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The Biden administration is increasingly concerned that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is gathering enough momentum to change the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. Credit... Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

Persons: Biden, Vladimir V, Putin, Nanna Heitmann Organizations: The New York Locations: Russia, Ukraine

Try going for a stroll in much of Guatemala City: It is a pedestrian’s nightmare. Rifle-grasping guards squint at each passerby, sizing up potential assailants. But tucked within the chaotic capital’s crazy-quilt sprawl, there is a dreamlike haven where none of that exists. Evoking the feel of a serene Mediterranean town, Cayalá features milky white buildings with red-tile roofs, a colossal civic hall with Tuscan columns, cafes and high-priced restaurants, colonnade-lined plazas and walkable, stone-paved boulevards. All of this is open to the public — except for the gated sections where about 2,000 families live.

Locations: Guatemala City, Cayalá, States

First the trucks arrived, carrying armed men toward the mist-shrouded mountaintop. Then the flames appeared, sweeping across a forest of towering pines and oaks. After the fire laid waste to the forest last year, the trucks returned. This time, they carried the avocado plants taking root in the orchards scattered across the once tree-covered summit where townspeople used to forage for mushrooms. “We never witnessed a blaze on this scale before,” said Maricela Baca Yépez, 46, a municipal official and lifelong resident of Patuán, a town nestled in the volcanic plateaus where Mexico’s Purépecha people have lived for centuries.

Persons: ”, Maricela Baca Yépez Locations: Patuán

Jesús Ociel Baena made history a year ago when they were sworn in as the first openly nonbinary person to assume a judicial post in Mexico. Baena, who used they/them pronouns, and their partner were found dead inside their home, stirring calls from Mexico’s L.G.B.T.Q. community to determine if the magistrate had been targeted for promoting the rights of nonbinary people. Baena, 38, was a magistrate on the electoral court, have said that their 37-year-old partner, Dorian Herrera, appeared to have killed them with a razor blade before dying by suicide. leaders in Mexico are questioning whether such a swift assessment fits what they say is a pattern by the authorities of effectively dismissing grisly killings involving L.G.B.T.Q.

Persons: Jesús, Baena, Mexico’s, Dorian Herrera Locations: Mexico, Aguascalientes

Okeef Saunders loves his job teaching history to high school students in Jamaica’s capital. But he is getting ready to leave for the United States, where a teaching job with a much bigger paycheck in North Carolina awaits him. “I have four kids to support, a mortgage, bills for food, water, electricity,” said Mr. Saunders, 49, who teaches at a Kingston high school. He said he plans to start out earning about $50,000 a year in United States, doubling his current salary after working as a teacher in Jamaica for the last 28 years. In the United States alone, nearly half of all public schools have been operating without a full teaching staff, according to the U.S. Department of Education, as enrollment in teacher preparation programs plunges.

Persons: Okeef Saunders, “, ”, Saunders Organizations: Kingston, U.S . Department of Education Locations: Jamaica’s, United States, North Carolina, Jamaica, Canada, Britain

☆ Mummies From Outer Space? Mexico’s Congress Gets a Firsthand Look
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-13 | by ( Simon Romero | More About Simon Romero | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Mexico’s Congress is usually meant to be a venue for solemn presentations on budgets and other serious legislation. researcher who brought with him some unusual objects: two mummified specimens that he claimed were the bodies of extraterrestrial beings. The presentation of the mummies on Tuesday by Jaime Maussan, a journalist who has speculated widely on aliens, caused jaws to drop and memes to multiply around the country. The two specimens, which Mr. Maussan said were found in Peru in 2017, were tiny in stature and chalky in color; each had three-fingered hands and what appeared to be shrunken or desiccated heads. “These are nonhuman beings who are not part of our terrestrial evolution,” Mr. Maussan declared under oath, with a sign-language interpreter at his side.

Persons: U.F.O, Jaime Maussan, Maussan, Mr Organizations: National Autonomous University of Mexico Locations: Peru

Every day, Vélina Élysée Charlier drives past barricaded neighborhoods and frequently sees dead bodies lying on the street, she said, a result of score-settling between gangs and vigilantes in Haiti’s capital. After dusk, she never leaves home for fear of being killed or kidnapped. When her 8-year-old daughter got appendicitis one evening, Ms. Charlier said, the family waited until morning to get her medical care since driving to a hospital was out of the question. “Port-au-Prince looks like something out of hell these days,” said Ms. Charlier, 42, a prominent anticorruption activist in the city and mother of four who lives in a hillside area of the capital. After that desperate appeal, a force led by Kenya finally seems close to materializing in what would be the first time an African country leads such a mission in one of the Americas’ most unstable places.

