Fresh turmoil hit Haiti’s government on Wednesday as Prime Minister Ariel Henry replaced his justice minister and a senior official stepped down, saying he could not serve a premier under suspicion in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise.Amid a brewing political crisis, Henry replaced Justice Minister Rockfeller Vincent with Interior Minister Liszt Quitel, who will take charge of both portfolios, according to a statement in Haiti’s official gazette.The resignation of Renald Luberice, who served more than four years as secretary general of Haiti’s Council of Ministers, came after new evidence emerged linking Henry to the former justice ministry official who investigators say is one of the main suspects behind Moise’s killing.Prosecutors say phone records show the two spoke twice around 4 a.m. on July 7, just hours after Moise, 53, was shot dead when heavily armed assassins stormed his private residence.Henry has denied any involvement in the murder but he has not directly addressed the phone calls and on Tuesday he replaced Haiti’s chief prosecutor who had been seeking to charge him as a suspect and ban him from leaving the country.The premier last week dismissed attempts to interview him over Moise’s killing as politicking designed to distract him from the work at hand in the poorest country in the Americas where power struggles have for decades hampered development.In a letter shared on social media Wednesday, Luberice said he cannot serve someone who “does not intend to cooperate with justice, seeking, on the contrary, by all means, to obstruct it.”Henry on Wednesday replaced Luberice with Josue Pierre-Louis, a veteran technocrat who has since 2017 held the rank of government minister in his role as the General Coordinator of the Office of Management and Human Resources (OMRH), according to the gazette statement.Killing and crisisMore than 40 people, including 18 Colombians, have been detained so far as part of the investigation into Moise’s killing. The investigation has made little apparent progress to solve the mystery and has been riddled with irregularities.Several judicial officials went into hiding after saying they received death threats while the original judge assigned to the case recused himself.Moise named Henry, a neurosurgeon and political moderate, to the position of prime minister just days before he was assassinated in a bid to placate the political tensions that plagued his mandate and led to a major constitutional and political crisis.The country has just a handful of elected officials after failing two years ago to hold legislative or municipal elections amid a political gridlock. Moise had ruled by decree. But there is no constitutional framework for a government in a situation like the current one.As such, Henry needs a broad consensus in order to govern. On the weekend he announced an agreement between Haiti’s main political forces on a transition government aiming to lead next year to elections and a new constitutional referendum.But any sign of weakness could lead to a fresh power struggle.Senate President Joseph Lambert, who tried to claim the presidency in the days following Moise’s killing as the most senior elected official remaining, made a fresh swipe at the post on Tuesday evening.He called local media to cover his swearing in at parliament but a gunfight interrupted proceedings. The Senate in a statement blamed the shootings on gangs that were “hired by dark forces in order to thwart the work of the Senators.”Lambert has called for a news conference on Wednesday evening.His likely claim to power will be “another quagmire to this extra-constitutional scenario we find ourselves in,” said a Western diplomat based in Port-au-Prince. 
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Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry has fired and replaced the chief public prosecutor who was seeking charges against him as a suspect in the July assassination of President Jovenel Moise.Prosecutor Ben-Ford Claude had sent a letter to a judge Tuesday, alleging that phone records showed the prime minister spoke twice with Joseph Felix Badio, an official wanted by police in connection with Moise’s assassination, on the morning of July 7, hours after the president was gunned down at his home.Claude said he asked Prime Minister Henry to discuss the evidence. Claude also asked Haiti’s immigration authority to issue an order banning Henry from leaving the country.In a letter released Tuesday but dated the day before, the prime minister’s office  said the prosecutor was being dismissed for an undisclosed “administrative error.”  The office posted a tweet late Tuesday announcing that Frantz Louis Juste has been named to replace Claude as chief prosecutor.More than 40 suspects have been arrested in the investigation into Moise’s killing, including 18 former Colombian soldiers and two Americans of Haitian descent. Badio remains at large.Henry, a political moderate and neurosurgeon, was named prime minister by Moise days before his death in an effort to ease friction between rivals and create a new consensus.Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 
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Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry on Tuesday replaced the chief public prosecutor who had been seeking charges against him as a suspect in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, plunging the country into a fresh political crisis.Moise was shot dead on July 7 when assassins stormed his private residence in the hills above Port-au-Prince. The 53-year-old had been governing by decree for more than a year after Haiti failed to hold legislative and municipal elections amid a political gridlock and had faced many calls to step down.His death has left Haiti in an even deeper constitutional and political crisis as it has only a handful of elected officials nationwide.Henry, a political moderate and neurosurgeon whom Moise named prime minister just days before his death in an attempt to reduce political tensions, has sought to forge a new consensus between different political factions.But allegations over his possible