The UK, France, Germany, Spain and other European countries have officially recognised opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela. It comes after President Nicolás Maduro defiantly rejected the EU’s Sunday deadline to call snap elections. Mr Guaidó declared himself interim leader last month and won US backing. Russia – a backer of Mr […]

El Salvador, the most densely-populated state on the mainland of the Americas, is a small and highly-industrialised country. In the 1980s, El Salvador was ravaged by a bitter civil war stoked by gross inequality between the overwhelming majority of the population and a small and wealthy elite that left around 70,000 people dead. A United […]

European countries issued a last-ditch warning to Nicolas Maduro yesterday that they would recognise Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president if he did not call elections, as the clock ticked down on their midnight deadline. Nathalie Loiseau, France’s Europe minister, reiterated that the ultimatum issued by Paris, London and five other European governments eight days […]

Salvadorans headed to the polls in the first round of a presidential election yesterday, with an energetic former mayor campaigning as an anti-corruption outsider predicted to win the top job and end decades of a two-party system. Nayib Bukele (37) has capitalised on the anti-establishment feeling sweeping elections across the region and further afield, as […]

Notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman had sex with minors he called “vitamins”, according to claims by witnesses in newly unsealed documents. The allegations come as a jury in New York is about to start deliberating in his US drug-trafficking case. According to papers made public at the weekend, a key government co-operator […]

The Chilean government says it will press France to extradite a former guerrilla who was arrested in Paris on Thursday after 22 years on the run. Ricardo Palma Salamanca was convicted of killing Jaime Guzmán, a right-wing senator and a lawyer, in 1991, in an ambush on his car. He then escaped from a high-security […]

Dozens of people died and hundreds are still missing after a dam collapsed at an iron ore mine in Brazil. The rupture released a sea of contaminated muddy sludge, in some places up to 15m (50ft) deep, sliding towards the town of Brumadinho, eventually covering an area the size of 300 football pitches. The mud […]

It’s the 40th edition of the world’s biggest annual off-road rally race, featuring hundreds of competing cars, trucks, bikes and quads. Qatari driver, Nasser al-Attiyah, won the opening stage of the Dakar Rally in Peru. It’s the 40th edition of the world’s biggest annual off-road rally race, featuring hundreds of competing cars, trucks, bikes and […]

Haiti has some of the most overcrowded prisons in the world. Human rights groups say around 11,000 inmates live in inhumane conditions. Their plight is just one of the many problems being addressed by the new UN mission to the country. Haiti has some of the most overcrowded prisons in the world. Human rights groups […]

The president of Cuba says that a tornado in eastern Havana has killed three people and injured 174 others. The Cuban capital was battered late on Sunday and in the early hours of Monday by powerful winds and heavy rains. A blackout hit many Havana neighbourhoods around 9pm local time. President Miguel Diaz-Canel posted photos […]