9 h. ago Art Basel Miami 2025: Latin American artists take center stage

The Florida-based art gathering is spearheaded this year by artists from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and PanamaWhether it’s literally bringing Panamanian soil to Miami, or subverting the messages of Mexican religious cults by appropriating their iconography into tile murals dripping with sexual innuendo, Latin American artists at Art Basel Miami Beach this year are finding ways to reinvent their cultural heritage as surprising and fantastic pieces of art.The Mexican artist Renata Petersen, originally from Guadalajara, has outfitted her Art Basel booth with three collections that may at first appear disconnected – intricate murals made from tiles and covered slogans and iconography, 80 chrome-blown glass works that look slightly like chess pieces but are actually derived from sex toys, and ceramic vases sporting carefully arranged motifs. For Petersen, these works spring from a childhood lived with her anthropologist mother, where she learned to look at cults and other religious moveme...

Politics

1 week ago WW3 tensions stoked as Russia moves more ships into UK waters

Russia will remain a "country of opportunity" looking to poke at any perceived weaknesses of its rivals with its warship posturing, retired Vice Admiral Duncan Potts told The Mirror

Events

1 week ago The ‘war on terror’ has killed millions. Trump is reviving it in Venezuela | Daniel Mendiola

After decades of terrorizing civilians in the name of fighting terror, the White House is trying to do it with even less oversightFor the last two months, US forces have amassed outside Venezuela and carried out a series of lethal strikes on civilian boats. The Trump White House has ordered these actions in the name of fighting “narco-terrorists” – a label apparently applicable to anyone suspected of participating in drug trafficking near Latin American coastlines. More than 80 people have already been killed in these pre-emptive strikes, and war hawks are calling for expanded military action to depose the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro.Watching this play out, I am reminded of a passage from the geographer Stuart Elden’s award-winning 2009 book, Terror and Territory. In discussing how to study the “war on terror”, Elden observed that it did not make sense to study terrorism as something unique to non-state actors.Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and mig...

Events

2 w. ago Disease fears as Argentina child vaccination rates hit historic lows

Sharp drop since 2024 in country regarded as a Latin American leader in childhood and adolescent immunisationArgentina’s childhood and adolescent vaccination rates have collapsed to a historic lows according to a new analysis, prompting warnings that once-eliminated diseases may resurge.The study of health ministry data by the Argentinian Paediatric Society (SAP) found that fewer than half of children aged five and six received several of their essential doses in 2024. All vaccines analysed were below the 95% level needed to reach herd immunity. Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago Park Avenue review – Fiona Shaw is fearless in upmarket New York mother

Having left her husband, Shaw’s daughter moves in with her at the family’s Manhattan apartment and soon tensions arise – wry, sweet, melancholic but somewhat insubstantialFiona Shaw finds some tremendous form in this upmarket dramedy of mother-daughter tension and first-world problems, and Katherine Waterston is (as ever) really good. There’s plenty of amusement and wry, sophisticated sadness here, though co-writer and director Gaby Dellal has confected what is, in the end, a pretty middleweight movie.Shaw plays Kit, an elegant and wealthy widow living in a handsome apartment on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, known for her witty disdain for those less stylish than herself and about to publish a memoir of life with her late husband, a collector of Chinese art. Out of the blue her grown up daughter Charlotte (Waterston) appears, having run out on her abusive rancher husband; she intends to stay for a while with her mother in her childhood Park Avenue home while she figures things o...

Politics

3 w. ago Pentagon’s largest warship enters Latin American waters as US tensions with Venezuela rise

USS Gerald R Ford’s arrival marks the largest US military presence in the region since the invasion of Panama in 1989The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.The deployment of the ship and the strike group it leads – which includes dozens of aircraft and destroyer ships – had been announced nearly three weeks ago, and its arrival marks an escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela. Continue reading...

Events