Environmentalists kidnapped, freed in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Two Mexican environmentalists have been freed after they were briefly kidnapped by settlers seeking to carve up North America’s last large pocket of tropical rain forest, their group said Tuesday.

The kidnapping follows the two-day abduction and subsequent release of a former federal environment secretary in a different part of the jungle a month ago, amid a battle over the governance and land use in the 1,290-square-mile (330,000-hectare) Montes Azules — Blue Mountains — forest reserve in the southern state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border.