Property, Tourism & Transportation

Land conflicts involving indigenous people have multiplied in Brazil over the last few months, generating greater tension and showing once again that the country's roughly 400,000 indigenous people still have a long way to go to win respect for their rights. Read More

Indigenous protesters from northwestern Venezuela marched Friday through the streets of Caracas, which is hosting the sixth World Social Forum (WSF), to protest plans for mining coal on their land. Read More

A bill for busing evacuees from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was $32 million more than it should have been, and the government paid it without question, the Transportation Department inspector general said Friday. Read More

The fed is looking into contracts for evacuation of New Orleans awarded to the FAA and a transportation company with ties to Bush. Did the agency and the company do anything at all post-Katrina? Read More

In 1996, Darius Mehri, a wide-eyed young American engineer, went to Japan to work for Toyota's production system. What he found was an abusive environment where the company controlled every movement - inside and outside work - of its employees. Read More

Independent auditors confirmed Friday to Volkswagen's senior board many of the details published in news reports in recent months about corrupt dealings by managers in the car company's personnel department. Read More

Japanese investors in India took a few hard lessons in India's tough labour laws when the automobile giant Honda Motors tamely resumed production at its plant outside the national capital this week, ending three months of labour disputes, including pitched battles between police and agitated workers. Read More

When Hanoi opened its door to global capitalism in 1988, the Communist party frowned on golf as an irrelevant bourgeois indulgence. Today, the Communist elite has bestowed its full blessing on the game as both symbol, and tool, of Vietnam's economic modernisation. Read More

Today about 40% of all the fuel that Brazilians pump into their vehicles is ethanol, known here as alcohol, compared with about 3% in the United States. No other nation is using ethanol on such a vast scale. The change wasn't easy or cheap. But 30 years later, Brazil is reaping the return on its investment in energy security while the U.S. writes checks for $50-a-barrel foreign oil. Read More

A new breed of leadership is working to make Buenos Aires, Argentina, a local, transparent economy and a model for the rest of the world. Read More