MercoPress: Troops locked down the northeast Brazilian city of Salvador on Sunday as an elite unit prepared to besiege the legislature and arrest armed police officers whose strike action has sent homicides spiralling.

MEXICO CITY - The capital's Human Rights Commission said Monday that 134 attacks on communications professionals, including 11 murders, took place in Mexico last year.

SANTO DOMINGO - Eighteen people are now confirmed dead in a shipwreck over the weekend off the northeastern Dominican Republic, while rescue teams continue to search for dozens of people missing in the accident, officials said Monday. The small boat, which was carrying more than 70 illegal immigrants bound for Puerto Rico, sank early Saturday.

HAVANA, Cuba (ACN) -- The leader of the Cuban Revolution and former president of Cuba, Fidel Castro, attended the launch on Friday of his memoirs, a two-volume book titled "Fidel Castro Ruz: Guerrillero del Tiempo" (Fidel Castro Ruz: Guerrilla of Time), at Havana's Convention Palace.

HAVANA - Cuba has begun to employ a new technology to produce white sugar, a measure that improves its quality, avoids the refining process and reduces the cost of manufacture, local media reported Sunday.  The technology, which to date had never been used in the island's sugar industry, uses a sulfur salt produced in Guatemala that - once dissolved in water - directly adds to the bleaching, according to official daily Juventud Rebelde.

Institute of the Americas Energy Podcast Series.

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne