In 1875 a handful of families from the Veneto region of northern Italy, fleeing hardship and hunger, took ship for the Empire of Brazil. Disembarking in Porto Alegre in the southeast, they hacked their way for over 100 kilometres through densely wooded country into the Serra Gaúcha hills, up to 800 metres above sea level.

Alejandra Gómez is facing prosecution in the southern Mexican state of Puebla for having an abortion. The 20-year-old's case is symptomatic of a wave of anti-abortion legal reforms adopted by a number of states in this country.

Claudia was 13 years old when she came to the capital of Paraguay from her small rural town. Just a few weeks after her arrival she was wandering the streets of downtown Asunción, a victim of sexual exploitation.

The Washington Consensus, the neo-liberal economic prescription presumed to be universally and permanently valid, was broadsided by the current world recession, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of IPS news agency.

The disappointing results of negotiations in Bonn last week are indication that industrialised countries are unwilling to make substantial contributions to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

The Mississippi River may be on the other side of the world from the Mekong River, but Vietnamese environmentalists say they hope a new link between the agencies that look after these two river systems can lead to new thinking about ways to manage water resources in the Mekong region.

Call it that choice between looking at the half-full or half-empty part of the results. And it is almost half; 55 percent of schoolchildren passed their exams in Gaza this year.

Some 3,000 people make their living from rural community-based tourism in Costa Rica, according to the association of tour operators who connect visitors to the delights of rural life.

'Coming to Colombia is to enter a world that is always intense, captivating and heart-wrenching at the same time,' Susana Villarán, a former member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), wrote in April 2008.

While the swine flu pandemic has not hit India too hard, it has sorely tested the country’s ailing health delivery system and its plans to remedy the situation through ‘private-public partnerships.’