I’m about to drink from a cup of black coffee made with beans grown at 5,000 feet above sea level in Huila, a province in southwestern Colombia. Huila is not exactly a tourist hotspot. Much of it still mountainous backcountry where leftist guerrillas still roam — the Colombian army and FARC forces regularly clash in the steep passes and heavy jungle.

Back in Bogotá, however, coffee snobbery is on full display. Duque prepares the beans with with triple-filtered water through an Aeropress, a method akin to the French press that uses a disposable paper filter. The coffee is exceptional.

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However, for millions of people, that date celebrates something else: Easter Sunday. Several conservatives and Christians alike took issue with Google's decision to honor the rights icon over their holiday:

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Members of the area's self-described "community police" say more than 1,500 members of the force were stopping traffic on Wednesday at improvised checkpoints in the town of Tierra Colorado, which sits on the highway connecting Mexico City to Acapulco. They arrested 12 police and the former director of public security in the town after a leader of the state's vigilante movement was slain on Monday.

A tourist heading to the beach with relatives was slightly wounded on Tuesday after they refused to stop at a roadblock and vigilantes fired shots at their car, officials said.

The vigilantes accuse the ex-security director of participating in the killing of their leader Guadalupe Quinones Carbajal, 28, on behalf of local organised crime groups and dumping his body in a nearby town on Monday.

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Helen Clark, the head of the United Nations Development Program, has publicly slammed global strategies to combat drugs, claiming there is increasing evidence that "the war on drugs" has failed. The former prime minister of New Zealand urged Latin American leaders to develop new policies to tackle drugs, which she says should be addressed as a public health problem rather than criminalized. "I've been a health minister in my past and there's no doubt that the health position would be to treat the issue of drugs as primarily a health and social issue rather than a criminalized issue," she told Reuters. "Once you criminalize, you put very big stakes around. Of course, our world has proceeded on the basis that criminalization is the approach. To deal with drugs as a one-dimensional, law-and-order issue is to miss the point." Although she did not directly comment on US involvement in the drug war, her words have been widely interpreted as a criticism of US drug policy, which she later denied. "She was speaking about the negative effects the drug trade has had on development in some Latin American countries in the context of the Human Development Report," said UNDP spokeswoman Christina LoNigro in a statement.

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If you'd been holding your breath hoping for a fresh new bro pope, a younger dude with a marginally less offensive attitude toward some of the most deeply controversial and divisive issues among Catholics today, your ship did not come in on Wednesday. The 76-year-old Argentine Bergoglio, the first pope to hail from the Americas, has reportedly called same-sex marriage "a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God." So that'd be a no. He's not down with abortion under any circumstances, which he says contributes to a "culture of death," and has publicly clashed with Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner over the country's plan to distribute free birth control. But according to a report in the Guardian, he is, however, open to contraception as a form of preventing disease. And though he's firmly denied it, he's been accused of complicity in a 1976 kidnapping of two priests during the country's military regime.

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Just to get it out of the way, I'll state the obvious: with respect to many policies, Chavez was no saint. He, for instance, amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms (though as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy notes, "Venezuela is recognized by many scholars to be more democratic than it was in the pre-Chávez era"). His rein also coincided with a boom in violent crime.

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Badiraguato, a town of 7,000 in Sinaloa state, shouldn’t have such wealth. It’s among the poorest municipalities in Mexico. But you’re better off not asking questions here.

This is a secretive place, hot and quiet in the Sierra Madre foothills. There’s an army barracks, but soldiers mostly stay inside.

It’s the heart of drug country, home to Mexico's most powerful criminal syndicate: the Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

For well over a century, local farmers have harvested marijuana and opium in the rugged mountains surrounding Badiraguato. Since the 1980s, the Sinaloa cartel has acted as their Wal-Mart, transporting the mind-bending cargo north with quasi-corporate efficiency, and distributing it to a narcotics-craving United States market.

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Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set.  It seems that, between 9/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.

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Jose Antonio Munoz Serrano, secretary of health for the western state of Jalisco, where the girl lives, said the parents knew their daughter was pregnant for months and did not notify authorities despite her young age, El Universal reported.

Munoz Serrano said authorities were concerned about the girl’s family, with whom she is living with her baby girl, CNN Mexico reported.

“We are worried that the girl’s parents didn’t notify the health sector about their daughter’s pregnancy so that she could receive medical attention during her pregnancy,” he said.

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There were reports of many more still trapped at the 51-story tower in Mexico City, according to MyFoxLA.com.

According to the Associated Press, the cause of the blast is still unclear. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto urged people not to speculate about what my have caused it. Some theories include an electrical fire, faulty air conditioning and a possible attack.

"We will work exhaustively to investigate exactly what took place, and if there are people responsible, to apply the force of the law on them," Pena Nieto told reporters, Reuters reported.

