News headlines in September 2011, page 30

The so-called 'Northern Triangle' of Central America, plagued by poverty, violence and the legacy of civil war, is considered one of the most violent areas in the world. But neighbouring Nicaragua has largely escaped the spiralling violence, and many wonder how it has managed to do so.

A high-level meeting on racism, scheduled to take place later this month under the auspices of the General Assembly, is threatening to split the world body and trigger a North-South confrontation.

Seventeen-year-old Rose Mina Joseph says she is nine months pregnant. Her belly is swollen and she moves slowly, placing each step, as she walks around her family's dusty yard.

The latest archeological findings in the Mirador Basin of Guatemala lend further credence to the theory that the Maya civilisation that once flourished there was brought down by environmental causes such as deforestation.

The last time Supaya Serrano saw her sisters Erlinda and Ernestina, they were just three and seven years old, respectively.

Ancel Roget believes he knows why the Trinidad and Tobago government imposed a State of Emergency (SOE) on Aug. 21 and used its majority in the Parliament to extend it for another three months.

People are packed like sardines on the sand and in the water. Like every summer in Cuba, tens of thousands of Havana residents seek to escape the heat and worries of city life every day along a 12-km stretch of popular beaches to the east of the capital, known as Playas del Este.

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.

A richly biodiverse rainforest the size of 3,000 soccer fields in central Bolivia will be the first victim of the road planned to run through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), say environmental activists.

Learning a lesson from crop failures attributed to climate change, Nepal’s women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks.