South America

"BELEM, Brazil — A top activist for land reform in Brazil's Amazon has been murdered, police said Thursday."

Trucks full of gunmen sought to kill 64-year old Sister Leonora Brunetto, who had spent decades trying to keep ranchers from stealing Amazon land. "Impunity in the Amazon because of a weak judicial system and corruption among local officials is endemic, a problem not only for people like Brunetto, but for the Brazilian government trying to preserve a rain forest the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi. More than 20 percent of the forest already has been destroyed."

"For more than 300 years, residents of Colombia's Pacific Coast area of Tumaco have mostly been left alone to fish or grow bananas .... But in recent years, the peace has been disturbed by new security threats, aggravated by climate change."

"Facing the possibility of a $27 billion pollution judgment against it in an Ecuadorean court, Chevron launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign to try to prevent the judgment as well as reverse a deeply damaging story line."

"In Lima, Peru, more than 1.3 million people have no access to drinking water. The citizens without it are in the poorest areas, where water trucked in can cost nine times as much as it does in richer areas. So, citizens have had to either make do without running water, or, with the help of a German NGO, make dew into drinking water."

"Power was restored in Brazil after an outage at a dam providing 20 percent of the country's energy thrust about half of the nation's 190 million people into darkness for at least two hours."