RIGHTS: Hollywood Spotlights Growing Trade in Humans

Kevin Kline, an Academy Award winning movie star, is outraged at the impunity with which human traffickers ply their trade in one of the world's growing multi-billion dollar businesses: the global sex industry.

Q&A: How Brazil Haunts

Fifty years since it was first introduced to Brazil, bossa-nova continues to fuel the imagination of South American musicians, as well as a coterie of U.S. and European artists.

ARGENTINA: Borges’ Literary Legacy Looking for a Home

It’s all ready and waiting. Some 20,000 items of legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), including original manuscripts, photographs, personal letters, portraits and out-of-print books, are classified and packaged. The only thing missing is the museum site promised by the Culture Secretariat to house them.

THEATRE-US: Palestinian Martyrs and Traitors

In a new play by a Palestinian-American woman, two characters say in unison: "Oppression is like a coin maker. You put in human beings, press the right buttons and watch them get squeezed, shrunk, flattened till they take the slim shape of a two-faced coin, one side is a martyr, the other a traitor. All the possibilities of a life get reduced to those paltry two."

SPAIN: Deportation of Venezuelan Band Sparks Outcry

Four well-known Venezuelan folk musicians were deported when they arrived to perform at Spain’s Canary Islands, where the community reacted with anger and pointed out that the South American country took in tens of thousands of Spaniards during the 1939-1975 dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

BOOKS-US: Outing the “Israel Lobby”

When John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published their controversial essay "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books in March 2006, their work elicited the kind of response of which most academics only dream.

ARCHITECTURE-MEXICO: Skyscraper Has Feet of Clay

The Mexican capital’s leftwing government wishes to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the country’s independence by sponsoring the building of the tallest skyscraper in Latin America, on prime residential land beside the emblematic Chapultepec Park, to house the offices of wealthy corporations.

CHILE: Rediscovering Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral

A treasure trove of poems, letters and personal effects of Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, which have lain untouched for 50 years, have been donated to the Chilean state and may contribute to a revaluation of the work of the first Latin American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

VENEZUELA: A New Life for At-Risk Kids, and Music Too!

On tour in Germany after performing to rave reviews at the BBC Promenade Concerts in London, the members of Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra and its wild-haired conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, have made a remarkable journey from their less than promising social origins.

Q&A: “We Live in an Age of Migration”

Celebrated Canadian writer and poet Michael Ondaatje recently published "Divisadero", his first novel in seven years.

HEALTH-ASIA: Unheard Voices Resonate at AIDS Photo Show

Sabina Yeasmin Putul has a silent, determined look with her left fist clenched tight in front of her face - a vision of strength, grace, and resilience all in one.

MUSIC-CUBA: Rap Calls for ‘Revolution Within the Revolution’

In makeshift studios, Cuba’s hip hop movement keeps on recording music that goes to the heart of the country’s troubles, in spite of the indifference of record companies and the media, and the negative response of society, which is perhaps afraid of hearing its defects exposed in song lyrics.

CUBA: Black Women Rap Against Discrimination

They are few in number, but women’s loud chants of resistance against sexism, racism and discrimination against sexual minorities have left an indelible mark on the hip hop movement in Cuba, a little more than a decade old.

THEATRE-US: Million-Dollar Media Yields Cheap Thrills

Two Broadway plays showing here expose how the media and its stars, at both the high and the low end, manipulate politics to turn news stories into emotional confrontations.

BOOKS-MIDEAST: Beneath Superheated Rhetoric, Pragmatism Rules

The last few years have produced an enormous trove of literature about conflict and violence in the Middle East, no doubt because there appears to be so much of it.

ROMANIA: Culture Capital Is Another World

Sibiu, one of the most dynamic regions in Romania, thrives as the European City of Culture for 2007. But its prosperity is not representative of the entire country.

BOOKS: When the "Good Fight" Is Anything But

Few political debates have changed as rapidly over the last four years as the one surrounding humanitarian military intervention.

FILM: Ingmar Bergman, a "Mighty Force", Dies at 89

Great film directors are invariably linked with their home countries and the places where they made their artistic and commercial successes.

JAPAN: A Reawakening of Neglected Island Cultures

After decades of cold neglect, the distinct and intricate cultures of the tiny islands that surround the archipelago of Japan's four main islands have recently begun to gain public attention.

CHINA: Close Sudan Links Cast Shadow On Olympics

Elaborate celebrations are being planned for the Aug. 8 one-year countdown to the Beijing Olympics, but Chinese leaders fear both the party and the games could be spoiled by an escalating international campaign to link the violence in Sudan's Darfur region to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

FILM-US: A Blurry Line Between Propaganda and News

A shocking thing happens midway through Norman Solomon's documentary film "War Made Easy".