News stories by Marcela Valente, page 18

'In my family, they always saw me as a girl, but at school they called me by my boy's name, which is why I dropped out,' Paula Sosa, a transvestite who recently managed to change her name on her identity document, told IPS.

The high popularity levels of their predecessors smoothed the way for Cristina Fernández and Dilma Rousseff to become presidents of Argentina and Brazil. But they also share the challenge of governing the two biggest countries in South America's Mercosur trade bloc, in the shadow of the leaders who went before them.

'I knew he beat her but I never imagined that she would end up like this,' Elsa Jerez told IPS, talking about her 24-year-old daughter Fátima Catán, a victim of domestic violence in Argentina who died of severe burns to her body.

Since antiretroviral drugs became widely available in many countries, AIDS has gradually come to be seen more like a chronic disease. But the treatment that restored the hope of people living with HIV has posed a new challenge, which is generally played down by health professionals.

Just over two months after the death of her husband, Argentine President Cristina Fernández is the front-runner in the polls for this year's presidential elections. She is also the politician with the best image in the country.

This year will be the ninth straight year of impressive economic growth for Argentina. Some analysts say the international context is the key to the high rates of growth since 2003, while others stress that there are also internal factors behind the expansion.

A new way of sharing music has caught on in Argentina, with bands -- both new and established -- filmed in impromptu performances on rooftops or in markets and other public spaces in Argentina. The high-quality videos, which are shot in one single take, are then posted on the Internet.

A video monitoring system will begin operating Jan. 1 on fishing vessels in the South Atlantic in a bid to halt the collapse of the Argentine hake population in one of the world's largest fisheries supplying the white fish market.

While real estate investment and the number of upscale apartments for sale or rent are growing in the Argentine capital, tens of thousands of poor families are living in crowded shanty towns, and are demanding affordable housing and access to mortgage programmes.

The life sentence handed down to former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla Wednesday was the culmination of a year marked by faster progress in trials of members of the armed forces accused of human rights violations committed during the country's 1976-1983 military regime.