Venezuela protests leave three ‘dead’
Mudslides kill 17
CARACAS/SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela, April 20, (Agencies): Two Venezuelan students and a National Guard sergeant died on Wednesday after being shot during protests against unpopular leftist President Nicolas Maduro, increasing turmoil in the volatile nation amid a devastating economic crisis.
Opposition supporters protested in Caracas and other cities in what they called “the mother of all marches,” denouncing Maduro for eroding democracy and plunging the oil-rich economy into chaos.
Crowds swelled to hundreds of thousands, including Maduro supporters who held a counter-demonstration in the capital at the urging of the president, and clashes were reported across the country during the most sustained protests since 2014.
Maduro says that beneath a peaceful facade, the protests are little more than opposition efforts to foment a coup to end socialism in Venezuela. The opposition says he has morphed into a dictator and accuses his government of using armed civilians to spread violence and fear.
Maduro
Funder of Trump inauguration:
President Nicolas Maduro may be struggling to feed Venezuela but his socialist administration still managed to make a $500,000 donation to Donald Trump’s inauguration, records released Wednesday show.
Inaugural committee records filed with the Federal Election Commission show Citgo Petroleum, a US affiliate of Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, was one of the biggest corporate donors to events surrounding the swearing-in ceremony.
The donation topped that of some US corporate giants including Pepsi ($250,000), Walmart ($150,000) and Verizon ($100,000) and was on par with the likes of JP Morgan Chase and Exxon, which each donated $500,000. It came in under Bank of America’s $1 million contribution.
Corruption threatens Brazil:
Efforts by Brazil’s embattled government to push through unpopular austerity reforms face ever greater headwinds after the eruption of a corruption scandal weakening President Michel Temer.
Temer is staking his legacy on passage of the reforms, which center on changing the costly pension system to increase the retirement age to 65 for men and 62 for women from today’s 60 for men and 55 for women.
Temer has rock-bottom public approval ratings but he has been able to rely on a friendly Congress since legislators impeached leftist president Dilma Rousseff last year, automatically raising Temer, her conservative vice president, to the top job.
Columbia mudslides kill 17:
A deluge of rain set off landslides that smashed homes and filled streets with mud Wednesday in a mountain city in a coffee-growing part of Colombia, and authorities said at least 17 people were killed and two dozen injured.
The disaster struck in the early morning when many people in Manizales were still asleep, just as a flooding disaster two weeks ago that caused more than 300 deaths in this Andean nation’s southern city of Mocoa.
Dozens of hillsides gave way in Manizales after the city of nearly 400,000 people received the equivalent of a full month’s rain in the span of five hours. The inundation caused at least 40 to 50 avalanches of mud and rock that destroyed homes and left several roadways impassable.
Ex-governor stalls extradition:
Javier Duarte, the former state governor of Mexico’s ruling party who was arrested in Guatemala at the weekend, said in court on Wednesday he would not agree to be extradited until his lawyers were able to study a formal extradition request.
“At this time, I can’t agree (to extradition) until the formal extradition request arrives, and it can be studied by my defense team” said Duarte. “This doesn’t mean I won’t accept it, though.”
If Duarte agrees to be extradited, he could be back in Mexico within a month, according to Guatemalan justice officials. If not, it might take considerably longer.
Son of oldest woman dies:
The son of a woman believed to be the oldest person in the world died at their home Wednesday in Jamaica at the ripe old age of 97.
Harland Fairweather, who had recently been ill but had seemed to recover, awoke saying he felt dizzy and then deteriorated over the course of the morning, said Elaine McGrowder, one of two family caretakers who were at the home at the time.
“He had been unwell for some time but we didn’t expect him to go like this,” McGrowder said.
Fairweather lived with his 117-year-old mother, Violet Brown, in the rural northwestern Jamaican community of Duanvale. He was born and raised there but spent much of his life in Britain, the caretaker said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “He was a beautiful man — very, very special,” she said.