Blackouts blamed on forest fires left without power whole areas of north and central Venezuela, including Caracas, officials said. The power outages began last Thursday due to the collapse of electrical lines located 250 kilometres west of Caracas, Electricity Minister Ali Rodriguez said.
A Guatemalan judge granted the country’s First Couple divorce petition thus opening the way for First Lady Sandra Torres to run in September’s presidential election for which her husband President Alvaro Colom is barred under constitutional rule.
The presidents of Colombia, Venezuela Juan Manuel Santos and Hugo Chavez held a non announced meeting with their Honduran peer Pofirio Lobo and said they were committed to help the outcast country rejoin the Latin American family by returning to the Organization of American States, OAS.
China on Sunday reported a surprise quarterly trade deficit of 1.02 billion US dollars, the first in six years as it settles to rebalance its export oriented economy to boost domestic consumption in the next five years.
Former army officer and politically nationalist Ollanta Humala won the most votes in Peru’s presidential elections, though will need to wait for full results to know who he’ll face in a June runoff.
United States congressional leaders have agreed on a budget deal to fund the US government for the rest of the fiscal year, just before a midnight deadline. It will reportedly cut 39 billion USD from the budget over last year's levels between now and 30 September.
Protests erupted across much of the Arab world on the Muslim day of prayer, with demonstrators killed in Syria and Yemen while Egyptians staged one of the biggest rallies since President Hosni Mubarak's fall.
Former Uruguayan president Tabaré Vázquez denied this week that he ever said that his Argentine counterparts Néstor and Cristina Kirchner are “fascists”, like Wikileaks cables stated.
British music icon Paul McCartney has confirmed that he will play the Estadio Nacional in Santiago on May 11 this year. It will be the star’s second show in Chile; he played the same venue in December 1993.
Argentina plans to extend the equivalent of 750 million US dollars in subsidized loans to meat producers to spur increased production of beef, chicken and pork.