Quebec
Separatists defeated: Quebec’s separatist Parti Québécois was dumped from office this week in its worst election showing since the party’s founding in 1970. The province’s premier, Pauline Marois, even lost her own seat. The new government will be led by Philippe Couillard’s Quebec Liberal Party, which took an outright majority. Couillard said his win showed that the politics of division between French and English speakers was over. The PQ was sunk by a combination of corruption allegations and its plan to bar civil service workers from wearing religious symbols and clothing, such as a Sikh turban or a Muslim hijab.
Havana
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American on hunger strike: Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor imprisoned in Cuba for more than four years, began a hunger strike last week to protest his treatment by the Cuban and U.S. governments. Gross, 64, was arrested in 2009 for giving Cuban dissident groups Internet equipment under a U.S. Agency for International Development program. His prospects for release worsened last week when USAID admitted it had funded another Internet program in Cuba—a Twitter-like network for the island’s youth. Gross, who has lost 110 pounds since his arrest, complained of “mistruths, deceptions, and inaction by both governments” and “the lack of any reasonable or valid effort to resolve this shameful ordeal.”
San José, Costa Rica
Upstart is president: Leftist history professor Luis Solís easily won a presidential runoff in Costa Rica this week after his rival gave up last month. Ruling party candidate Johnny Araya stopped campaigning a month before the election because he was so far behind in the polls, meaning Solís was essentially unopposed. But he urged Costa Ricans to turn out anyway to give him a mandate. In the end, he took more than 1.2 million votes, the largest number in Costa Rican history. Solís, a U.S.-educated professor who taught at Florida International University and the University of Michigan, pledged to support small businesses and protect the environment.
Salvador, Brazil
Cruise ship hell: Brazilian police boarded an Italian cruise ship this week to rescue workers from what they called “slave-like” conditions. Responding to a plea for help from some of the Magnifica’s crew, police removed 11 workers who said they had been sexually harassed and forced to work for up to 16 hours a day. MSC Cruises, which owns the Magnifica, denied the allegations. A recent report in the journal Tourism Management found that employers often make cruise ship workers, many of whom come from poor countries, fund their own visas and vaccinations, inflicting “a level of debt that cannot be repaid and is comparable to forced labor.”
