The region's 500-year transformation into a Catholic stronghold seemed capped in 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected as the first Latin American pope. Once a missionary outpost, Latin America is now the heart of the Catholic Church. It is home to over 575 million adherents ' over 40% of all Catholics worldwide. The next-largest regions are Europe and Africa, each home to 20% of the world's Catholics. But even as Protestant ranks swelled, another trend was quietly gaining ground: a growing share of Latin Americans abandoning institutional faith altogether. And, as my research shows, the region's religious decline shows a surprising difference from patterns elsewhere. While fewer Latin Americans are identifying with a religion or attending services, personal faith remains strong. In 2014, 8% of Latin Americans claimed no religion at all. This number is twice as high as the percentage of people who were raised without a religion, indicating that the growth is recent, coming from people who left the church as adults....

But in Philadelphia and other U.S. cities, studies have shown that if you live in a Black or Hispanic neighborhood, your home is more likely to be appraised below its market value when compared to homes in non-Hispanic white neighborhoods. This is called home appraisal bias. The appraisal is critical to securing a mortgage to purchase a home or to refinancing an existing mortgage. It can determine whether an applicant gets a mortgage and influence how much the mortgage costs. For example, if a borrower must take out a mortgage for more than 80% of a property's value, they may be required to pay for private mortgage insurance in some cases. Getting the appraisal value right is key to ensuring that homebuyers and those seeking to refinance a mortgage can do so under fair and equal conditions. We are two academics who study urban places and the people who live in them. Together, we have more than 80 years of experience working at federal civil rights agencies, teaching at research universities and consulting for the housing industry, city and state agencies, and nonprofits....

Sixty-three years ago, President John F. Kennedy single-handedly brought the world back from the brink of nuclear war by staring down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev over the Cuban missile crisis. At least, so goes a standard U.S.-centric interpretation of events. As an expert in Latin American and Cold War history with a new book on the topic, I argue that when it comes to the Cuban missile crisis, it took a proverbial regional village to avert catastrophe. Indeed, the United States did not solve or experience the drama alone. Much as in geopolitics today, the Cuban missile crisis took place in a complicated environment where the entire hemisphere both reckoned with and helped shape the realities of American power and regional dominance. On the evening of Oct. 22, 1962, Kennedy took to the airwaves and revealed to a live international audience that the Soviet Union had secretly placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba capable of reaching most of the mainland U.S. and Latin America. Throughout his speech, Kennedy consistently emphasized that the missiles threatened the security not just of the U.S. but of the entire hemisphere. And because the missiles were a regional threat, they required a regional solution. Kennedy called upon the Organization of American States, a regional body created in 1948 to coordinate hemispheric affairs, including security, to invoke the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance 'in support of all necessary action' to remove the missiles....

In the second quarter of 2025, Mexico emerged as the leader in terms of venture capital dollars raised in Latin America, per Crunchbase data. It marked the first time since the second quarter of 2012 that Mexico's startups brought in more venture funding than their Brazil counterparts, our data indicated. Now in the third quarter, it appears that Brazil is back on top ' and in a big way. Brazil-based startups raised $692 million in Q3, up 47% year over year and 92% quarter over quarter. Mexico-headquartered startups brought in $126 million, down 21% year over year and a 71% dip quarter over quarter. The largest raise in Brazil ' and Latin America as a whole ' was announced on Sept. 11. That was a $160 million Series D round for Sao Paulo-based Omie ' which offers cloud-based management software for SMEs '- that valued the company at $700 million. Partners Group led the financing. In general, a boom in late-stage and growth funding helped buoy the region year over year, Crunchbase data shows. Overall, startups in Latin America raised a combined $1 billion across seed- through growth-stage deals in the third quarter, up 21% year over year and up 8% from the second quarter....