty towns
A seemingly endless lake of cardboard and tin shacks surrounds the perimeter of a former airport runway in Colombia’s desert-like city of Maicao. Known locally as La Pista, the area is home to more than 2,000 families, and is one of 44 informal settlements to have emerged around the city in the past two years.
The old airport has become a landing strip for desperate migrants and bi-national indigenous Wayuu people fleeing the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where the basic essentials of life are hard to come by.
Country at a ‘tipping point’ that could affect wider region, experts warn, as ‘donor fatigue’ causes aid shortfall
The continuing exodus of millions of Venezuelans is reaching “a tipping point” as the response to the crisis remains critically underfunded.
More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships. It has become the largest external displacement crisis in the region’s history, and the most underfunded.
Head of country’s academy of medicine issues warning with less than 1% of population having received a dose
Venezuela’s slow rate of vaccination for Covid-19 means it could take up to 10 years for the country to be fully vaccinated, the president of the nation’s academy of medicine said on Monday.
Venezuela, with about 30 million inhabitants, has received 1.4m vaccines from China and Russia, according to its health ministry. Authorities hope to receive enough doses for about 5 million people from the World Health Organization’s Covax system.
On Friday José Gregorio Hernández, doctor, scientist, university professor and pioneer of bacteriology, will be beatified, a step toward sainthood in the Roman Catholic church, after 72 years of efforts by Venezuela’s Catholics
Alessandro Bazzoni’s bank account was closed after he faced sanctions in a case of mistaken identity
A small business owner in Italy is preparing to sue the US Treasury after accidentally being put on a sanctions blacklist before Donald Trump left the presidency.
Alessandro Bazzoni, who owns a graphic design company in Sardinia, has been unable to trade since 19 January, when his business was slapped with sanctions as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on blacklisted Venezuelan crude oil.
Nearly 5,000 refugees holed up in small Colombian town of Arauquita, having fled intense and continuing battles
Lizeth Iturrieta, a journalist in the small town of La Victoria on Venezuela’s western border with Colombia, was woken by the rumble of armoured vehicles rolling past her home. Hours later the sounds of gunfire and explosions shook the walls, and she and her husband dived for cover.
“Out of nowhere we were in the middle of a war zone,” Iturrieta said in a video call from a refugee camp on the Colombian side of the frontier. “After a day of hiding at home in absolute silence, we ran for our lives to the boat to Colombia. We almost fell into the river in the panic.”
Latin American countries scramble to protect themselves from a country where nearly 60,000 people are expected to die in March alone
It has long been regarded as a soft power superpower, the sun-kissed, culturally blessed land of Bossa Nova, Capoeira and Pelé.
But Brazil’s shambolic response to coronavirus under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has cast Latin America’s largest country in an unfamiliar and unpleasant role: that of a Covid-riddled, science-shunning, politically-unstable outcast on whom many regional neighbors are now shutting the door.
The socialist-led country has little sex education, acute shortages of contraceptives and one of Latin America’s most restrictive laws
Sofía was 20 years old and coming out of an emotionally abusive relationship when she found out she was pregnant.
Her ex-boyfriend called her a “slut” for having conceived and claimed that he was not the father. Appealing to Sofía’s conservative family for help was not an option, since they had long warned that they would disown her if she ever got pregnant.
The press conference in Wellington, held in response to the discovery of three community cases in Auckland, has now finished. As of 11.59PM tonight Auckland will be placed under tougher restrictions, at level three, while the rest of the country will be moved to level two restrictions. (Details of the alert levels can be found online here).
Ardern said she was asking the public “to be strong and to be kind”:
I know we all feel the same way when this happens, we all get that sense of - not again. But remember we have been here before and that means we know how to get out of this again, and that is together. If you know someone in Auckland reach out, please check on them. If you are in Auckland please check on your neighburs and ensure they are looked after and supported.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s director-general of health, said officials were working under the assumption that the new Auckland cases were one of the new variants of Covid-19. “Regardless of where people have come from, these are the common variants and we do know they are more transmissible,” he said.
Ardern said that the decision to introduce tougher restrictions was “not taken lightly”. However, the cost to the economy would be far greater, she said, if the country was slow to react.
President orders convoy to border in politically charged gesture
Patients in Amazon city of Manaus reportedly ran out of oxygen
Venezuela’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, has sent an emergency shipment of oxygen to his country’s border with Brazil in a politically charged gesture he said was to help alleviate “Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster”.
In recent days the Brazilian state of Amazonas, which borders southern Venezuela, has been plunged into coronavirus chaos for the second time in under a year.
BBC reporter Will Grant has produced an excellent look at the group of strongmen who came from left field
If there was ever a surreal start to a trip to Cuba, it was the one that coincided with the news Fidel Castro had died. That was what I woke up to on 26 November 2016, hours before my husband and I were due to fly to Havana. A day later, we found ourselves in what seemed like an endless queue under a blazing autumn sun, waiting to enter Castro’s memorial at the Jose Martí monument in the Plaza de la Revolución.
Donald Trump’s departure will alter the face of geopolitics. The climate crisis and Covid response will affect all nations – while others face very particular challenges. Observer correspondents examine the 12 months ahead
A potent mix of hope and fear accompanies the start of 2021 in most of the world. Scientists have created several vaccines for a disease that didn’t even have a name this time last year. But many countries, including the UK and the US, are still stumbling through the deadliest period of the pandemic.
The shadow of Covid will not begin to lift, even in richer countries, for months. Britain was the first to approve a vaccine and has secured extensive supplies, yet Boris Johnson’s suggestion that life might be returning to normal by Easter is widely seen as optimistic. Other countries, particularly in the south, face a long wait to get vaccines, and help paying for them. The rebuilding of economies shattered by Covid everywhere will be slow; even countries that managed to contain it have taken a hit, from Vietnam to New Zealand.
President Iván Duque says undocumented Venezuelans will be denied access in a move denounced as unethical and impractical
Colombia will refuse to administer coronavirus vaccines to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees within its borders, President Iván Duque has announced, in a move which stunned public health experts and prompted condemnation from humanitarian groups.
Speaking to a local radio station on Monday, Duque that only Venezuelans with dual nationality or formal migratory status will have access to the vaccine when it is eventually distributed in the country.
National assembly was only institution not commanded by ruling Socialist party
Nicolás Maduro tightened his grip over Venezuela on Sunday in legislative elections that some believe effectively marked the end of Juan Guaidó’s US-backed campaign to topple the South American strongman.
The bulk of Venezuela’s beleaguered opposition boycotted the contest for the 277-seat national assembly, calling it a sham designed to lend Maduro’s authoritarian regime an air of democratic legitimacy.