Latin America

The same day that the lower house of the Brazilian Congress approved a reform of the forestry code that would make it easier to clear land in the Amazon jungle for agriculture, a husband and wife team of activists who spent years fighting illegal deforestation in the rainforest were murdered.

With the arrest of the once powerful head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, following allegations that he raped a maid in his 3,000-dollar-a-night penthouse suite at the Sofitel Hotel, a spotlight has been turned on the treatment of female cleaning staff, many of whom are immigrants who keep silent for fear of losing their jobs or being deported.

Liberal and secular Egyptians at the core of mass protests that toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak are scrambling to form a unified political front ahead of critical parliamentary elections in which they will face the better-organized Islamists.

In other circumstances, many women in Peru would be celebrating the possibility of a female president for the first time in the history of their country, or the alternative: the triumph of a candidate who promises to improve things for the poor. But both candidates taking part in the Jun. 5 runoff draw heavy opposition or awaken serious doubts among women’s groups.

Forty-seven governments on the Untied Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) will discuss and decide, beginning at its May 30th session, what to do about an unusually truthful report in the world of international politics.

“Few paths are more treacherous than the one that challenges an abuse of power,” warns “A Handbook for Committing the Truth: The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide” – a primer not only for whistleblowers but for corporate leaders and citizen activists as well, say authors Tom Devine and Tarek Maassarani.

The rage was proportional to the size of the crowd cornered between the jungle and the wall that will dam up the Madeira River in northwest Brazil. Over the space of three days, workers set fire to some 50 buses and other vehicles, work installations and even their own lodgings, which were built to house 16,000 people.

When Caribbean journalists met in Antigua in late March to discuss the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) that was signed between the European Union and the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) countries in 2008, they were told that the absence of tax treaties, foreign exchange controls and language barriers were among the factors preventing the full implementation of the accord.

Al-Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, is the term describing the mass deportation of a million Palestinians from their cities and villages in 1948, including massacres of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages, to establish the State of Israel.