International rebuke on Saturday swelled over what observers say are efforts to use a politicized justice system to keep Guatemalan president-elect Bernardo Arevalo out of office.
A prosecutor at Guatemala’s attorney general’s office on Thursday moved to strip Arevalo of his immunity from prosecution, accusing him and his running mate of complicity in the takeover of a university in the capital last year.
Arevalo, an anti-graft candidate elected in a landslide in August, called the prosecutor’s move “absolutely illegal.”
Photo: Reuters
In a statement on Saturday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression condemned the attorney general’s office’s “incessant improper actions and interference.”
“These threaten the democratic order, the ongoing presidential transition process and the individual and collective exercise of civil and political liberties in the country,” the statement said.
Earlier on Saturday, US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols condemned the attorney general’s office’s “malign request” to strip Arevalo and Guatemalan vice president-elect Karin Herrera of immunity in a post on social media.
Also on Saturday, the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas published a letter signed by 29 former heads of state from Latin America and Spain denouncing the “persecution” of Arevalo and Herrera, which has the “repeated and clear purpose of obstructing the sovereign will of Guatemalans, already expressed through free elections.”
Guatemalan Attorney General Consuela Porras, accused by the US government of corruption, has pursued a criminal investigation against Arevalo as well as his center-left Seed Movement party since before his election.
Apps and Web sites that use artificial intelligence (AI) to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, researchers said. In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing Web sites, the social network analysis company Graphika said. Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, Graphika said. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400 percent on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only
IN ABSOLUTE CONTROL: About 80 percent of Russians approve of Putin, a survey shows, but that might be misleading due to his intolerance to criticism Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday moved to prolong his repressive and unyielding grip on Russia for at least another six years, announcing his candidacy in the presidential election in March that he is all but certain to win. Putin still commands wide support after nearly a quarter-century in power, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his people’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia — including one on the Kremlin itself — and corroded its aura of invincibility. A short-lived rebellion in June by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin raised widespread speculation that Putin could be
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
RSS