Latin America

One year and one month after Haiti’s horrendous earthquake, the world’s eyes are focused elsewhere.

The demonstration by an estimated million women across Italy Sunday points to a continuing denial of fair opportunities for women at work.

For decades, European bank accounts and trusts and the real estate market were havens for dictators seeking safe places to deposit billions of dollars they were stealing from their countries of origin.

The reaction across Egypt was explosive. The anger that had been simmering for decades and boiled over during 18 consecutive days of protests, was transformed by a single uttered sentence into pure jubilation.

Several hundred thousand protesters massed in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square exploded into joy Friday, after Vice-President Omar Suleiman made the announcement that Hosni Mubarak had resigned as president of Egypt after three decades in office.

In a televised address late Thursday night, embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak delegated executive authority to his newly-appointed vice-president, but stopped short of stepping down. The announcement enraged anti-Mubarak demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, who say they will maintain their uprising- now in its 18th day – until Mubarak’s unconditional resignation.

Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26-year-old Egyptian woman who two weeks ago had only one name, now boasts at least three. These include “A woman worth 100 men”, “The girl who crushed Mubarak” and “The leader of the Egyptian revolution”.

With international press coverage focused almost entirely on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, few outsiders have grasped the scale of Egypt’s popular uprising, now in its third week. But massive demonstrations, and pitched battles between pro-democracy protesters and the regime’s security forces, are taking place in every corner of the country.

The booming tourist industry along Mexico’s Caribbean coast, particularly in the area of Cancun and the “Riviera Maya,” is polluting the world’s largest underwater cave system and harming the world’s second largest coral reef, a new study has found.

Over recent years, Egypt has witnessed mounting tension between its Muslim majority and its sizeable Coptic Christian minority. But in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the site of ongoing mass protests against the ruling regime, members of both faiths chant in unison: “Muslim, Christian, doesn’t matter; We’re all in this boat together!”