JAPAN: Buddhist Priests Use Pop Culture to Win Back Faithful

Hip hop. Fashion. Zen café. Animation.

CHILE: Preserving the Kaweshkar Language – In the Nick of Time

Sound files containing recordings of spoken Kaweshkar - a nearly extinct indigenous language of southern Chile – have been put together thanks to the work of ethnolinguist Óscar Aguilera and anthropologist José Tonko, and donated to national and foreign institutions with the aim of preserving the culture of one of Chile’s nine native groups.

Q&A: Secrecy, Lies, Power and the Pentagon Papers

A little over 38 years ago, when Daniel Ellsberg released the "Pentagon Papers" to The New York Times and other newspapers, it set off one of the 20th century's most important battles over government secrecy and freedom of the press.

ARGENTINA: New Voice for Sexual Minorities

A monthly magazine published by an Argentine umbrella group of some thirty organisations of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans (LGBTs) seeks to become a major communications channel for the community and an instrument for disseminating the actions that sexual minorities undertake to defend their rights.

CUBA: Peace Concert Bridges Borders and Differences

Although it was the target of threats from radical Cuban exiles and the focus of controversy and opinion polls from the moment it was announced, Colombian musician Juanes' idea of staging his "Peace without Borders" concert in Cuba proved a success at promoting understanding, in spite of differences.

US-CUBA: Five Decades of an Admittedly Failed Policy

U.S. citizens of Cuban descent are once again free to travel to Cuba and send an unlimited amount of money to their relatives on the island, but for the most part U.S. policy toward the communist nation hasn't changed under President Barack Obama.

MUSIC: Afro-Brazilians Priced Out of Back2Black Concert

On stage, singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil highlighted Brazil's "genetic and cultural" connection to "Mother Africa," to applause from a predominantly light-skinned audience at a concert that black people generally could not afford - symbolic of the country's "veiled racism" at an international festival organised to combat it.

ARGENTINA: In Children’s Art, the Sky’s Not Always Blue

The young students taught by Maruca, who has been giving free painting classes to children in a town in Argentina's pampas for the last 50 years, have won more than 1,000 international prizes for their artwork.

BRAZIL: Art is the Best Education

A broad range of projects in Brazil are using ballet and folk dances, classical and popular music, theatre, circus arts, capoeira - an Afro-Brazilian combination of dance and martial arts - fashion, visual arts and the audiovisual media to reach disadvantaged and at-risk children.

EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Public Schools Fend Off Invasion of New Ideas

Two non-governmental initiatives managed to penetrate the walls around public education in Brazil, temporarily assuming responsibility for the administration of schools where they left their seeds planted. But ultimately they discovered how resistant the school system is to innovation.

MIDEAST: To Rap Is to Resist

In a backstreet open-air café in Gaza late at night, Khaled Harara from the Black Unit Band starts to talk about rap.

BRAZIL: Artistic Energy as Antidote to Exclusion

Putting the power of art to the test in extreme situations has become an unintended but necessary task for the Axé Project, a Brazilian non-governmental organisation (NGO) aimed at creating the conditions for street kids and other at-risk children to overcome educational, family and community exclusion.

BRAZIL: From Learning Circle to Flights of Artistic Imagination

Slender, small and long-haired, 11-year-old Higor Fonseca sounds much older when he talks. He has a great deal to tell, in spite of living in this small, sleepy town in the interior of Brazil, where most workers are employed as seasonal migrant labourers in other parts of the country.

BRAZIL: Changing Lives Through the Power of Dance

"My family’s lives changed," said Maria Erilma da Silva, a mother of three girls and a teenage boy, listing a whole series of transformations, from changes in eating and personal hygiene habits to "the security of knowing where my daughters are" and even an end to her husband’s frequent drinking binges.

CHILE: Building the Bicentennial Society?

The Chilean government has embarked on major works of infrastructure, national programmes and 28 competitions, in preparation for the 2010 celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the country's independence. But the bicentennial projects, which began this month, have drawn their share of criticism.

MUSIC-BRAZIL: A School Without Teachers

The participation of renowned professional musicians as instructors and special guests at workshops, instead of academic professors, is what sets Brazil’s Bituca University of Popular Music apart, and is earning it a reputation as a model of experimentation and excellence in music education.

ISRAEL: Madonna Applauded for her Silence

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il, Hitler, the Holocaust, ecological disasters, poverty in Africa, wars around the world, Obama and Martin Luther King: the appropriate images were all there, an overwhelming backdrop on the huge stage for the Queen of Pop's rendition of her song, 'Get Stupid' in Tel Aviv's Yarkon Park.

Q&A: "Blogmailing" to Foment Debate on Cuban Filmmaking

Blogging has taught him to share his deepest concerns with people who think differently, to treat others and himself more compassionately, to learn from even the most impassioned disputes, and above all, to show that far from being the sole possessor of truth, he is desperately seeking it.

TRADE: 2010 Soccer World Cup May See More Snorting than Kicking

It is the middle of the day but 25-year-old Lyle Arendse of Athlone on the Cape Flats, Cape Town’s sprawling hinterland, is at home. He left school nearly 10 years ago and has since been unemployed. "It is because of drugs -- tik (methamphetamine or "crystal meth") and heroin -- that I left school," he acknowledges.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Justice for Indigenous Leader’s Murder – 21 Years On

One night in February 1988 in the native Nasa territory of Jambaló, in southwest Colombia, soldiers barged into Etelvina Zapata's home and snatched her 21-year-old son, barefoot and clad only in shorts, accusing him of working with the leftwing guerrillas.

BRAZIL: Music Education Opens Doors to Social Inclusion

"It takes us an hour and 20 minutes to get there. We have to walk, because we can't afford the 30-minute bus ride. But the girls never miss their music classes, not even when they have to go without lunch because they don't have time to eat after school," says their mother, Maria da Cruz.