Poverty

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.

If our reception by the village militia the previous night was less than warm, the next morning was chilling. Already, Chandan, Arvind and I had been told that while we'd come by choice, there was no guarantee they would arrange a meeting with the guerillas. And either way, leaving was not up to us. So we really fell on the side of prisoners rather than guests, though no one wanted to acknowledge this openly.

New Delhi -- In a dusty alley on the outskirts of this capital city, a group of 30 women stare at the ground in plaintive silence and form a circle around Omwati Kishore, who waits for her husband to return with the cremated remains of their youngest son.

SOUTH BASTAR, India — Two years ago, Comrade Sunil spent half his day at school and the remainder working the red fields of his ancestral village.

But his life changed one night when he found his home torched and older brother dead outside, allegedly shot by a state-sponsored civilian militia cracking down on Maoist sympathizers.

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.

South Bastar, India -- Two years ago, Comrade Sunil spent his days studying in a school classroom and toiling in corn and rice fields in his ancestral village. But life abruptly changed one night after he returned to find his home torched and his older brother shot dead by a state-sponsored civilian militia on the pretext that he had been a rebel sympathizer.

Antigone Barton was interviewed on South Florida's local PBS station, WPBT Channel 2.

Watch the interview on the Heroes of HIV interactive website.

Watch the video on the Heroes of HIV interactive website.

It was 1982 when Dr. Jean Malecki examined a dying 9-month-old baby and made the first pediatric AIDS diagnosis in Palm Beach County.

The parents, who had arrived recently from the Caribbean, were sick, too.

"Within six months, the child had died," Malecki said. "The whole family got wiped out by the disease."

Malecki states this flatly because in the past 25 years, the Palm Beach County health director says, she has seen that flinching from the truth accomplishes nothing.

Australia's needle exchange program aims to prevent injecting drug users from sharing dirty needles.

NEW DELHI — Faced with setbacks in their former stronghold, India's Maoist insurgents have responded with a new war strategy that favors large-scale attacks on police forces and high-profile-target killings.

The latest in a series of recent strikes came late last month when 19 persons, including the youngest son of former state Chief Minister Babulal Marandi, were gunned down at a village cultural event in eastern Jharkhand state.

SOUTH BASTAR, India — Two years ago, Comrade Sunil used his given name and spent half the day at school, the remainder working the red fields of his ancestral village.

But his life changed one night when he found his home torched and older brother dead outside, purportedly shot by state-sponsored civilian militia on the pretext of being a Maoist sympathizer.

Warming by a campfire deep in the mountain jungles of southern Chhattisgarh state, the 18-year-old member of the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army vowed to never give up the homemade rifle lying in his lap.