Vast tracts of pristine rainforest on three continents went up in smoke last year, with an area roughly the size of Switzerland cut down or burned to make way for cattle and commercial crops, researchers said Tuesday.
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South American countries at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic are reopening even as case numbers rise, ignoring the example set by Europe, where nations waited for the worst to pass.
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Beyond the hot spots of Brazil and Mexico, the coronavirus is threatening to overwhelm Latin American cities large and small in an alarming sign that the pandemic may be only at the start of its destructive march through the region.
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In the remote Amazon community of Betania, Tikuna tribe members suspect the coronavirus arrived this month after people returned from a two-hour boat trip down the Solimoes River to pick up their government benefit payments.
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Worldwide deaths from the coronavirus pandemic surpassed 300,000 this week and despite the hopeful lifting of lockdowns in Europe and the United States, concerns are growing the virus may never be totally eradicated.
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Despite millennia of cultural upheavals in some of the most famous ancient civilizations in South America, researchers have found a surprising amount of ancestral mixing and genetic continuity in DNA from the past.
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France and Spain, two of the worst-hit countries in the coronavirus pandemic, were laying out separate roadmaps Tuesday for lifting their lockdowns, while signs emerged the virus has been all but vanquished in New Zealand and Australia.
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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, whose dismissive stance toward the Covid-19 pandemic has angered many health experts, fired his popular health minister after a series of disagreements over the proper response to contain the virus’ spread in South America’s most populous country.
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Two former Fox executives are charged with bribing soccer officials, as U.S. prosecutors fine-tuned charging papers Monday in the sprawling FIFA corruption scandal.
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After U.S. prosecutors filed drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last week, the Trump administration on Tuesday announced a plan to form a transitional government in the South American country that would see Maduro step down.
Read morePanic over the spread of the coronavirus sparked a prison riot in Colombia that killed 23 inmates Sunday, and Chile became the latest Latin American country to announce restrictions on movement.
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Colombia and Bolivia both declared states of emergency and Brazil recorded its first coronavirus death as the global pandemic began to grip South America as tightly as other devastated regions.
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The Amazon rainforest could be the Amazon savanna by 2070, because ecosystems undergo massive, disruptive, structural changes within decades, not millennia, according to new research.
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Scientists warn that we have reached a tipping point in which the Amazon rainforest is in critical danger if swift action is not taken, according to an editorial published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
Read moreSearchers combing Antarctic seas have recovered parts of a military transport plane and human remains belonging to some of the 38 people aboard who vanished en route to the frozen continent, Chilean officials said Thursday.
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Chile’s air force lost radio contact with a transport plane carrying 38 people on a flight Monday evening to the country’s base in Antarctica, and authorities indicated several hours later that they were not optimistic about the aircraft’s fate.
Read moreArgentina’s new president Alberto Fernández takes office Tuesday, having pledged to put Argentina “back on its feet: but he faces a tough task due to recession, high inflation and rising unemployment and poverty.
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As popular protests engulf several South American countries, Colombia’s turn arrives Thursday. The country is expected to be paralyzed by the broadest expression of political discontent in its modern history.
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Police and soldiers on Tuesday escorted gasoline tankers from a major Bolivian fuel plant that had been blockaded for five days by supporters of former President Evo Morales, and at least three people were reported killed while the operation was underway.
Read moreThe families of those killed in the Bolivian military’s 2003 clash with protesters urged the 11th Circuit on Tuesday to resurrect a $10 million jury verdict against the country’s ex-president and his former defense minister.
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