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Stewart, a journalist specializing in war and organized crime, first heard about Ciudad Blanco -- the White City, a magnificent ruin rumored to be buried deep in the jungles of the Mosquitia region of Honduras -- while reporting on the booming Honduran drug trade in 2008. An American ex-soldier who had been involved in training the Nicaraguan contras told him about the legend while describing Mosquitia as the "shittiest, buggiest shithole jungle in the world." Stewart was soon obsessed, and in a few months, he was on a plane for Central America.

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The Interior Ministry said Wednesday that border police noticed fresh scars and blood-stained gauze on her chest as well as pale patches beneath her skin.

The woman said she had recently had breast implant surgery. The statement said police were suspicious and sent her to a local hospital where the implants were removed and found to contain cocaine.

The woman arrived in Spain from Bogota, Colombia.

European authorities routinely submit passengers arriving from Latin America to stringent checks to combat drug smuggling.

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The singer's father, Pedro Rivera, said he thinks his daughter was on board the plane and that her brother will travel to Mexico on Monday to identify what they presumed were her remains.

Born in Long Beach, California, Jenni Rivera was at the peak of her career as perhaps the most successful female singer in grupero, a male-dominated regional style influenced by the norteno, cumbia and ranchero styles.

A 43-year-old mother of five children and grandmother of two, the woman known as the "Diva de la Banda" was known for her frank talk about her struggles to give a good life to her children despite a series of setbacks.

She was recently divorced from her third husband, was once detained at a Mexico City airport with tens of thousands of dollars in cash, and she publicly apologized after her brother assaulted a drunken fan who verbally attacked her in 2011.

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Gay marriage has been legal in the Federal District, Mexico City, since 2010, and the Supreme Court had previously ruled that those marriages must be recognized nationwide. Wednesday’s ruling struck down a law in the southern state of Oaxaca that denied same-sex couples the right to marry there.

The ruling could have repercussions beyond Mexico’s borders. The couples seeking to marry in the Oaxaca case based their claims partly on protections in the American Convention on Human Rights, which has legal force in many Latin American countries. In saying that bans on same-sex marriage are discriminatory, the court may establish a precedent that could be used by LGBT activists throughout the region.

This comes before the U.S. Supreme Court has even decided whether it will hear a gay marriage case.

This Oaxaca case, which has broad implications, had an unlikely beginning. It was initiated by a Oaxacan law student, Alex Alí Méndez Díaz, who brought suits on behalf of a handful of couples even though other LGBT activists in his state warned that they were doomed to fail.

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With that said, if the United States has a distinct advantage over its similarly–situated fellow travelers in Europe and elsewhere, it’s due to demographics. Thanks to mass immigration, our birth rate has held steady, and in a prosperous society, more people is a recipe for more growth.

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The post-9/11 era is no different, though the methods of warfare have changed. US military intervention in countries like Yemen have destabilized nations and killed innocent civilians in the name of the “war on terror.” The current crop of undeclared wars the US is waging is having a deleterious impact around the world. And there’s also the so-called war on drugs, which the US continues to wage despite devastating consequences on the ground.

Here is a look at some of the specific countries where US intervention is doing immense damage.

1. Yemen

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However, as millions here follow events in London obsessively, the reality is that the region has largely failed to live up to its sporting potential for decades, and relatively few Latin Americans have ever graced an Olympic podium.

Before the London games started, the region had a total of 128 Olympic golds. If that sounds like a lot, it's worth remembering that Sweden has 190, Australia, 136 and South Korea, 91.

And just over half Latin America’s golds, 67 to be precise, come from Cuba, where the Castro regime has dedicated vast amounts of state resources to achieving international sporting glory. Most of the rest come from just three countries, Brazil — the runner-up with a total of 20 — Argentina, and Mexico.

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But Perez Roisinblit’s story is far from normal. Indeed, only his family and an unwavering need for justice have kept him going through the turbulent and deeply confusing last decade.

“I know the truth now. I now know what my real origins are, who my real family are, what happened to me and where I was really born,” says the 33-year-old. “But more than this, I need justice, because someone is responsible for all of this. Someone played God and decided who lived, who died and who brought up the children of the victims.”

Perez Roisinblit is one of Argentina’s stolen babies. He was born to left-wing activist parents who were arrested during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983) and taken to a clandestine detention center because of their beliefs.

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Due to be extradited from the UK to Sweden for questioning over alleged sexual offenses, last month Assange breached his bail conditions to seek refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy.

Since then he has refused to leave and has requested asylum and even Ecuadorean citizenship from Correa’s left-wing administration, which, like Assange, has an antagonistic relationship with Washington.

This week, Ecuadorean newspaper Hoy quoted Correa as saying: “If Assange’s life is at risk, these things would be a cause for granting asylum.” Controversially, he then went on to add: “In the United States there is the death penalty for political crimes.”

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