NEED TO KNOW

Powerful explosion in Prague. Part of the Czech capital (remember that guy?) has been sealed off after a large blast inside a building in the city center. At least a dozen people are receiving medical treatment and emergency services say others could still be trapped.

It’s not yet clear what caused the explosion, but police have suggested it was a gas leak. Would everyone’s buildings please stop falling down?

Syria’s PM survives car bomb. Wael al-Halqi, prime minister in President Bashar al-Assad’s government, was reportedly the target of a car bomb that went off in Damascus today. He wasn’t killed, but his bodyguard and possibly others were.

If confirmed, it’s the most daring direct attack on a member of Assad’s circle since the Interior Ministry was bombed in December, wounding the minister, and since the defense minister and his deputy – Assad’s brother-in-law – were killed in an attack on the national security headquarters last July. Some observers called those assassinations “the beginning of the end.” They weren’t.

WANT TO KNOW

Farewell to Kaesong. The last remaining South Koreans are preparing to leave the Kaesong industrial zone in North Korea, the closest thing the two Koreas had to a common project and the latest casualty of the stand-off between Seoul and Pyongyang.

More than 100 workers evacuated this weekend, and today, the final 50 or so managers and engineers are due to make South Korea’s withdrawal complete. How long are they leaving for? The South Korean government says it’s still open to negotiations, but with the assembly lines halted and the site all but abandoned, many fear the staff have said goodbye to Kaesong for good.

The Spanish are coming. For hard-up Spaniards, Latin America is looking a lot like the promised land. For most of the past few decades it was Latin Americans who crossed the Atlantic in search of better luck; now, with Spain’s economy – as the Mexicans say –chingada, the Latin American influx there is waning and Spaniards are instead coming to the Americas, where economic indicators point up, not down.

GlobalPost meets the latest wave of migrants leaving the Old World to see their fortune in the New.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

If a cheetah attacks a president and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It’s a question we never thought we’d ask ourselves, until we learned today that President Ian Khama of Botswana recently required two stitches after being clawed in the face by a captive cheetah. So that happened.

The government is only revealing the incident now, the president’s spokesman says, because it was a “freak accident, but not an attack” (we’d like the cat’s opinion on that) and as such there were “no real security implications.” You hear that, world? The cheetah is not, repeat not, a terrorist.

BOSTON — Much attention has turned again to Venezuela ahead of its April 14 presidential election, but it isn’t the only Latin American country gearing up for a critical vote this year.

Several nations in the Americas will head to polls in 2013 to choose a leader, with some predicted to swing left and others right.

4 Latin American elections: What to watch

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

HAVANA, Cuba — Taking full advantage of their new license to travel abroad, Cuba’s leading dissidents have been on a whirlwind campaign in recent weeks, denouncing President Raul Castro’s government on three continents and promising new tactics to challenge its 53-year rule.

Now the question is: What happens when they return home?

For Cuba’s traveling dissidents, an anxious return

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Media outlets around the world have, over the past couple days, all had one major headline in common: American woman gang raped on Brazilian transit van.

The news of the attack on the 21-year-old staying in paradise city Rio de Janeiro on a student visa was horrific. The American woman was picked up by a van — a common form of public transportation in Rio that hold about a dozen people — along with a 23-year-old male friend from France near the famous Copacabana beach just after midnight on Saturday morning.

Brazil gang rape: Why did an American’s attack get more attention than a local’s?

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

NEED TO KNOW

Meet the new pope. With a puff of white smoke, the cardinals sequestered in Rome announced they had a winner: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina, henceforth known as Pope Francis I.

Bergoglio becomes the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit pope, and the first from outside Europe in more than 1,000 years (kind of — his father was Italian). But same as the old pope, he is old, white and conservative. 

GlobalPost’s John Otis writes that Bergoglio has a reputation as a humble servant of God and an advocate for the poor, but is also accused of being an accomplice in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

WANT TO KNOW

China’s new president. Moving away from Pope Francis, China also has a new leader.

Xi Jinping was similarly chosen in a secret conclave of sorts, though we’ve pretty much known for the past five years that he was destined to replace Hu Jintao as Chinese president. No smoke, no special robes. 

Sorry, Communist Party of China, but no one does pageantry like the Roman Catholics.

Khmer Rouge leader dies. Ieng Sary, a former top leader of the Khmer Rouge who was on trial for war crimes committed during the Cambodian genocide, has died at the age of 87. 

Ieng Sary was the second person to be tried by the slow-moving, UN-backed court in Cambodia established to seek justice for the millions who died under the Khmer Rouge.

