MEDIA-CHILE: Community Newspapers Take to the Web

Political science student Vlado Mirosevic, 20, is the proud editor of El Morrocotudo, Chile's first community newspaper, where hundreds of people like him post news items of local interest on the Internet.

ARTS: Unexpected Bear Greets Chinese

Noted for its surprises, the Berlin International Film Festival sprang another at the weekend when it announced that Chinese director Wang Quan'an's movie ‘Tuya's Marriage’ (Tu Ya De Hun Shi) scooped the top Golden Bear prize at the end of the 11-day movie jamboree.

ARTS: Berlin Revisits a Singer’s Story

Protest singer Dean Reed's concerts were foot-stomping sell-outs from Santiago to Baghdad, Warsaw to Helsinki in the 1960s and '70s. But in later years, with his career in decline, his marriage shaky and little prospect of work if he returned to the United States, the despairing Denver-born crooner, who had settled in communist East Berlin in the Cold War years, drove his car to a lake and drowned himself.

ARTS: Spotlight on Mandela Film

The 57th International Film Festival in Berlin has got off to a strong start with the South African film Goodbye Bafana on Nelson Mandela's long incarceration emerging as an early front-runner for honours. In all 26 movies are chasing the top Golden Bear award.

ARGENTINA: Patagonia to the Highest (Foreign?) Bidder

A new book based on a journalistic investigation into major land purchases in Argentina's southern Patagonia region by foreign multimillionaires has been selling like hot potatoes, to both tourists and locals.

BOOKS-ARGENTINA: Women Prisoners Tell Their Stories

The daily experiences, codes of language and behaviour and rituals of women in Ezeiza prison, on the outskirts of the Argentine capital, form the rugged terrain that journalist and writer Marta Dillon explores in her latest book.

BOOKS-US: Is “Just War” an Oxymoron?

The author of a best-selling "biography" of cod and a world history of salt has taken on the weighty theme of nonviolence movements in his latest book - why some thrive and others fail, and why the concept is so "profoundly dangerous" to the powers that be.

THEATRE-CHILE: Enter Salvation, Stage Right

Among the profusion of plays on offer in the Chilean capital in the new year is a festival of moving dramas in which the actors are convicts and slum-dwellers, who are trying to escape marginalisation by going on the stage.

MEXICO: Lest We Forget – Tlatelolco 1968

At 6:10 p.m. on Oct. 2, 1968, red and green flares signalled troops and police in civilian clothes that it was time to fire on the students gathered in Tlatelolco square in the Mexican capital. This massacre changed the country's history.

FILM: Cuba’s Almodovar Girl

She swept the floor, emptied the ashtrays and watched the plates of food served by the waiters with hungry eyes. Afterwards, when the lights were dimmed and the music came on, she appeared on stage and sang "I want to be an Almodóvar girl."

VENEZUELA: Petrodollars for Local Film Industry

The film industry in Latin America, plagued by endemic poverty, has found an oasis in Venezuela, where the film institute plans to distribute 3.7 million dollars to 26 filmmakers this year.

RELIGION-CUBA: Afro-Cuban Brotherhood Vindicated

A recent episode of a Cuban television detective serial portrayed the Abakuá secret society in an unusually favourable light, after more than a century of discrimination and calumnies in Cuba against this sect of African origin.

COLOMBIA: Open Your Books, Please, Bogota

For the first time, a Latin American city has been named World Book Capital. Bogotá will have this honour in 2007 by courtesy of UNESCO, with the main aim of promoting a dying habit: reading.

CHALLENGES 2006-2007: Brazil to Join Digital TV World

In a country as addicted to television as Brazil, disputes over digital TV, which is being installed this year, are naturally acerbic. The business is worth an estimated 50 billion dollars, and could bring profound social and cultural changes.

BOOKS-US: ” Zebra Murders” Recalls a City’s Collective Punishment

It may seem like an unlikely place to look, but those concerned with stopping the spread of terrorism would be advised to check out "The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness and Civil Rights", a new book about a string of murders in 1970s San Francisco written by the city's first black police chief, Earl Sanders, and co-author Bennett Cohen.

CHALLENGES 2006-2007: Docu-mania Sweeps U.S.

From Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" to Barbara Kopple's "Shut Up and Sing" about the travails of the Dixie Chicks, U.S. audiences flocked to theatres in 2006 to watch films that took on heavy topics like global warming, the meaning of "patriotism" and the war in Iraq.

ARTS-HAITI: Around the World in Eight Days

Some 100 Haitians squeezed into a sweltering Town Hall to see Al Gore lecture in Creole in "An Inconvenient Truth". Hundreds more gathered before a screen on the beach to hear Sierra Leone's Refugee Allstars sing, in Haitian Creole. And many returned a week later for "Sisters in Law", a Cameroonian documentary on domestic violence, again in their own language.

CHILE: Capturing the Soul of Afghanistan – in Pictures

An Afghani woman, swathed in traditional Muslim attire, stands halfway down a stairway, her arms crossed and her head slightly bowed. She is alone, inside an old, dark building, lit up only by the flash of the camera.

CULTURE: Fomenting Diversity in the Face of Growing Homogenisation

Culture as a universal human right that is opposed to hegemonic dominance, and contributes to development and diversity, is the central paradigm behind the Fórum Cultural Mundial (World Cultural Forum) held Wednesday and Thursday in this Brazilian city.

COLOMBIA: Music Can Tame the Wildest – Even in Medellin

Ten years ago, even falling in love was dangerous in this city, the industrial capital of Colombia. A romance could mean death if one of the members of the couple belonged to a rival gang or neighbourhood.

FILM-US: A Director Bold in Life and Art

U.S. film and stage director Robert Altman, who died of cancer at the age of 81 in Los Angeles on Nov. 20, will be remembered for the overt and subtle liberal political views that imbued his nearly 50 films.