involvement in Moise’s killing are now overshadowing that.Prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude said last week that phone records showed Henry had twice communicated with a man believed to be the mastermind behind Moise’s killing on the night of the crime. FILE – A picture of the late Haitian President Jovenel Moise hangs on a wall before a news conference by interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 13, 2021.That suspect, a former justice ministry official whom Henry has publicly defended, is now on the run.Henry dismissed his request to discuss the matter as politicking and did not respond to the allegations.That prompted Claude to write on Tuesday to the judge overseeing the investigation into Moise’s slaying and ask him to charge Henry as a suspect.He also wrote to Haitian migration services ordering them not to let the prime minister leave the country “due to serious presumption relative to the assassination of the president.”Later on Tuesday, a letter from Henry to Claude dated September 13 emerged in which he said he was firing him for “grave administrative error,” without going into detail. In a separate letter dated September 14, he named Frantz Louis Juste to the post.It remains unclear whether the order actually is valid, as Haiti’s 1987 constitution mandates that the prosecutor can only be appointed or fired by the president, a position that remains vacant.Decades of political instability as well as natural catastrophes have plagued Haiti’s development. Its aid-dependent economy is the poorest in the Americas, more than a third of Haitians face acute food insecurity, and gangs have turned swathes of the capital into no-go areas.Claude had invited Henry on Friday to meet with him to discuss the phone calls with the suspect, noting that he could only summon the premier on presidential orders, but the country was without a president.Haiti’s Office of Citizen Protection demanded on Saturday that Henry step down and hand himself over to the justice system.Henry retorted on Twitter that “no distraction, invitation, summons, maneuver, menace or rearguard action” would distract him from his work.The prime minister announced on Saturday that Haiti’s main political forces had reached an agreement to establish a transition government until the holding of presidential elections and a referendum on whether to adopt a new constitution next year.The agreement establishes a Council of Ministers under Henry’s leadership.A constituent assembly made of 33 members appointed by institutions and civil society organizations will have three months to prepare the new constitution.Moise’s attempts at holding elections and a constitutional referendum were attacked for being too partisan. Critics called them veiled attempts at installing a dictatorship.His supporters said he was being punished for going after a corrupt ruling elite and seeking to end undue privileges. 
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Haiti’s chief prosecutor on Tuesday asked a judge to charge Prime Minister Ariel Henry in the slaying of the president and asked officials to bar him from leaving the country. The order filed by Port-au-Prince prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude came on the same day that he had requested Henry meet with him and explain why a key suspect in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise called him twice just hours after the killing. “There are enough compromising elements … to prosecute Henry and ask for his outright indictment,” Claude wrote in the order. A spokesman for Henry could not immediately be reached for comment. Claude said the calls were made at 4:03 and 4:20 a.m. on July 7, adding that evidence shows the suspect, Joseph Badio, was in the vicinity of Moise’s home at that time. Badio once worked for Haiti’s Ministry of Justice and at the government’s anticorruption unit until he was fired in May amid accusations of violating unspecified ethical rules. FILE – A picture of the late Haitian President Jovenel Moise hangs on a wall before a news conference by interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 13, 2021.In the two-page document, Claude said the calls lasted a total of seven minutes and that Henry was at the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince at that time. He also noted that a government official tweeted last month that Henry told him he never spoke with Badio. On Monday, Justice Minister Rockfeller Vincent ordered the chief of Haiti’s National Police to boost security for Claude because the prosecutor had received “important and disturbing” threats in the past five days. Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia, said there is clearly a fight within the government between Henry and those who supported Moise. “We have a very confusing situation, a power struggle at the moment, and we will see who will win it,” he said. “It’s not clear where we are going, and it’s not clear what the international community thinks about everything.” Henry has not specifically addressed the issue in public, although during a meeting with politicians and civil society leaders on Saturday, he said he is committed to helping stabilize Haiti. “Rest assured that no distraction, no summons or invitation, no maneuver, no threat, no rearguard combat, no aggression will distract me from my mission,” Henry said. “The real culprits, the intellectual authors and coauthor and sponsor of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse will be found and brought to justice and punished for their crimes.” More than 40 suspects have been arrested in the case, including 18 former Colombian soldiers. Authorities are still looking for additional suspects, including Badio and a former Haitian senator. The investigation is ongoing despite court clerks having gone into hiding after saying they had been threatened with death if they didn’t change certain names and statements in their reports. In addition, a Haitian judge assigned to oversee the investigation stepped down last month citing personal reasons. He left after one of his assistants died in unclear circumstances. A new judge has been assigned. 
