The week at a glance...Americas

last updated 8 January 2015

Ottawa

Senator accused: A Canadian senator was charged with sexual assault last week and suspended from the Senate pending trial, raising new questions about the practice of lifetime appointments to the upper house. Patrick Brazeau was national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples and only 34 years old when Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed him to the Senate in 2008 as the body’s youngest member ever. The native advocacy group had been instrumental in Harper’s election campaign, and the appointment was widely seen as political payback. The government has proposed major reforms to the Senate, including limiting senators to nine-year terms and having them elected by the provinces.

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Vessel stranded: A cruise ship was adrift in the Gulf of Mexico for several days this week, after a fire onboard left it without power. More than 4,200 passengers and crew members were stuck onboard, with a lack of air-conditioning, overflowing toilets, and the stench of rotting food in refrigerators forcing many to sleep in tents on deck. Although the fire was extinguished without injury to passengers or crew members, it left the 100,000-ton Carnival Triumph drifting northwards in the Gulf of Mexico for almost two days without propulsion or power. Two tugboats were dispatched to tow the Triumph back to port in Mobile, Ala. “We obviously are very, very sorry about what’s taken place,” said Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill.

Isla Negra, Chile

Was Neruda murdered? The body of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda is being exhumed to test whether the poet was poisoned after the 1973 military coup that installed Augusto Pinochet. Neruda was a committed Communist and served as a diplomat for his friend President Salvador Allende, who was deposed in the coup. Recent tests on Allende’s body found that he was not murdered, as previously assumed, but committed suicide. Neruda’s death, ostensibly of prostate cancer, has been seen as suspicious as it came just two weeks after the coup. Neruda’s driver has always maintained he was poisoned.

Santo Antônio da Platina, Brazil

Arachno-spectacle: Thousands of spiders have woven a massive network of webs over a town in southern Brazil, stretching between trees and power lines. Erick Reis, 20, shot a video of the spiders appearing to rain down from the sky and posted it on the Web; the footage went viral and was featured on news programs across the planet. A Brazilian biologist identified the spiders as Anelosimus eximius, a local species known for forming “sheet webs” to house vast colonies, but arachnologists said they were more likely Parawixia bistriata, a larger, orb-weaving variety. Neither species is dangerous to humans.