Environment

Mayans and Achuar leaders blame one California-based petroleum company for wreaking environmental havoc and leaving many people ill.

5:30 a.m. and still dark. But the rooster knows the sun is coming and his crow trills up past the sulfurous street lamps into the still night sky.

He’s woken the dogs, and suddenly their frantic howling seems to come from the top of every hill in Addis, making the city seem surrounded by their feral packs.

The sharp barks are soon undercut by the rising moan of the muezzin. He sings the same words that have woken me around the world, but his melody here is unique, more of a monotonous chanting than the sung declaration I’ve heard before.

According to Ethiopia's unique calendar, the year 2000 started last September; Christmas was two weeks ago, on Jan. 7; and this weekend, at the end of the 12 days of Christmas, the country's 33 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians celebrated Timkat — or Epiphany — a commemoration of the baptism of Christ. CLP audio producer Jessica Partnow brings us this report from the nation's capital, Addis Ababa.

Some of my toughest times growing up in Kenya were those spent on my way to and from the village river. I call it the village river because it was by and large the only source of water for my village. Never mind the fact that the river was four miles away and was shared among scores of villages along its course.

5:30am and still dark. But the rooster knows the sun is coming and his crow trills up past the sulfurous street lamps into the still night sky.

He’s woken the dogs, and suddenly their frantic howling seems to come from the top of every hill in Addis, making the city seem surrounded by their feral packs.

The sharp barks are soon undercut by the rising moan of the muezzin. He sings the same words that have woken me around the world, but his melody here is unique, more of a monotonous chanting than the sung declaration I’ve heard before.

Close to 40 hours after leaving Athens, Ohio, I arrived to my destination in Addis. My Emirates flight was not exactly that long...I had two stopovers - four hours in Hamburg and 12 in Dubai. It is the kind of thing you have to contend with when you make a decision to fly cheap.

As the world's hunger for meat increases because of expanding middle classes and changing tastes, feeding the animals to feed that hunger is having a significant impact on our planet's agriculture - nowhere more so than Latin America where forests are giving way to soybean empires.

Paraguay is the world's fastest growing soy producer; its eastern region - 2 ½ million hectares of it - is devoted to the crop that has brought wealth and development to one of the poorest countries in South American.

The global production of soybeans is on the rise, thanks to increasing demand. The fastest growing soy producer in the world is Paraguay, the landlocked country in South America still recovering from years of dictatorship and corruption.

Kelly Hearn tells the story of one trip into the Amazonian rainforest to give a big-picture look at the hydrocarbon industry's push into the Tropical Andes.

In mid-winter three of us boarded a 55ft sailing yacht under Cape Town's Table Mountain to rediscover islands in the Atlantic and what they can teach us about coping with climate change. With the help of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and prompted by a dog-eared copy of The Song of the Dodo by the science writer David Quammen, we uploaded video segments of our adventure and thousands of concerned viewers joined the expdition through the website www.jeffbarbee.com.

Paraguay has been run by one political party for the past half century. But former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo is hoping to challenge that. Reporter Charles Lane has the story.

The Camisea Natural Gas Project in Peru is one of South America's largest energy developments. With six pipeline ruptures since 2004, it's also one of the most controversial.