Maria Ester, 23, lives in a crumbling, one-room stucco cottage with her mother and daughter in Santiago del Estero, an Argentine province northwest of Buenos Aires. Ester's 5-year-old daughter and assorted neighborhood children crowd the room, and a sagging mattress that smells like it belongs to a young bed wetter is the only place for a visitor to sit down.

Under a new plan by the Bush administration, more rural youngsters in New York and elsewhere will reap the heart and lung benefits ghetto youth enjoy as local animal factories stink it up with complete impunity for at least the next couple of years. Slaughterhouses will be free to spew pollutants for at least two years as long as they comply with an emissions-monitoring program.

In what some are describing as a new tactic employed by Haiti’s notorious national police to control the slums of Port-au-Prince, last week officers were seen distributing machetes to a group of residents in the impoverished neighborhood of Bel Air–setting them loose on their neighbors. Human rights groups have long accused the Haitian police of terrorizing poor neighborhoods believed to be power bases for exiled President Aristide ever since the February 2004 coup, and in the months leading up to the elections planned for this fall, activists say police oppression has increased.

(CBS/AP) Doctors and aid groups are rushing to set up cholera treatment centers across Haiti's capital as officials warn that the disease's encroachment into the overcrowded city of Port-au-Prince will bring a surge in cases. Hundreds of people were already suspected of having cholera, suffering the disease's symptoms of fever and diarrhea while lying in hospital beds or inside shacks lining the putrid waste canals of Cite Soleil - one of the most dismal of the country's slums.

Medical trials are necessary for the development of new medicines. However, certain requirements have to be met, including steps to ensure the right to health of children taking part in medical trials. These include, but are not limited to, obtaining the prior informed consent of either children or their legal guardians.

Just twenty minutes from Haiti’s National Palace, past skeletal dogs and bullet-hole-ridden cement walls, winds a narrow path that leads to a cock-fighting ring. The tin roofed atrium serves as a community center, and at the top of crumbling pink and sea-foam painted risers perch the leaders of the local pro-Aristide Famni Lavalas cell.