Sinaloa, Mexico
Drug lord’s American kids: The leader of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel has American children, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. Emma Coronel, the 22-year-old wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, gave birth to twins in a Los Angeles hospital in August, making the two little girls American citizens. She and the children returned to Mexico a few weeks later. Guzmán, 54, married the former beauty queen the day she turned 18; she is his third or fourth wife, depending on reports, and a niece of Guzmán’s former partner, who was killed last year in a shoot-out with the Mexican army. The U.S. and Mexico say Guzmán controls most of the cocaine and marijuana traffic into the U.S. from Mexico and Colombia.
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Santiago, Chile
Lights out: Massive power blackouts have plunged more than half of Chile into darkness, prompting calls for a complete overhaul of the electricity grid. The worst blackout hit Santiago and surrounding regions last weekend on a Saturday night, stranding thousands of people in elevators and subway cars. At least 9 million of Chile’s 17 million people were without power for hours. Energy Minister Rodrigo Álvarez said the cause of that blackout was not yet definitively known but probably involved a computer failure. Two smaller blackouts struck in the following days. Chile’s electricity grid is still unstable because of damage from the massive 2010 earthquake as well as years of underinvestment.