News stories by Marcela Valente, page 14

Argentina's weak, fragmented opposition is going to the polls on Sunday offering neither strong leaders nor clear alternatives capable of winning voters away from President Cristina Fernández, who is expected to easily win a first-round victory.

Rural and indigenous women in northern Argentina, hit hard by the expanding agricultural frontier, deforestation and the spraying of toxic pesticides, spoke out about their problems and set forth proposals for discussion at the next global summit on climate change.

Efforts by the government and thousands of volunteers in Argentina have succeeded in slashing the illiteracy rate to just 1.9 percent, with a goal to eliminate it completely within the next four years.

A plan to boost agribusiness, but based mainly on family farming and cooperatives, in Argentina is geared to producing and exporting more food — in a more sustainable manner.

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay have all made progress in the area of child health. But some are celebrating significant achievements while others are plodding slowly towards the goals adopted by the U.N. member countries in 2000.

While the tendency in the industrialised world in the wake of the Mar. 11 nuclear meltdown in Japan is to abandon plans for further nuclear energy development, in Argentina the capacity of existing plants is being strengthened, and new reactors are being built.

As human rights cases from Argentina's 1976-1983 military dictatorship move ahead in the courts, cases of judges and prosecutors who were accomplices in the crimes are coming to light.

Conditional cash transfers to poor families with children in Argentina 'have had a very positive impact,' says an enthusiastic Graciela Dulcich, the principal of a primary school in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

The boom in exports from South America's Mercosur trade bloc is due not only to commodities sold to China and other large emerging economies, but also to industrial goods bound for other Latin American and Caribbean markets.

The Argentine economy has grown steadily since 2003, and hundreds of thousands of social housing units have been built. Nevertheless, the protests and conflicts that periodically break out make it clear that the solutions have failed to keep up with the need for affordable housing