How Trump's Gamble Could Unravel Columbia | Girl by Day ... Queen by Night

The U.S. is emerging as the sole international actor to back Colombia’s president in blocking a law at the core of the peace agreement with FARC rebels.

The Colombian peace deal of 2016 ended the longest-running conflict in the Western hemisphere. It won the country’s then-President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. But now, with the world’s attention on the internal strife in neighboring Venezuela, the Colombian deal faces its greatest threat yet. President Ivan Duque and his party, Democratic Center, are rejecting key elements of the pact, determined to renegotiate it. And they have found in the Trump administration a vital international ally to back them up.

The Marxist FARC guerrilla group that fought the Colombian government for half a century finally demobilized with guarantees that its members would be tried under a transitional war crimes tribunal, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and would not be extradited. But in mid-March, Duque refused to sign a law passed by the country’s Congress to set out the powers of the JEP, dealing what experts say represents the largest blow yet to the peace accords.

An attempt to save the trees of Reni, India, inspired an enduring term — and a movement.

A young girl was reportedly the first to see the loggers coming. It was March 26, 1973, and loggers sent by sporting goods manufacturer the Simon Company were heading for Gopeshwar forest near the tiny village of Reni in Uttarakhand, which was then part of Uttar Pradesh. The girl ran to tell Gaura Devi, a village elder, who summoned dozens of other women to do the only thing they could: place their bodies between the trees and the axes. They hugged the 300 ash trees tightly, telling the loggers that in order to get to the trees they’d have to go through human bodies first. The loggers opted to leave instead. But Devi and the other women remained vigilant.

De’Andre Hunter was squeezed out when he first arrived in Charlottesville. Now he’s paving the way to the Final Four.

Many college basketball players arrive on campus with an ultimatum — playing time or else — which helps to make Virginia’s De’Andre Hunter remarkable. He chose to confront a snub. In the fall of 2016, the star at Philadelphia’s Friends’ Central School — a Top 100 player in the country — showed up in Charlottesville to coach Tony Bennett telling him he was going to sit out the year as a redshirt.

“I was pissed for two weeks,” Hunter says.