Latin America

Capital punishment continues to exist because in some countries people are barraged with propaganda depicting it as a curb on crime, which it is not, said Federico Mayor Zaragoza, chair of an international commission against the death penalty that inaugurated its new headquarters in Geneva Monday.

The sun’s rays bouncing off the A9 highway give it a shining glow. Once known as Sri Lanka’s ‘highway of death’, the road has come a long way from those macabre associations.

As the number of apartments and houses left empty in Spain due to failure to make mortgage or rental payments climbs, tens of thousands of families, including many immigrants, are living on the streets, in shantytowns, or crowded into seedy boarding houses.

Like the biblical plagues of Egypt, 10 calamities have fallen in recent years on the previously flourishing basic industries of northeastern Venezuela, such as iron and steel, aluminum and hydroelectricity.

A delegation of Namibian government representatives and leaders of the indigenous Herero and Nama people who came to Germany to repatriate 20 skulls of their ancestors were once again disappointed in their hopes for dialogue and an official apology.

Days after his half-hearted conciliatory U.N. appearance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already approved the construction of 1,100 flats in occupied East Jerusalem. Yet on Sunday, he threw his support behind the new Mideast Quartet’s peace plan with the Palestinians.

Gazalla Amin’s office on the outskirts of this city, capital of Jammu & Kashmir state, is redolent with the fragrance of lavender wafting up from heaps of the dried flowers in a corner bowl.