BOGOTÁ, Colombia – U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, on a four-country trip across Latin America, said he hoped the region would accept more Guantanamo prisoners to help expedite closing the facility, in an interview published Wednesday by a Colombian newspaper.
GUATEMALA CITY – Teenage pregnancies are on the rise in Guatemala, giving the country the highest adolescent fertility rate in Latin America. In 2011, according to the Reproductive Health Observatory, 49,000 mothers aged 10 to 19 became pregnant, and last year that number increased to 61,000. Of those, 35 were 10-year-old girls.
MCALLEN, Texas – Behind the beige brick facade and the barbed wire of the Border Patrol station here, crowds of Central American women and children are sleeping on concrete floors in 90 degree heat.
Scenic beaches and cold bottles of Imperial pervade Costa Rica’s image as a world-renowned tourist destination. But a darker side lurks behind the pura vida.
Recently, the two surviving founders of Pink Floyd sent the rock band equivalent of a diplomatic cable — an open letter published in Salon — to the Rolling Stones. They asked Mick Jagger and his crew to cancel their first-ever concert in Israel to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle against occupation. But Pink Floyd hit a wall.
The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, known as the Sala IV, revealed that over 30 prisoners incarcerated in the La Reforma maximum-security prison claimed to have been beaten and mistreated by penitentiary guards.
In Guatemala, the rule of law hangs in the balance following the ouster of human rights champion Claudia Paz y Paz from the post of attorney general. A right-leaning former Supreme Court justice, Thelma Esperanza Aldana Hernández, was named as Paz y Paz’s replacement, and may be about to roll back recent gains against corruption and human rights violations, analysts say.
The situation, like the Syrian civil war and the conflicts in South Sudan and elsewhere, pits humanitarian instincts against hard realities for a U.S. administration wary of foreign entanglements in the wake of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
ABUJA, Nigeria – Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan ordered an investigation into efforts to rescue more than 200 schoolgirls abducted in the town of Chibok by suspected Boko Haram Islamists following a late night raid on April 14.
