Americas press review

Headlines: In Ecuador, a murdered candidate was elected mayor

Municipal elections have taken place in Ecuador.

© Getty Images/iStock/Edgar Yanchapaxi

Text by: Justine Fontaine Follow

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With 46% of the vote, Omar Menendez won the municipal elections in the small coastal town of Puerto Lopez.

Overwhelming victory, nearly 25 points ahead of its main competitor.

But he was

, reports the newspaper

.

Member of a party close to former left-wing president Rafael Correa, the candidate was assassinated a few hours before the start of the ballot, at the end of a campaign marked by violence at the national level.

A first candidate had been killed 15 days earlier in another city, in a country plagued by the violence of drug traffickers.

At the national level, the camp of Rafael Correa, today in exile in Belgium, made an important breakthrough.

And

wanted by President Guillermo Lasso, reports

.

A referendum that focused on security, institutions or the environment.

The conservative head of state thus suffered a major setback at the ballot box.

Chile, gigantic forest fires spread to new regions

Huge flames, thick black smoke, and firefighters who seem very alone in the face of the magnitude of the fires.

Here are

that can be seen on the front page of

or

.

The figures printed on paper are already obsolete, faced with the

communicated by the authorities late Tuesday evening... 24 dead and 293,000 hectares consumed in the center-south of the country, reports the website of radio Bio-Bio, which stresses, like the site of the newspaper

that

.

That's nearly half of what has burned in fires across the European Union in the whole of 2022.

What are the reasons for this?

Drought, but not only.

The Ciper website

shares several forums by researchers, who point out the impact of highly flammable pine and eucalyptus monocultures.

Cultures which for thirty years, since the dictatorship of General Pinochet, have developed enormously and have often replaced local species.

, to make them more respectful of the environment.

“

Biden calls on Republicans to help him finish the job

”

This headline, about President Joe Biden's State of the Union address, is on the front page of both the

and the

.

The Democrats no longer have a majority in the House of Representatives since the midterm elections in November, which forces them to negotiate with the Republicans.

Given global inflation, the war in Ukraine, and the country's divisions,

sums up the

in its own way , highlighting the good employment figures in the country.

The tone is much more critical in the pages of the

.

" 

 ", writes the tabloid, for which the president would have multiplied the false accusations against the Republicans and would not have been offensive enough vis-à-vis China, after “ 

»

LeBron James, the all-time leading scorer in the NBA

The Lakers player surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's points record and now has 38,390 points on the clock.

For a Los Angeles Times columnist, at 38,

.

This even if Michael Jordan was six times NBA champion, and LeBron James has only 4 titles for now.

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel in the footsteps of Mahler and Bernstein

The Venezuelan

will conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 2026. During a conference in Chile in 2018, here is how he summed up his vision of the profession: " 

'look at how well I conduct the orchestra ”,

“listen to how I do it”.

Pure product of El

Sistema, these popular music schools created in Venezuela in the 1970s, Gustavo Dudamel is today musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Paris Opera.

The announcement of his new appointment arouses the pride of the

in the United States: " 

 ", rejoices for example a merchant of Venezuelan origin in New York.

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