 
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A report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council blasts the Nicaraguan government’s harsh crackdown on opposition leaders in advance of November 7 Presidential and Parliamentary elections.Critics accuse Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega of systematically ridding himself of viable opposition candidates to secure a fourth consecutive term as President of the country.In her latest update to the Council, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michele Bachelet said increasing restrictions by Nicaraguan authorities on peoples’ right to vote are undermining free and fair elections. She said Nicaraguans should be able to exercise their right to vote without intimidation, violence, or administrative interference.Her report documents the arbitrary detention of 16 people between June 22 and September 6. They include political leaders, human rights defenders, businesspeople, journalists, as well as peasant and student leaders.She said these arrests are in addition to 20 other government opponents who have been detained since May 28. She spoke through an interpreter.“This group includes six men and one woman who have publicly stated that they were aspiring to the presidency…The large majority of these people remain deprived of their liberty and have been so for up to 90 days, being held incommunicado, some in isolation without any official confirmation as to their whereabouts from the authorities to their families,” she said.The Public Prosecutor’s Office says most of the people detained are accused of conspiracy to undermine national integrity and other crimes linked to the implementation of cooperation funds.U.N. rights chief Bachelet said attacks on freedom of expression and against the media and journalists have intensified. She said similar patterns of repression are being registered against human rights defenders, social and political leaders, among others. “Given this deteriorating situation in Nicaragua, it is essential that the government once again guarantee the full enjoyment of civil and political rights of all Nicaraguans, that they put an end to persecution of the opposition, press, and civil society, and that they immediately and unconditionally release the over 130 persons detained since April 2018, according to civil society sources,” said Bachelet.The Nicaraguan government has consistently brushed off U.N. and international criticism, claiming it is based on disinformation from North American and European countries seeking to maintain their colonial grip on the country. 
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Chilean scientists have announced the discovery of the first-ever southern hemisphere remains of a type of Jurassic-era “winged lizard” known as a pterosaur.Fossils of the dinosaur which lived some 160 million years ago in what is today the Atacama desert, were unearthed in 2009.They have now been confirmed to be of a rhamphorhynchine pterosaur — the first such creature to be found in Gondwana, the prehistoric supercontinent that later formed the southern hemisphere landmasses.Researcher Jhonatan Alarcon of the University of Chile said the creatures had a wingspan of up to 2 meters, a long tail, and pointed snout.”We show that the distribution of animals in this group was wider than known to date,” he added.The discovery was also “the oldest known pterosaur found in Chile,” the scientists reported in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.      
 
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Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, died on Saturday in a military hospital after an illness, the Peruvian government said.  Guzmán, 86, died after suffering from an infection, Justice Minister Aníbal Torres said.  Guzmán, a former philosophy professor, launched an insurgency against the state in 1980 and presided over numerous car bombings and assassinations in the years that followed. After his capture, he was sentenced in life in prison for terrorism and other crimes.  President Pedro Castillo tweeted that Guzmán was responsible for taking countless lives.  “Our position condemning terrorism is firm and unwavering. Only in democracy will we build a Peru of justice and development for our people,” Castillo said.  Guzmán preached a messianic vision of a classless Maoist utopia based on pure communism, considering himself the “Fourth Sword of Marxism” after Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mao Zedong. He advocated a peasant revolution in which rebels would first gain control of the countryside and then advance to the cities. Guzmán’s movement declared armed struggle on the eve of Peru’s presidential elections in May 1980, the first democratic vote after 12 years of military rule. Prison built for himThroughout the 1980s, the man known to his followers as Presidente Gonzalo built up an organization that grew to 10,000 armed fighters before his capture inside a Lima safehouse by a special intelligence group of the Peruvian police backed by the United States. Since then, he was housed in a military prison on the shores of the Pacific that was built to hold him. By the time Guzmán called for peace talks a year after his arrest, guerrilla violence had claimed tens of thousands of lives in Peru, displaced at least 600,000 people and caused an estimated $22 billion in damage. A truth commission in 2003 blamed the Shining Path for more than half of nearly 70,000 estimated deaths and disappearances caused by various rebel groups and brutal government counterinsurgency efforts between 1980 and 2000. Yet it lived on in a political movement formed by Guzmán’s followers that sought amnesty for all “political prisoners,” including the Shining Path founder. The Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Right failed, however, to register as a political party in 2012 in the face of fierce opposition from Peruvians with bitter memories of the destruction brought by the Shining Path. In its songs and slogans, the Shining Path celebrated bloodletting, describing death as necessary to “irrigate” the revolution. Its militants bombed electrical towers, bridges and factories in the countryside, assassinated mayors and massacred villagers. In the insurgency’s later years, they targeted civilians in Lima with indiscriminate bombings. The Shining Path was severely weakened after Guzmán’s capture and his later calls for peace talks. Small bands of rebels have nevertheless remained active in remote valleys, producing cocaine and protecting drug runners. 
