Hurricane Bud weakened Friday as it headed toward a string of laid-back beach resorts and small mountain villages on Mexico's Pacific coast south of Puerto Vallarta. Two people, one of them from France, were reported missing in a separate storm in Cuba.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff used a line-item veto Friday to send back parts of a congressional bill that loosened the nation's benchmark law protecting the Amazon rainforest — a veto the government said would prevent increased deforestation.

A 5-year-old Mexican boy whose eyes were allegedly gouged out by his mother as part of a drug-fueled ritual "to save the world" is expected to live, but has been left completely blind, health authorities said Friday.

Shortly after sunrise last month in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, police found 14 butchered bodies in a van outside city hall, a salvo in a seesawing battle of horrors between Mexico's two most powerful drug cartels.

A Puerto Rico doctor has been found guilty of negligent homicide in the death of her toddler whom police say she accidentally left in a hot car for several hours.

A local sports hero, a New York real estate developer and a well-known architect are teaming up to build a soccer stadium in Haiti's notorious Cite Soleil, hoping to revive the seaside shantytown known throughout the hemisphere for its extreme poverty and gang battles.

About 3,000 Venezuelan soldiers have been sent to bolster security along the border with Colombia after the neighboring country's main rebel group carried out a deadly attack on a Colombian army patrol in the frontier region, Venezuela's defense minister said Thursday.

Mexico's government says it will protect a half-million acres held sacred by the Huichol Indian tribe that inspired a protest movement against a Canadian company's silver-mining concessions in the northern desert.

A gunman opened fire on a labor leader in the Colombia city of Cali but missed, killing the man's brother and wounding two other people, including a 4-year-old girl, police said Thursday.

The chief executive officer of the world's biggest copper company is stepping down.