Culture

Joe Biden Picks Latino To Lead Homeland Security & More in Today’s News

Lead Photo: U.S. President-elect Joe Biden removes his protective mask as he addresses the media after a virtual meeting with the National Governors Association's executive committee at the Queen Theater on November 19, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden removes his protective mask as he addresses the media after a virtual meeting with the National Governors Association's executive committee at the Queen Theater on November 19, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Las Notis is a daily news column that gets you up to speed on the political, media + other going ons in Latin America and the diaspora—all in one quick digest.

Here’s your glimpse at what’s going on today:

  • President-Elect Joe Biden has announced several candidates for top foreign policy and national security positions, among them Alejandro Mayorkas, who has been nominated as his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. If appointed, Mayorkas would be the first Latino to head the agency. Avril Haines has been nominated as director of national intelligence and would be the first woman to hold the post, while Biden plans to tap former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as a special presidential envoy on climate. [CNN]
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been warning Americans to avoid traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday, but more than one million people still boarded planes in a single day ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. That figure represents the second-highest number of people to travel by air since March and has worried health experts trying to contain virus surges before the winter holidays. [ABC]
  • Amid demonstrations against Guatemala’s President Alejandro Giammattei and leaders that approved cutting educational and health spending during the pandemic and back-to-back natural disasters, hundreds of people broke into the country’s Congress and burned part of the building. Police fired teargas into the crowd and about a dozen injuries have since been reported. [Guardian]
  • Brazil, a country that has been having its own reckoning over racial justice and police brutality, saw demonstrators take to the streets after a Black man was killed by two white security guards outside of a grocery store. Video footage showed Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas, a 40-year-old-man, repeatedly punched in the face last Thursday, just before Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day. [BBC]
  • Thousands of young people in Peru have hit the streets and made it clear they won’t tolerate political corruption, some of them unifying under the hashtag #TheyMessedWithTheWrongGeneration. The last two weeks have seen three men pass through the presidency. [CNN]
  • Just days after Mexico became the fourth country to pass 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, it recorded one of the highest infection rates in 24 hours when the health ministry reported 9,187 new cases. That makes the total number of cases in the country 1,041,875. [NBC Latino]