Latin America | featured news

President Obama has spent part of the Summit of the Americas critiquing media coverage of issues involving the United States and Latin America. "I think that often times in the press the attention in summits like this ends up focusing on where are the controversies," Obama said at one point this weekend. "Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born."

Hardened in the streets and prisons of California and deported in the 1990s to the Central American countries where they were born, the members of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang swiftly grew into a force of heavily tattooed young men carrying out kidnappings, murder and extortion.

The Obama administration said Friday that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's upcoming visit to four Latin American countries is is a sign of desperation as the country becomes politically isolated due to sanctions and warned Latin American leaders against expanding ties with Iran.

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Blackberry, which has been plagued by service outages in Europe, the Middle East and India this week, reports that disruptions have spread to Latin America.

Netflix is expanding its movie and TV show streaming service into 43 countries throughout Latin America in the online movie rental company's largest international expansion yet.

Nearly 10 percent of the world’s adults have diabetes, and the prevalence of the disease is rising rapidly. As in the United States and other wealthy nations, increased obesity and inactivity are the primary cause in such developing countries as India and in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

Top Obama administration officials are expected to face continued criticism Thursday over their handling of the crisis in Libya, and louder calls for a clearer explanation of U.S. policy in the war-torn North African nation.

A state airliner filled with Cubans and travelers from Europe and Latin America crashed and burst into flames in a mountainous area after declaring an emergency and losing contact with air traffic controllers, the island's worst air disaster in more than 20 years.

Argentina became the first Latin American country on Thursday to legalize same-sex marriage.