Brooke and WNYC reporter Marianne McCune report from Mexico City about how the Mexican media is grappling with the country's upcoming presidential elections, and the youth movement that is tired of business-as-usual.

Los Lobos - El Gusto

Over the past couple years, violence in Ciudad Juarez has fallen from its peak levels, but the city (along with its neighbor accross the border, El Paso) is still trying to revitalize its image. Marianne McCune talks to the mayors of El Paso and Juarez about what they're doing to accomplish this, the 2010 decision to leave Juarez off of an El Paso tourism map, and the recent decision to add it back to the map.

Just across the border from El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juarez is notorious for the violence that has accompanied a long war between cartels. Marianne McCune goes to Juarez to see how the once-epicenter of Mexico’s drug violence has changed the city and the reporters who risk their lives to cover it.

I’ve been interviewing people who write about depressing things. Journalists, currently in Mexico City, who’ve spent a good part of the past decade (or more) covering horrifying murders, over and over again. The death toll since President Felipe Calderon launched his war on the drug cartels in 2006 is in the tens of thousands. Thirty five thousand? Eighty thousand? Many here dispute the number of murders and disappearances and that’s because only a tiny percentage of them are ever investigated, much less solved.

One of my favorite features of Mexico City is the blank billboards. The ones for which no one has bought an ad. All that remains are quadrants of empty space, beautiful geometric shapes in shades of grey and beige that gain color from this city’s extraordinary evening skies.

Seventeen-year old U.S. sensation Claressa Shields lost Monday to UK middleweight Savannah Marshall at the Women’s World Championship in Qinhuangdao, China, but there is confusion at the tournament about whether Claressa might still advance to London.

Claressa Shields, 16-year old boxer out of Flint, MI, was calm and confident last night before she defeated the National champion, Franchon Crews, by a wide margin. Crews is an experienced fighter. "I wasn't nervous at all," Shields said. "I knew I would win."

Brooklyn born boxer Heather Hardy wants to be a world champion. She will not compete this month to make the first women’s Olympic boxing team – she plans to go pro instead. But getting paid to fight – when you’re a woman – is difficult even for top tier boxers. So, like female boxers around the world, Hardy hopes the women who enter the ring in London this summer will change her life, too.

This summer in London, women will box in the Olympics for the first time. The boxers competing for a spot on the US team will make history – but few know who they are or why they box. Images of women boxers range from girls throwing soft punches in bikinis and lipstick to women who look and act like men. The Olympic hopefuls are neither--but everything in between.

Along the blocks surrounding United Nations headquarters, there have been plenty of sour faces the past week – angry protesters and frustrated neighbors trying to weave through the blue barricades. But the faces of one group of visitors to the UN were full of joy: Libyans.

International politics become local this week as world leaders take over midtown Manhattan, with the United Nations General Assembly on the east side of Manhattan and the Clinton Global Initiative on the west.

Ten years after the World Trade Center attacks, WNYC's 10th Anniversary Special explores New Yorkers’ most visceral and immediate emotional reactions to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and how they are – and are not - still with us today.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that, more than a year after an earthquake devastated the island nation, it will allow Haitians who came to the U.S. in the year following the earthquake to apply for Temporary Protected Status, the same work visa extended to those living here before the disaster.

Libyans in the New York area have been gathering across the street from the United Nations this week to urge the international community to stop Moammar Gadhafi from going to war with the protesters calling for his ouster.

CBS reporter Lara Logan joined a list of dozens of reporters who were assaulted, detained or harassed while covering Egypt’s uprising last week. Protesters and outspoken government critics have also been intimidated or censored in Egypt and elsewhere. Here in New York and across the globe, human rights and advocacy groups have been working to keep the lines of communication open.

Census figures show about 50,000 people of Egyptian ancestry live in New York and New Jersey combined. Most Egyptians are Muslim, but about 10 percent of the country’s population is Coptic Christian. They are the largest minority group in Egypt and, in recent days, many in the New York metro area have been following news of Egyptian protests with less excitement than trepidation.

Leaders of Egyptian Christians are among those in New York who have paid close attention to the protests in Egypt and have called on Coptic congregations to pray and fast for peace for the first three days of this week.

The return of the former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier to Haiti had many in the Haitian diaspora glued to Internet radio Tuesday. Duvalier fled during a popular uprising in Haiti a quarter century ago and was questioned in Haitian court Tuesday. His defense attorney said he faces accusations of corruption and embezzlement for allegedly pilfering the treasury before being ousted in 1986. Some Haitians in New York accuse him of stealing attention from Haiti’s most imminent problems: a contested election and hundreds of thousands of people still living in tents.

Finding ways to help Haiti help itself has proven a challenge. A Haitian born accountant in Brooklyn has been learning that first hand.

It’s been one year since an earthquake devastated Haiti. New York City schools have taken in almost 800 students from the island nation. And 12 of them have started memoirs, posted inside the entrance to a Brooklyn elementary school.