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A section of mountain on the outskirts of Mexico City gave way Friday, plunging rocks the size of small homes onto a densely populated neighborhood and leaving at least one person dead and 10 others missing.Firefighters scaled a three-story pile of rocks that appeared to be resting on houses in Tlalnepantla, which is part of Mexico state. The state surrounds the capital on three sides.As rescuers climbed the immense pile of debris, they occasionally raised their fists in the air, the familiar signal for silence to listen for people trapped below. Firefighters and volunteers formed bucket brigades to pass 19-liter containers of smaller debris away as they excavated.“In this moment our priority is focused on rescuing the people who unfortunately were surprised at the site of the incident,” said Tlalnepantla Mayor Raciel Pérez Cruz in a video message.Authorities had evacuated surrounding homes and asked people to avoid the area so rescuers could work.Rescuers carried a body on a stretcher covered with a sheet past AP journalists. The Mexico state Civil Defense agency said in a statement that at least 10 people were reported missing.Among the volunteers were 30-year-old construction worker Martin Carmona, 30, and his 14-year-old son. “They organized us in a chain to take out buckets of sand, stone and rubble,” Carmona said. “A coworker lives there. He has a wife and two young children under the debris.”Carmona and his son arrived to the pile before government rescuers and his friend was already there digging for his wife and kids.Neighbors began to complain that they need more help and organization.Carmona said rescuers heard children, but after two hours of removing debris, authorities told volunteers to leave the area. Only relatives stayed to help the rescuers.A boulder that plunged from a mountainside rests among homes in Tlalnepantla, on the outskirts of Mexico City, when a mountain gave way on Sept. 10, 2021.Search dogs clambered over the rubble with their handlers.Ana Luisa Borges, 39, said she lives just three houses down from those hit by the landslide.“It thundered horribly,” she said of the sound of the slide. “I grabbed my youngest son and ran out (of the house). Then came a very big cloud of dust.” Fortunately, her other four children were in school.“There are a number of houses there,” she said of the slide area. “There was a building, but they tell us there are people there and children. I saw one person come out with head injury.”Borges said they have been warned that another rock could come down and that she didn’t know where they were going to sleep tonight.“They’ve only told us that we have to leave (our homes),” she said.Tlalnepantla officials announced they were opening several shelters for displaced residents.The neighborhood is a heap of jumbled houses climbing the mountainside, many with corrugated tin roofs, separated in places by just a steep staircase.One massive boulder stopped against a two-story house barely its equal, knocking out the front wall and spilling the home’s contents into the street. A path of destruction traced uphill.Boulders that plunged from a mountainside rests among homes in Tlalnepantla, on the outskirts of Mexico City, when a mountain gave way on Sept. 10, 2021.Maximinio Andrade, who lives with his parents and siblings — 14 family members in all — near the slide walked down the steep street pushing a flat-screen television on a hand cart. He had not been home at the time of the landslide but feared thieves would enter now that the surrounding homes had been evacuated.“They’ve already started stealing from the destroyed homes,” he said.National Guard troops and rescue teams carrying lengths of rope made their way through narrow streets.Images from the area showed a segment of the steep, green side of the peak known as Chiquihuite sheared off above a field of giant rubble with closely packed homes remaining on either side.Mexico state Gov. Alfredo del Mazo said via Twitter that local, state and federal authorities were coordinating to secure the zone in case of more slides and to remove rubble to locate possible victims.The landslide follows days of heavy rain in central Mexico and a 7.0-magnitude earthquake Tuesday night near Acapulco that shook buildings 320 kilometers away in Mexico City.While visiting the scene later Friday, Del Mazo said authorities believe four homes were destroyed in the landslide and another 80 were evacuated as a precaution.“It’s likely the earthquake and the intense rain we have had in recent days have affected (the area) and for this came the landslide and the breakup of the mountain,” he said. 
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A protest by Brazilian truckers loyal to President Jair Bolsonaro largely fizzled out Friday, to the relief of industries that feared supply shortages.Brazil’s infrastructure minister said in a statement early Friday that there were protests along highways in three states, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Rondonia, but no roads were blocked. That compared with 16 states that had registered highway protests earlier in the week.The nation’s federal highway police said the protests “no longer present threats of partial or total blockades and are heading toward total demobilization.”Stirred up by Bolsonaro’s call to action against the Supreme Court at political rallies on Tuesday, the truck blockades gained steam on Wednesday. Earlier this week, the right-wing leader had accused the Supreme Court of preventing him from governing and called on Justice Alexandre de Moraes to step down.On Thursday, he sought to defuse the dispute and said he had told truckers to stand down, warning that if the protests continued past Sunday, it would bring about serious supply shortages.With scant rail infrastructure in Latin America’s largest country, the economy is heavily dependent on trucks and the protests threatened key export routes. A major truckers’ strike in 2018 brought activity to a standstill.Besides supporting Bolsonaro in his battle against the Supreme Court, truckers are unhappy about soaring diesel prices.Bolsonaro gained prominence in the 2018 presidential campaign with his early support for the truckers, and he has remained sympathetic to their complaints of high fuel prices.  
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