The southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, a pioneer in participatory budgets and environmental policies, and habitual host of the enormous World Social Forum, has returned to the international stage.

The U.S. should proceed cautiously in its engagement strategy with Iran, while moving quickly toward final-status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, according to a new report by a team of veteran diplomats and Middle East policymakers.

Declining amphibian populations, dwindling fish stocks, waning ocean biodiversity, loss of forests...All scientists acknowledge that the rate of species loss is greater now than at any time in human history.

With parliament in recess, the Colombian government of Álvaro Uribe confirmed that it would give the United States access to at least three military bases.

In what is shaping up as one of the most consequential battles of his six-month-old presidency, Barack Obama finds himself in the trenches alongside his former Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, fighting hard to end production of an advance fighter jet that much of the defence establishment considers a wasteful boondoggle.

Amid a flurry of anticipation and speculation, former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani led Friday prayers in Tehran this week.

If the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti remains in power in Honduras, the Central American right may be encouraged to stage further coups against the fragile democracies that have emerged in the region over the last two decades, analysts warn.

The political geography of the modern Middle East has been affected for one hundred years by the appetite of westerners and other outsiders for the region's hydrocarbons.

The armed forces of Brazil will begin to search for the remains of guerrilla fighters who were forcibly disappeared in Araguaia, a remote area in the northern jungle state of Pará during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, reviving an old debate on the role played by the army in that area.

If the leaders of India and Pakistan were looking for out-of-the-box solutions to their long-standing dispute over Kashmir and the related issue of cross-border terrorism, they could hardly have done better than the joint statement they released this week after their meeting at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.