The week at a glance...Americas

Abricots, Haiti

Sandy wreaks havoc: Before it reached the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. this week, Hurricane Sandy killed at least 53 people in Haiti and laid waste to the country’s cropland. Stores of corn and potatoes were wiped out, and banana and breadfruit trees were ripped out of the ground. “We’ll have famine in the coming days,” said Kechner Toussaint, mayor of the southwestern city of Abricots. “It’s an agricultural disaster.” Sandy also destroyed many of the tent camps that house some 370,000 victims of the 2010 earthquake. Aid workers warned that the flooding could lead to a spike in cholera, which has killed 7,400 Haitians and sickened 600,000 in the past two years.

Yacuiba, Bolivia

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Set afire on air: A Bolivian journalist was lit on fire while he was broadcasting a radio show this week in a town just a few miles from the country’s border with Argentina. Three masked men broke into the studio of Radio Popular, poured gas on Fernando Vidal, and set him and the studio alight. Vidal, 70, was badly burned, and another staff member was injured. Vidal had been reporting on the smuggling of gas across the Bolivia-Argentina border, and is known as a vocal critic of the provincial government. Bolivian Interior Minister Carlos Romero said the three were arrested but weren’t talking, and that “there is surely someone else behind this.”

Brasília, Brazil

Major blackout: A blackout far bigger than those caused by Hurricane Sandy darkened northeastern Brazil last week. Some 53 million people lost power after electrical equipment connecting two substations caught fire. The blackout lasted just a few hours, but as the second one to hit the region in just over a month, it raised considerable alarm. It comes at a time when Brazil is trying to quell concerns that it lacks the infrastructure to smoothly host the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016.