Latin America

One year ago, in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, Bill Clinton wrote in TIME that "given the right organization and support, Haiti could become a self-sustaining and successful country." That hasn't happened. Despite the best intentions of many around the world, including the former President himself, Haiti is still a basket case. Only 5% of the 675 million cu. ft. (19 million cu m) of rubble in Port-au-Prince has been removed from the streets. At least 1 million Haitians still live in tents. A preventable cholera epidemic has claimed more than 2,500 lives.

Haiti marks a grim anniversary this month: It's been one year since a catastrophic earthquake struck the island nation, leveling whole neighborhoods of the capital city of Port-au-Prince and killing upwards of 230,000 people. Twelve months later, much of the rebuilding and recovery remains undone. Only 40 percent of the rubble in Port-au-Prince is scheduled to be cleared by next August, complained former U.S.

It's been said that when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

No case illustrates this suffering more than that of Alan Gross, a Maryland resident and USAID subcontractor who was working to connect the Cuban Jewish community to the Internet and was detained by Cuban authorities one year ago. Campaigning for his release these many months, his wife, Judy Gross, fears that her husband has become a "pawn" in the half-century Cold War between the United States and Cuba.

As Havana prepares for its first Communist Party Congress in 14 years in April, the United States should seize the opportunity to positively influence the economic blueprint the party is expected to approve.

In the paper, “Youth Savings in Developing Countries,” the YouthSave Consortium explores savings as a tool towards achieving the nexus potential: financial inclusion and youth development. But what if an evolved social protection scheme could give this hypothesis a little nudge forward?

Today the YouthSave Consortium launches its new website, www.youthsave.org, an online resource dedicated exclusively to the experiences and research of the YouthSave Project, as well as broader information on youth savings accounts around the globe.

My hotel on the outskirts of Puebla, a city of 1.3 million in central Mexico, looks out over a rolling golf course lined with palm trees and beyond that a busy highway flanked by Mazda and Mercedes car dealerships. The historic downtown has colonial Spanish architecture. Newer areas of the city boast gated subdivisions, Home Depot outlets, and strip malls. I came to attend a technology conference, "Ciudad de las Ideas," now in its third year and featuring such international luminaries as Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson as speakers.

Writing from Mexico City

In the high-stakes world of international diplomacy, bluffing is a seldom-seen practice -- the stakes are simply too high to risk getting called out. But, that's precisely what seems to have happened with the Obama administration's stated policy of détente toward Cuba. Havana is making concessions, but Washington seems incapable of responding in kind. The United States may be fumbling away its best chance at influencing Cuba in the way that it has claimed to have wanted for decades.

The tweets started arriving in August, and they did not mince words. One of the first accused the South Korean government of being "a prostitute of the United States." The Twitter account, under the name "uriminzok," or "our nation," seemed to be part of a sprawling North Korean digital operation that included a Facebook account (registered as a man interested in "meeting other men," but solely for "networking purposes") and a series of YouTube videos meant to celebrate the might of the North Korean military.