“One of the most senior leaders is escaping justice, and the rest are old and sick,” said Ou Virak, director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. “The tribunal is in danger of being a wasteful exercise of hundreds of millions of dollars.”

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Is Greenland turning green? Not yet, but other parts of the north are changing dramatically as climate change and warming temperatures mean longer growing seasons, allowing forests and crops to grow further north.

New satellite images from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center show that northern latitudes now look the way places four to six degrees further south (some 250 to 430 miles away) did as recently as 1982.

“It’s like Winnipeg, Manitoba, moving to Minneapolis-St. Paul in only 30 years,” said Compton Tucker, a co-author of the NASA study.

OK, that might not sound so dramatic, but picture this: new vegetation has sprouted in a third of the northern latitudes in Canada and Russia, equaling some 3.5 million square miles — an area slightly less than the size of the United States.

The late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s last words were reportedly: “Yo no quiero morir, por favor no me dejen morir.”

In English, they read: “I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die.”

Gen. Jose Ornella told the Associated Press that Chavez couldn’t speak in his final moments, but he said those words with his lips “because he loved his country, he sacrificed for his country.”

Chavez’s last words: ‘Yo no quiero morir, por favor no me dejen morir’

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

NEED TO KNOW

Comandante no more. The opposition rumored it, the government denied it, the believers prayed it wouldn’t happen – but yesterday, Venezuela’s vice president was forced to announce that it had. Hugo Chavez is dead.

What happens next? First, there’ll be seven days of official mourning. A funeral on Friday. Weeping. Diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic eulogies from world leaders who watched Chavez with admiration, astonishment or alarm. Then, within 30 days, Venezuela must elect a new president.

There’s VP Nicolas Maduro, of course, the man anointed successor by Chavez himself. But there’s also Henrique Capriles Radonski, the opposition leader who came closer than anyone else to toppling Chavez while he lived. Observers are already speculating that the polarizing president’s death could signal a fresh start for Venezuela, Latin America and relations with the US.

“Long live Chavez,” his supporters cried even as Maduro announced he was gone. The revolutionary is dead; what about the revolution?

WANT TO KNOW

One million. That’s the number of Syrians believed to have fled their country since its civil war began, almost two years ago. The United Nations says more than 400,000 people have become refugees in the past two months alone, a breakneck increase that indicates the exodus is only growing.

What’s worse, the UN says that half of all those displaced are children, most of them younger than 11. Here’s what they’re running away from.

Kenya will have to wait. Vote-counting is being held up by technical hitches with the country’s new electronic ballot system, which means that Kenyans still don’t know who their next president will be. Election officials have been ordered to resort to good old-fashioned paper records, which they will have to deliver in person to a central counting center in Nairobi.

The result is an agonizingly slow trickle: so far officials from less than a quarter of the constituencies concerned have made it to the capital.

Washington is snow-questered. A hefty snowstorm has shut down federal government offices in the US capital today, along with schools and airports in at least three states. Parts of the Midwest are covered in up to 12 inches of snow; the mid-Atlantic region is next.

Wrap up warm, y’hear?

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Now, we love cats as much as the next internet user. Possibly even more. But there’s a fondness for felines and there’s homicidal rage, and we’d like to draw a line between the two. These things need stating sometimes, as the story of the Russian woman who killed her husband over her pet pussycat reminds us.

The woman’s husband was allegedly threatening the kitty with a metal poker when she grabbed a knife and stabbed him three times in the chest. She now faces up to 15 years in jail. And is the cat is grateful? I think we all know the answer to that.

FULL COVERAGE

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has died after a long battle with cancer, the government announced. He was 58.

Chavez died in Caracas Tuesday at 4:25 p.m. local time, Vice President Nicholas Maduro announced. Chavez had undergone months of treatment for the disease in Cuba, where he handed over cheap Venezuelan oil to its communist leaders, whom he was said to have admired.

Hugo Chavez is dead

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan officials have been called to the presidential palace as President Hugo Chavez’s condition worsens. The leader, who has been fighting cancer, is suffering from a new and “severe” respiratory infection, a government official said.

Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro is holding a meeting with political and military leaders on Monday. He accused “enemies of the fatherland” both at home and abroad, of seeking to undermine democracy in Venezuela.

Maduro called the cancer that has threatened Chavez an “attack” by his enemies, calling for an investigation, according to the BBC.

Maduro said the government planned to expel a US embassy official on suspicion of espionage and planning to destabilize the country. The Associated Press said Maduro identified the American as the Air Force attache, accusing him of meeting with military officers and spying on the military.

Venezuelan officials meet as Chavez’s condition worsens

Photo by AFP/Getty Images