The week at a glance...Americas

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Look up: UFO sightings in Canada are sky-high for the second year in a row. The 1,180 reports of UFOs in 2013 were topped only by the record 1,981 sightings in 2012, mostly in the west of Canada. By comparison, just 141 UFOs were reported in 1989. Three reports last year included sightings of extraterrestrials, while four were reports of alien abductions. Many, though, are reported by pilots or police. “I’ve always been a UFO skeptic, and yet I saw those lights,” said one retired helicopter pilot who said he saw a mysterious aircraft. “I allow the possibility that there is something out there.”

Tumbiscatío, Mexico

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Cartel boss killed, for real: The megalomaniac drug lord who led the Knights Templar cartel has been killed by Mexican police, four years after faking his death at their hands. Methamphetamine kingpin Nazario Moreno, known as “the Craziest,” modeled himself on a comic book superhero, dressing in white robes to lead a cult-like gang that terrorized Michoacán state with beheadings, rapes, and extortion. His followers revered him as a saint and kept jewel-encrusted statues of him wearing medieval armor. Four years ago, Mexican police thought they had killed him in a shoot-out, but he had actually gone into hiding, continuing to run the gang. This week, police and soldiers shot him dead at his 44th birthday party—and this time his body was recovered.

Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Europe must pay: Caribbean nations have agreed on a 10-point plan for slavery reparations from European nations that once colonized them. At a meeting this week, prime ministers from 15 countries and territories drew up a document that includes demands for a formal apology and debt cancellation from former colonizers such as France, the U.K., and the Netherlands, as well as money to help Rastafarians resettle in Africa. “We are not exclusively concerned with financial transactions,” said Sir Hilary Beckles, the Barbadian historian who chairs the reparations task force. “We are concerned more with justice for the people who continue to suffer harm at so many levels of social life.”

Caracas, Venezuela

No censure: The Venezuelan government has claimed victory after the Organization of American States declined to censure it. Panama called last week for the OAS to condemn Venezuela’s violent crackdown on protests over the past two months, and Venezuela cut off relations with Panama, labeling it a “lackey government” of the U.S. In the end, though, the OAS passed only a bland statement calling on all sides to join the government-sponsored dialogue that the opposition has already rejected. UNASUR, an association of South American governments, also supported Venezuela this week. Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa said the protests were “an attempt to destabilize a legitimate, elected government, and we cannot permit that.”

Lima, Peru

Van der Sloot stays: Peru has agreed to extradite Joran van der Sloot, the main suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, to the U.S., but only in 2038, after he finishes serving a murder sentence. The Dutchman was convicted of killing a Peruvian woman in 2010 after she found out he was suspected in the disappearance of Holloway on spring break in Aruba. He has never been charged in Holloway’s death, as the evidence linking the two is only circumstantial. But he is wanted in the U.S. on charges of extorting money from Holloway’s parents in exchange for information about where her body was located. The body was never found.