“As I write this, we are well into the second power outage of the day in this part of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city. We have experienced daily power outages since Russia began missile attacks.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. imposed sanctions Friday on Nicaragua’s state-owned gold mining company and the president of its board of directors in part over the Central American nation’s ties to Russia.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is making it easier for refugees fleeing Russia’s war on Ukraine to come to the United States from Europe while trying to shut down an informal route through northern Mexico that has emerged in recent weeks.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Friday brushed off comments by a senior U.S. military official who said there are more Russian spies in Mexico than anywhere else in the world.

Senior U.S. officials secretly traveled to Venezuela over the weekend in a bid to unfreeze hostile relations with Vladimir Putin’s top ally in Latin America, a top oil exporter whose re-entry into U.S. energy markets could mitigate the fallout at the pump from a possible oil embargo on Russia.

El Salvador joined Nicaragua in abstaining from the U.N. General Assembly’s condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine. As El Salvador prepares to issue a billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin Bonds, Bukele implies the Russia clampdown underscores a key use-case for the cryptocurrency: sanctions evasion.

The government on Saturday issued a statement that blamed the U.S. for the current war in Ukraine. It referred to “U.S. efforts to continue the progressive expansion of NATO” towards Russia’s borders as the main provocation for its attacks on Ukraine.

If the United States wants Russia to keep its hands off Ukraine, or wants any nation to respect its neighbors, it must first practice what it commands.

Russia on Thursday sharply raised the stakes in its dispute with the West over Ukraine, with a top diplomat refusing to rule out a Russian military deployment to Cuba and Venezuela if tensions with the United States mount.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — In his first visit to Latin America, Iran’s hardline president on Monday met with his Venezuelan counterpart and declared that both countries have “a common enemy,” alluding to the United States, before signing a series of cooperation agreements.

Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador’s nods to Russia and China are often read as a jealousy game in the U.S. bilateral relationship. Regional leaders claim sovereignty and multipolarity as their mantra. Experts say that non-ideological short-term calculus and a search for impunity are instead guiding their actions.

With the country no longer isolated as it was under Bolsonaro, who engaged with only a few international pariahs, President Lula da Silva has endangered Brazil’s return to the international scene by supporting Russian actions in Ukraine.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was in the Chinese financial hub of Shanghai on Thursday as he looks to boost ties and win political support for attempts to mediate the conflict in Ukraine.

Starlink, a division of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has almost 4,000 low-orbit satellites across the skies, connecting people in remote corners of the Amazon. The lightweight, high-speed internet system has also proved a new and valuable tool for Brazil’s illegal miners.

With thousands of Bolsonaro supporters either in jail or under investigation for plotting against democracy in Brazil, the nation’s attention has shifted to the defense of the Amazon rainforest and its Indigenous peoples and the policy shifts under President Lula.

A wrap-up of this week’s most important and interesting Latino news and views from around the world and the across the internet.

In an attempt to shift negative attention away from the problematic and troubled agency, the National Border Patrol Council is deploying social media posts to spread misinformation and blatant lies.

Almost $9 billion in bad debt and a half-century of high electricity prices hang in the balance in Puerto Rico.

The first of a weekly column by senior editor Hector Luis Alamo in which he gives an overview of the most interesting and important things he’s read, seen, or heard during the past week, providing his thoughts on them.

Last month, Venezuelans surpassed Guatemalans and Hondurans to become the second-largest nationality stopped at the U.S. border after Mexicans. Venezuelans were stopped 25,349 times, up 43 percent from 17,652 in July and four times the 6,301 encounters in August 2021, authorities said Monday, signaling a remarkably sudden demographic shift.

Three Americans were quietly jailed in Venezuela earlier this year for allegedly trying to enter the country illegally and now face long prison sentences in the politically turbulent nation. One of the men, Eyvin Hernández, is a 44-year-old lawyer and Salvadoran immigrant from California.