Politics

• Wednesday, October 5th 2016 - 17:05 UTC

  Antonio Guterres has Security Council support to become next UN Secretary General

  

  Portugal’s former Prime Minister Antonio Guterres has unofficially been selected as the next U.N. Secretary-General. He is expected to be officially endorsed in the coming days. Following a decisive round of voting Wednesday in the U.N. Security Council, the veteran politician and diplomat prevailed with 13 votes in favor of his candidacy, none objecting to it and two votes of “no opinion”.

• Wednesday, October 5th 2016 - 11:43 UTC

  Brazilians disenchantment with the political system: 17.5% abstention on Sunday's election

  

  Brazilian President Michel Temer said on Monday the high abstention rate as well as the number of blank and spoiled ballots in local elections on the weekend signaled the disillusionment of Brazilians with their political system. Brazil's electoral authority, the TSE, said the abstention rate averaged 17.5% in Sunday's nationwide polls, up from 15.4% in the municipal elections in 2014.

• Wednesday, October 5th 2016 - 11:01 UTC

  London confident of a Brexit deal “suitable and adequate” for Gibraltar and UK

  

  United Kingdom's International Trade Secretary Liam Fox has said he is confident a Brexit deal could be struck that “will get a suitable and adequate response to the problems we face” both for Gibraltar as well as for the UK.

• Wednesday, October 5th 2016 - 06:33 UTC

  Malvinas has “an enormous emotional content” but “my duty is to advance dialogue in all issues”

  

  Foreign minister Susana Malcorra said that the Falklands/Malvinas issue has “an enormous emotional content”, but as her country's main diplomat her duty is to ensure a dialogue that can advance, in the best possible way, on all issues. The minister also described the Mercosur relation with Brazil as “inexorable”, which is beyond ideologies underlining the significance of Brazil's Michel Temer recent visit to Argentina.

• Tuesday, October 4th 2016 - 11:55 UTC

  Macri and Temer reaffirm commitment to strengthen Mercosur

  

  Argentine President Mauricio Macri and his Brazilian counterpart, Michel Temer, agreed on Monday on the need to strengthen Mercosur and to make its rules more “flexible” to ”give a certain autonomy to the (member) states in their international relations.”

• Tuesday, October 4th 2016 - 11:31 UTC

  Argentina claims squid catches in the South Atlantic have plummeted dramatically

  

  The president of Argentina's Chamber of Jiggers Fishing Vessels Ship-owners, Juan Redini, gave some alarming figures on squid catches in the South Atlantic during a presentation at Monday's cephalopod conference held in Vigo, Spain sponsored by FAO and the Conxemar frozen seafood exhibition.

• Tuesday, October 4th 2016 - 10:20 UTC

  Colombia the day after: Uribe holds the key to a peace deal, but much harsher on FARC commanders

  

  Colombia's president tried Monday to keep alive an agreement to end Latin America's longest-running war after a shocking rejection by voters, but his opponents made clear their price for joining the effort will be steep.

• Tuesday, October 4th 2016 - 08:50 UTC

  Until Falkland Islanders so wish, “there can be no dialogue on sovereignty”

  

  The United Kingdom has no doubt about the principal and the right of the Falkland Islanders to self determination as enshrined in both the UN charter and Article one of both UN covenants of Human Rights, said British representative Barrister Margaret Purdasy, at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland.

• Tuesday, October 4th 2016 - 06:29 UTC

  Lula's Workers Party support shrinks 60% in Sunday's municipal elections

  

  Brazil’s Workers Party suffered its worst-ever result at the polls as voters used Sunday’s local elections to punish it for a deep recession and a series of corruption scandals. After 13 years in power the party saw its vote collapse across Brazil in a dramatic confirmation that it is now fighting to retain a seat at the top table of Brazilian politics following the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in August and the decision last month to try party founder and former president Lula da Silva for corruption.

• Tuesday, October 4th 2016 - 04:59 UTC

  Trump's campaign on the defensive in several fronts: tax elusion and fundraising

  

  New York's attorney general ordered Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's charitable foundation to immediately stop fundraising in the state, warning that a failure to do so would be a “continuing fraud.”