Never before have so many offices been at stake on an election day in Mexico: Citizens of the Latin American country will be casting their ballots on Sunday for over 20,000 positions.
All 500 seats of Mexico's lower house of parliament are up for grabs, as are 15 of the country's 31 governorships.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives saw off a strong challenge from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to return to power in a key state election with a big gain in support.
Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) under Premier Reiner Haseloff in the small eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt won 35 per cent, according to exit poll projections, significantly higher than the 29.8-per-cent vote it scored in the last year election in 2016.
LONDON (Reuters) -Meghan, Britain's Duchess of Sussex has given birth to her second child, a baby girl, who she and husband Prince Harry have named after Queen Elizabeth and his late mother Princess Diana.
Lilibet 'Lili' Diana Mountbatten-Windsor was born on Friday at the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in California, with Harry in attendance.
By Marco Aquino and Marcelo Rochabrun
LIMA/TACABAMBA, Peru (Reuters) -Peruvians began voting to pick a president on Sunday in an election that has bitterly divided them by class and geography, with urban and higher-income citizens preferring right-wing Keiko Fujimori while the rural poor support leftist political novice Pedro Castillo.
Polls in the runoff election began to open at 7 a.m. (1200 GMT), with long queues building up early at some centres in the capital Lima of people bundled up against the cold of the southern hemisphere late autumn.
Citizens have been invited to vote according to their numbers on their identity cards in a bid to avoid large crowds gathering.
Peru almost tripled its coronavirus death toll last week following a government review, meaning it now has the world's worst death rate per capita during the pandemic.
Opinion polls show the presidential race in a statistical dead heat but with Fujimori, who had earlier trailed Castillo, pulling slightly ahead.
Fujimori, 46, the daughter of jailed ex-president Alberto Fujimori, is promising to maintain economic stability and pro-free market policies in the world’s second-largest copper producer.
Castillo, 51, an elementary school teacher and union leader, has galvanized support from Peru's rural poor - and scared investors – with pledges including to alter multinational companies’ tax regimes and rewriting the constitution.
He is from a remote village near the town of Tacabamba, in Peru's northern Andes, which on Saturday night cheered him as he made his way back home to vote.
He has previously warned against fraud in the election and said he would "be the first to summon the people" if he saw evidence of foul play. On Saturday night, however, he told crowds he would respect the result.
At an election breakfast in Lima on Sunday morning, Fujimori told supporters: "Keiko means hope. Let's all go out and vote."
Many Peruvians hold a deep mistrust of politicians following two decades in which five former presidents have been investigated or prosecuted for corruption.
Ruth Rojas, a Peruvian mother with a disabled daughter who said she lived in deep poverty, said she believed neither of the candidates’ vows.
"They promise everything until they get into government but then they forget about the poor, they just think of themselves and their own people," Rojas said.
Pollsters say undecided voters and Peruvians living abroad could tip the balance.
Overseas Peruvians make up almost 4% of the 25 million on the electoral roll. Only 0.8% voted in the first round of the election in April, when COVID-19 lockdowns were commonplace.
However, the head of Peru's National Office of Electoral Processes, Piero Corvetto, said that with vaccination programs now further advanced in areas where Peruvian expatriates predominate - the United States, Spain, Argentina and Chile - turnout would likely be closer to 1.5%.
(Reporting by Marco Aquino in Lima and Marcelo Rochabrun in Tacabamba; Additional reporting by Reuters TV; Editing by William Mallard and Grant McCool)
By Steve Scherer and Anna Mehler Paperny
OTTAWA (Reuters) -The Catholic Church must take responsibility for its role in running many of Canada's residential schools for indigenous children, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday, after the discovery of the remains of 215 children at one former school last month.
"As a Catholic, I am deeply disappointed by the position the Catholic Church has taken now and over the past many years," Trudeau told reporters. "We expect the Church to step up and take responsibility for its role in this."
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops did not respond to a request for comment.
Between 1831 and 1996, Canada's residential school system forcibly separated about 150,000 children from their homes. Many were subjected to abuse, rape and malnutrition in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 called "cultural genocide".
Run by the government and church groups - the majority of them Catholic - the schools' stated aim was to assimilate indigenous children.
The discovery this week of the remains of the children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, which closed in 1978, has reopened old wounds and is fueling outrage about a persistent lack of information and accountability.
From 1893 to 1969, a Catholic congregation called the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate ran the Kamloops school, which was once Canada's largest.
On Friday, Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir, on whose land the Kamloops school still stands, told reporters the nation has not received any records from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate that would help identify the children.
"We do want an apology" from the Catholic Church, Casimir said. "A public apology. Not just for us, but for the world."
In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized for the system. Trudeau said many are "wondering why the Catholic Church in Canada is silent, is not stepping up."
He added: "Before we have to start taking the Catholic Church to court, I am very hopeful that religious leaders will understand this is something they need to participate in and not hide from."
Trudeau has not directed such pointed comments at the Catholic Church over the residential schools since taking office in 2015.
On Wednesday, Vancouver Archbishop J. Michael Miller said on Twitter "the Church was unquestionably wrong" and his archdiocese would be transparent with its archives and records regarding residential schools.
The Conference said on its website that each diocese is separate and responsible for its own actions.
"The Catholic Church as a whole in Canada was not associated with the residential schools, nor was the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops," it said.
Separately, United Nations human rights experts on Friday called on both Canada and the Vatican to further investigate the deaths of the children found in Kamloops.
"It is inconceivable that Canada and the Holy See would leave such heinous crimes unaccounted for and without full redress," they said in a statement.
(Reporting by Steve Scherer and David Ljunggren; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
