Ricardo Soberón, the anti-drug chief who last year briefly suspended coca eradication in Peru, resigned under pressure from the administration of President Ollanta Humala—to be replaced with an outspoken eradication advocate.
Yet a fourth nuclear scientist was mysteriously blown up in Iran, just as the Islamic Republic began a uranium enrichment program at an underground facility near Qom. Even Russia said the enrichment is beyond what is needed for civilian purposes.
Citing inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, and continuing inaction on climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it has moved its famous “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight.
Marco Aurelio Lorenzo, an activist Catholic priest based in western Honduras, has filed a criminal complaint charging that he and his two brothers were tortured by eight police agents the day after Christmas.
Former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo has filed a 122-page statement calling charges that he “was somehow complicit” in a 1977 massacre of indigenous civilians “baseless and outrageous.”
Dozens of students occupied four radio stations in Chilpancingo, capital of the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero, to publicize their positions on an ongoing conflict at a nearby rural teachers’ college that last month left two students dead.
Efforts to help Haiti recover from a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated the southern part of the country in 2010 have made significant progress, according to the UN and the Haitian government.
The State Department expelled Livia Acosta Noguera, Venezuelan consul general in Miami, over an alleged plot involving Venezuela, Iran and Cuba to launch a cyber-attack against the FBI, CIA, NSA and other top US government agencies.
Blackwater, now known as Academi, reached a confidential settlement agreement with survivors and families of victims in a shooting incident in the Nisour Square area of Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
A Russian naval flotilla led by an aircraft carrier docked in the Syrian port of Tartus in what Damascus hailed as a show of solidarity by Moscow—as NATO member Turkey broached military intervention in the conflicted Arab nation.
The Chinese government’s new white paper outlining its plans for the next five years in space broaches placing a human being on the Moon—as tensions with US allies again mount in contested areas of the South China Sea.
A “Plurinational Encuentro” held last month in Cochabamba brought together lawmakers and leaders of popular movements—but was boycotted by Bolivia’s main labor federation and dissident campesino organizations.
