13-Y-O riddled with bullets en-route to school
[CMC] – Police are searching for the gunman who murdered a 13-year-old school boy as he made his way to school on Tuesday.
Yakini Charles, a first form student of the Tranquility Government School in Belmont, just on the outskirts of the capital, was shot several times.
Media reports said that the boy was walking to school when a car drove up and someone inside the vehicle fired several shots hitting him. He later died in hospital.
Nearly 300 people have been murdered in Trinidad so far this year.
UN urges Venezuela to end abuses against Colombians
[Al Jazeera] – The United Nations has urged Venezuela to prevent human rights abuses of Colombians being deported from the country, including the separation of children from their parents, in a simmering border crisis between the two neighbours.
Venezuela closed several major border crossings and deported nearly 1,500 Colombians last month in what it described as a crackdown on smuggling and crime along the shared border.
Fearing deportation, another 15,255 Colombians have fled their adopted homeland to Colombia in recent weeks, many crossing rivers and bridges with their belongings on their backs, according to Colombian government figures.
“I am disturbed by the recent collective deportation of more than one thousand Colombians from Venezuela,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in his opening statement to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
He said the deportations had involved rights violations such as a lack of due process, the destruction of property and the separation of children from their parents.
“I urge the authorities to take immediate measures to guarantee family reunification and to prevent further abuse of Colombians.”
In a poor neighbourhood called La Invasion in Venezuela, the homes of Colombians, many of whom have lived for decades in the country, were marked “D” for demolition before security forces knocked them down last month, TV footage from Reuters showed.
The dispute has caused a diplomatic row between President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government and the centre-right administration of Juan Manuel Santos in Colombia.
Brazil cuts spending and raises taxes
[BBC] – The Brazilian government has announced a $7bn (£4.5bn) package of spending cuts aimed at plugging a huge black hole in the country’s 2016 budget.
At the same time, it unveiled plans to raise another $8bn by bringing back an unpopular financial transactions tax that was abolished eight years ago.
The government is struggling to pull the country’s economy out of recession.
It has also been hurt by the slump in President Dilma Rousseff’s public approval rating, which is now just 8%.
The measures were announced at a news conference by Finance Minister Joaquim Levy and Planning Minister Nelson Barbosa.
They include reducing the number of government ministries from 39 to 29, as well as cutting 1,000 public-sector jobs and freezing the pay of remaining state employees.
Cuban activists detained ahead of Pope Francis visit
[BBC] – Cuban police have detained more than 50 people who took part in a march calling on the island’s communist government to release political prisoners.
The detentions come less than a week before a visit to Cuba by Pope Francis.
Most of the activists were members of the predominantly Catholic dissident group, Ladies in White.
They walked through the streets of Havana holding up pictures of political prisoners, before they were rounded up by police.
According to Cuba’s main dissident website, 14yMedio, members of Ladies in White and activists from other opposition groups were handcuffed and pushed into police cars and buses on Sunday afternoon.
A number of them were released hours later, it said.
Cuba says the protesters are financed by right-wing American groups to destabilise the government.
Cuban dissidents are planning to protest during the Pope’s visit to the island, which begins on Saturday.
Every time Cubans protest for their rights, the idiotic regime accuses some Western group of financing and fomenting the protest. It is like as though Cubans can’t think and act for themselves. Actually, that is role the Cuban dictators reserve for themselves.