Daina Beth Solomon

Bolivia's election of centrist Rodrigo Paz is raising cautious hopes that a more market-friendly leader could pave the way for international investment in the country's ample lithium reserves after years of false starts under two decades of socialist rule.

Global miner Rio Tinto , will tackle one of the biggest technological challenges in the lithium industry as it takes the lead in Chile's first major projects involving the battery metal in years, alongside state-run mining companies Codelco and ENAMI.

Chile's Indigenous communities in the lithium-rich Atacama Desert are in talks with two of the nation's biggest miners to gain more influence over plans to increase extraction of the battery metal, according to the companies and community sources.

Her daughter's school shut down, Yomara said, after a shootout between rival gangs competing for control of drug and migrant trafficking routes in their southern Mexican town of Chicomuselo. Then, she said, produce vendors cleared out of the market after they faced demands to affiliate with the gangs; she feared her husband Carlos would be forcibly recruited if he turned up for his job on a construction site.

The jungle has become a notorious humanitarian catastrophe as tens of thousands of people trek toward the U.S. border. It's also attracting thrill-seeking tourists and "content creators."

Until last year, Julieta Monica Morales was another factory worker making T-shirts in central Mexico, fuming over poor pay and a broken union system she thought served companies more than workers.

At first, Mexican migrants Pablo Ortega and Julio Lopez enjoyed the smuggling equivalent of a first-class ticket to the United States: complimentary beers, safe houses with video games, even a week at a hunting ranch.

Three asylum seekers were kidnapped in April while in a U.S. migration program that had placed them in the care of Mexican officials in the city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Texas, one of the victims and the U.N. migration agency said.

After her husband was shot dead while running for mayor of Apaseo el Alto in central Mexico in 2018, Maria del Carmen Ortiz took over his campaign and, pushing through her grief, won the vote after becoming a symbol of residents' hunger for justice.

Walmart's Mexico unit has penalized food companies supplying groceries to rival Amazon, pressure that has forced some to pull their products from the world's largest online retailer, four people familiar with the matter said.