Persons: Charlier, ” Locations: “, Kenya

Ecuador and Guatemala held elections on Sunday that shed light on crucial trends throughout Latin America, including anticorruption drives, the growing importance of young voters and calls to emulate El Salvador’s crackdown on crime. In Ecuador, where the assassination this month of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio cast a pall over campaigning, an establishment leftist, Luisa González, will head into a runoff against Daniel Noboa, the scion of a well-heeled family known for its banana empire. And in Guatemala, the progressive anti-graft crusader Bernardo Arévalo won in a landslide over a former first lady, Sandra Torres, dealing a blow to the country’s conservative political establishment. As concerns simmer over the erosion of the rule of law and the expanding sway of drug gangs in different parts of Latin America, the voting was watched closely for signs of what the outcomes could mean.

Persons: El, Fernando Villavicencio, Luisa González, Daniel Noboa, Bernardo Arévalo, Sandra Torres Locations: Ecuador, Guatemala, America

An anticorruption crusader won a runoff election for Guatemala’s presidency on Sunday, handing a stunning rebuke to the conservative political establishment in Central America’s most populous nation. Bernardo Arévalo, a polyglot sociologist from an upstart party made up largely of urban professionals, took 58 percent of the vote with 98 percent of votes counted on Sunday, the electoral authority said. His opponent, Sandra Torres, a former first lady, got 37 percent. Alejandro Giammattei, the current president, who is prohibited by law from seeking re-election, congratulated Mr. Arévalo and extended an invitation to organize an “orderly” transition of power. Mr. Arévalo’s win marks a watershed moment in Guatemala, both a leading source of migration to the United States and one of Washington’s longtime allies in the region.

Persons: Bernardo Arévalo, Sandra Torres, Alejandro Giammattei, Mr, Arévalo, Arévalo’s Organizations: Sunday Locations: Central America’s, Guatemala, United States

While Guatemala’s president, the broadly unpopular leader Alejandro Giammattei, is prohibited by law from seeking re-election, concerns over a slide toward authoritarianism have grown more acute as he has expanded his sway over the country’s institutions. Who is Bernardo Arévalo? Bernardo Arévalo, 64, an intellectual, is the son of a Juan José Arévalo, a former president who is still exalted for creating Guatemala’s social security system and protecting free speech. After the former leader was forced into exile in the 1950s, Bernardo Arévalo was born in Uruguay and grew up in Venezuela, Chile and Mexico before returning to Guatemala as a teenager. Mr. Arévalo is proposing to hire thousands of new police officers and upgrade security at prisons.

Persons: Alejandro Giammattei, Bernardo Arévalo, Juan José Arévalo, Arévalo, Nayib Bukele Locations: Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador

Bernardo Arévalo had been enjoying a quiet and predictable life for nearly a decade with his family in Geneva, working on pro-democracy issues for a nonprofit. That placid existence ended after he returned to his homeland, Guatemala, and got drawn into politics. Today, whenever Mr. Arévalo appears in public, he attracts throngs to hear him assail the government’s attacks on Guatemala’s democracy. Flanked by a well-armed security detail after receiving death threats following the assassination last week of a presidential candidate in Ecuador — which sent tremors across Latin America — Mr. Arévalo wears a bullet-resistant vest and travels in an armored S.U.V. Now, in what is building into a watershed moment for Central America’s most populous country, Mr. Arévalo, a Hebrew- and French-speaking polyglot with a doctorate in sociology, is on the cusp of winning the presidency in a runoff on Sunday — an implausible scenario just months ago.

Persons: Bernardo Arévalo, Arévalo, throngs Organizations: America’s Locations: Geneva, Guatemala, Ecuador, America

When Hawaii’s last sugar cane plantation shut down in Maui in 2016, it marked the end of an era when sugar reigned supreme in the archipelago’s economy. But the last harvest at the 36,000-acre plantation underscored another pivotal shift: the relentless spread of extremely flammable, nonnative grasses on idled lands where cash crops once flourished. Varieties like guinea grass, molasses grass and buffel grass — which originated in Africa and were introduced to Hawaii as livestock forage — now occupy nearly a quarter of Hawaii’s landmass. Fast growing when it rains and drought resistant when lands are parched, such grasses are fueling wildfires across Hawaii, including the blaze that claimed at least 93 lives in Maui last week. “These grasses are highly aggressive, grow very fast and are highly flammable,” said Melissa Chimera, whose grandmother lived on the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company’s plantation in Maui after emigrating from the Philippines.

Persons: ”, Melissa Chimera, “ Organizations: Fire Exchange Locations: Maui, Africa, Hawaii, Philippines, Pacific

The losses in Lahaina from the fire now include the historic Baldwin Home, which houses the restoration foundation’s main office and was considered the oldest house still standing on the island of Maui. It was built between 1834-35 by the Rev. Ephraim Spaulding, a missionary from Massachusetts who prized its proximity to the waters where whaling ships once anchored. The home contained the wooden rocking chairs that the family of the Rev. Unlike others in Lahaina whose families in the area stretch back generations, Ms. Morrison, 75, from Berkeley, Calif., happened upon the town while sailing around the Hawaiian islands in 1975.

