Grant Burrier

Traffic through the Panama Canal is nearly half-capacity these days. Normally, 40 ships take the world’s greatest shortcut through its locks each day. Last week, the Canal Authority reduced daily passages to 25, while predicting further cuts to 18 by February. The immediate cause is Panama’s driest October since recordkeeping began in 1950.

Photo: Courtesy of the author. Last month, a Brazilian expert on Indigenous people and a veteran journalist for The Guardian were murdered by illegal fishermen along the Rio Itaquaí. Although police arrested three suspects, they acknowledged the suspected killers might not be the intellectual authors of the assassinations. Justice requires a full, transparent accounting.

Image: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tours oil platform in his home state of Tabasco. Source: El Dictamen. As the COP-26 summit in Glasgow passed rather disappointingly, perhaps no country better symbolizes the current malaise than Mexico. Latin America’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, Mexico’s per capita emissions rank among the region’s worst. Rather than seize the opportunity for greater change, Mexico’s summit performance was desultory. It did not have to be.