CUBA: Transvestites and Crossdressers Key Workers Against AIDS

Activism against AIDS is uniting a group of transvestites and crossdressers in western Cuba in a project that is going beyond peer education and making inroads into the world of culture.

LATIN AMERICA: Blogging the Bicentennial

Three women and four men from Mexico, between the ages of 22 and 25, have begun a journey through seven Latin American countries to document the commemorations in 2009 and 2010 of the bicentennial of independence of the region’s countries from Spain, in videos, still photography and text.

EL SALVADOR: Banging Empty Pots to Protest Food Prices

Some 400 protesters beat on pots and pans and blew whistles outside the Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador to protest the rise in prices of staple food items.

ECONOMY-US: Pacific Coast Towns Seek Life After Logging

The small city of Forks sits in the northwest corner of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, four hours away from Seattle by car, tucked near the Pacific coast by one of only two temperate rainforests in the world. The city literally grew from the trees that surround it. Its industry: timber.

ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Development Vs. Preservation in Florianopolis

With marvellous exceptions like the south and other historic and natural nooks and crannies, the island of Florianopolis in southeastern Brazil is not the same place visitors found 20 years ago.

ARGENTINA: Unemployment Declining at Two Different Speeds

Argentine companies are competing for professionals and technically skilled employees, and are even hiring students who have not yet graduated, as demand for qualified workers exceeds supply. But the reverse is true among less-skilled workers.

LEBANON: The Lights Are Going Out in Beirut

Sporadic gunfire erupts, breaking the silence of the night. A few police cars speed up, heading east. Their lights flashing in the dark and their sirens echoing across the shanty neighbourhoods, they rapidly cross the run down metallic Basta bridge in the direction of the shootout.

RUSSIA: New Focus on Neighbourhood

Foreign policy experts have raised concerns about Russia's relations with its neighbours after the presidential election that gave first deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev a landslide victory.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Thousands Come Out for Anti-Paramilitary March

"I will march against the members of the security forces who have betrayed the honour of the military and the police, and have betrayed their fatherland, by selling themselves out to paramilitaries and drug traffickers to serve their interests," said Colombian Senator Juan Manuel Galán in a speech given at the spot where his father was assassinated in 1989.

POPULATION-US: More People Call the Streets Home

At last November's Republican presidential debate in St. Petersburg, Florida, activists trying to draw attention to the city's homeless problem were discreetly corralled away from the candidates by a perimetre fence.

Q&A: Car-Centric Urban Growth Fuelled By Subsidies

Pollution and road congestion are at crisis proportions in India’s cities. Yet, the government encourages car-centric urban growth, subsidised by public largesse, says Anumita Roychowdhury of the non-governmental Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), which is leading a campaign for cleaner air in Delhi.

BRAZIL: Keeping Indigenous Identity Intact in “Urban Village”

"I desperately want to go back. I feel like I’m living in a prison here, but I stay on because I love my children," says Conceição Gonçalves, who misses the indigenous village of Taunay where she lived until last year, when she moved to the capital of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

DEVELOPMENT-ZIMBABWE: Full Dams Do Not Translate Into Water Supplies

Heavy rains in Zimbabwe and in the catchment areas of its major rivers in December and January have filled most of the country’s dams to capacity. Yet, many urban households do not have water.

LEBANON: Children Look At The Brighter Picture

On the outskirts of Beirut, narrow alleyways cut through the Chatila Palestinian refugee camp. A maze of electricity cables connect one concrete block and another. Sewage pours continuously through a small grey construction, filling the street with nauseating stench.

IRAQ: Baquba Losing Life – And Hope

Life has been bad enough in Diyala province north of Baghdad after prolonged violence, unemployment and loss of all forms of normal living. What could be worse now is the loss of hope that anything will ever be better.

CUBA: Catholics Celebrate ‘Festival of the Spirit’

Eighty-two-year-old Alba Osorio feels as though she were 50 again. A true survivor, 10 years after the late Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba, she is now running back and forth from her house to the parish church, getting ready for what she regards as a new "festival of the spirit."

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Workers of the World Unite – in Anti-Paramilitary Vigil

The world’s largest trade union federation has called a Mar. 6 global demonstration to pay homage to victims of Colombia’s far-right paramilitary militias and their allies in the state, political establishment and business community.

RIGHTS-GUATEMALA: Defenceless Defenders

The security situation for human rights defenders in Guatemala has gotten worse in the last five years, with around 50 activists killed in that period and near total impunity for the murderers, said Hina Jilani, special representative of the United Nations secretary-general.

CENTRAL AMERICA: Gangs Flourish as &#39Zero Tolerance&#39 Measures Fail

Around 40 percent of the members of youth gangs in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are women, according to a new study that says governments have failed in their struggle against these groups that are employed as "labour power" by drug traffickers and organised crime.

LATIN AMERICA: Gender Stereotypes Still Firmly Entrenched, Despite Progress

Constructing gender equality in Latin American societies remains an apparently arduous task. The issue is still confined to the ivory towers of academia, far away from the media, and is seldom included in the debates that really capture people’s attention.

PERU: Poverty Provides Growing Number of ‘Drug Mules’

Anti-drug police at Peru’s "Jorge Chávez" international airport in Lima have had their hands full over the last year, arresting nearly two "mules" a day, each carrying an average of five kg of pure cocaine.