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    • Air Pollution Causes More than 6 Million Deaths Worldwide

      By | Around the World – Thu, Feb 7, 2013

      For the last three weeks, residents of Beijing have been breathing thick, soupy air so choked with pollutants that it has registered far off the scale of acceptable levels.

      Yet places like Beijing or New Delhi, India, which has also had extremely unhealthy air quality levels, are far from the only cities to be plagued. Air pollution affects practically everyone on the planet and causes more than 6 million premature deaths every year, according to the World Health Organization. Yet, this insidious and long-standing issue really only generates headlines when it hits extreme levels.

      ABC News correspondent Gloria Riviera reports that levels in Beijing averaged 300 on the Air Quality Index (AQI), a whopping 280 points over what WHO says is good, clean air. Optimal AQI is just 20.

      Explosive economic growth in China means factories are going full tilt 24/7 and millions of people are able to own cars for the first time. China has minimal environmental standards in place. The new pollution

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    • Guatemala Dictator to Stand Trial on Genocide Charges

      By Christiane Amanpour | Around the World – Mon, Feb 4, 2013

      After a U.S.-backed coup ousted its democratically elected government, Guatemala, a small Central American country, endured a brutal civil war that lasted more than three decades, from 1960 to 1996. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans went missing and 200,000 of its citizens were killed during the conflict, mostly by state security forces.

      Now, relatives of the victims have a symbolic victory all these years later. Just last week, a Guatemalan court ordered a former military dictator, Efrain Rios Montt, to stand trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

      The charges against the general are a direct result of what filmmakers captured in a 1983 documentary called “When the Mountains Tremble.” During Montt’s 17-month rule in the early 1980s, the dictator allowed a young woman, Pamela Yates, to accompany and film him on a helicopter mission as he led troops on a crackdown against leftist guerrillas in the Mayan highlands. “Granito” is a 2011 documentary about that original

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    • Art and Craft of Diplomacy: Secretary of State John Kerry Faces ‘Complex Agenda’

      By Christiane Amanpour, Mary-Rose Abraham, David Miller & Brian Fudge | Around the World – Thu, Jan 31, 2013

      In her four years as the 67th Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton traveled nearly a million miles, visited 112 countries and had 1,700 meetings with world leaders. Besides a grueling travel schedule, the president’s chief foreign affairs adviser must wield all the tools of a negotiator: the art and craft of diplomacy.

      This week Clinton steps down from her post. Taking her place is Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The new secretary of state faces plenty of challenges: the crisis in Syria, Iran, North Korea, Israeli-Palestinian relations. And that’s just to name a few. So how does the craft of diplomacy help the U.S. negotiate our increasingly complex geopolitical relationships?

      In this episode of “Around the World,” Christiane speaks with R. Nicholas Burns. He served for 27 years in the U.S. foreign services, including as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008. Burns is now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy

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