Persons: Baldwin, Ephraim Spaulding, Dwight Baldwin, Morrison, Mark Twain, ”, “, — Organizations: East Coast Locations: Lahaina, Maui, Massachusetts, East, Berkeley, Calif, ”

☆ U.S. Nurse and Her Child Released by Kidnappers in Haiti
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-09 | by ( Simon Romero | More About Simon Romero | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

An American nurse and her child in Haiti have been freed by their abductors after their kidnapping in late July drew international attention to a wave of anarchic violence gripping the capital, Port-au-Prince. El Roi Haiti, a faith-based humanitarian organization, said in a brief statement on Wednesday that Alix Dorsainvil, the group’s community nurse and the wife of the group’s director, was released along with her child after they were held in Port-au-Prince. They had been abducted on July 31 from El Roi’s campus near the capital, and the U.S. State Department had said that American officials were working with their Haitian counterparts to get them released. “There is still much to process and to heal from in this situation,” El Roi said in its statement. “We are so thankful for everyone who joined us in prayer and supported us during this crisis.”

Persons: ., Alix Dorsainvil, ” El Roi, ” Organizations: U.S . State Department, Haitian Locations: American, Haiti, Port, . El Roi Haiti, El Roi’s

In the United States, some truck owners delight in modifying their rigs with oversized wheels, heavy-duty suspension kits and soot-spewing exhaust systems, turning them into the monster trucks that stalk organized events like demolition derbies and mud bogs. In Mexico, drug cartels are taking the monster truck concept to another terrifying level, retrofitting popular pickups with battering rams, four-inch-thick steel plates welded onto their chassis and turrets for firing machine guns. Some of Mexico’s most feared criminal groups, including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, are using the vehicles in pitched gun battles with the police. Other organizations, like the Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel, use the armored trucks to fight each other. Cartels emblazon the exteriors with their initials or the latest in camouflage patterns, at times making them hard to distinguish from official military vehicles.

Organizations: Jalisco New, Gulf Cartel, Northeast Cartel Locations: United States, Mexico, Jalisco, Mexican

Guatemala’s presidential election was thrown into turmoil Wednesday night after a top prosecutor moved to suspend the party of a surging anticorruption candidate, threatening his bid to take part in a runoff and potentially dealing a severe blow to the country’s already fraying democracy. The move could prevent Bernardo Arévalo, a lawmaker who jolted Guatemala’s political class in June with a surprise showing propelling him in the Aug. 20 runoff, from competing against Sandra Torres, a former first lady. Rafael Curruchiche, the prosecutor who mounted the case to suspend the party, has himself been listed among corrupt Central American officials by the United States for obstructing corruption inquiries. The development places even greater stress on Guatemala’s political system, after the barring of several top presidential candidates who were viewed as threatening to the political and economic establishment, assaults on press freedom and the forced exile of dozens of prosecutors and judges focused on curbing corruption.

Persons: Bernardo Arévalo, jolted, Sandra Torres, Rafael Curruchiche Organizations: Central Locations: United States

Migrant shelters with plenty of empty beds. Soldiers patrolling intersections where migrant families once begged for spare change. In Ciudad Juárez and in other Mexican cities along the border, the story is much the same: Instead of surging as elected officials and immigration advocates had warned, the number of migrants trying to enter the United States has plummeted following the expiration in May of a pandemic-era border restriction. The unusual scenes of relative calm flow from a flurry of actions the Biden administration has taken, such as imposing stiffer penalties for illegal border crossings, to try to reverse an enormous jump in migrants trying to reach the United States. But it is also the result of tough steps Mexico has taken to discourage migrants from massing along the border, including transporting them to places deep in the country’s interior.

Persons: Biden Organizations: Ciudad Juárez Locations: United States, Mexico

SANTA FE, N.M — Alec Baldwin was on the set of his latest film, a low-budget western called “Rust,” working on a scene in which his character, a grizzled outlaw named Harland Rust, finds himself in a small wooden church, cornered by a sheriff and a U.S. Members of the small crew — including the director, cinematographer, cameraman and script supervisor — clustered around Mr. Baldwin inside the cramped, spartan set. As light poured through the church’s windows, casting slanted rays in the dust that swirled over the pews, a shadow fell, and the crew had to adjust the camera angle. The crew had been assured the gun was “cold,” meaning it held no live ammunition, according to court papers. In fact, investigators said, it was loaded with a live round.

Persons: N.M — Alec Baldwin, ”, Harland Rust, Baldwin, Jimmy Stewart Organizations: SANTA FE, Hollywood Locations: SANTA, U.S, Santa Fe, Laramie ”

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