Third World

The clash between North and South America is as enduring as ever, but its rhetoric is evolving. Gone are the crude tirades about imperialist oppression and the exploitation of the world's poor by greedy corporations. Now it's all about the competition between liberty, the preeminent value championed by President Bush, and equality, the primary concern of his leading ideological adversaries, presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Mya Arulpragasam has a habit of scrunching up her mouth. In photographs, she often pulls her purple- or orange-painted lips into a hard-core rapper's sneer -- or a punk's, a bit of old Sid Vicious creeping into the visage of this 30-year-old, London-born, frequently displaced daughter of Sri Lanka. It's not a pretty girl's look. It makes kissing unlikely and conversation likely confrontational.

Re "Bush: No tax hike for bridges," Aug. 10 Federal officials deem more than 73,000 U.S. bridges to be structurally deficient. Many are in need of repair or replacement. The consequences of the "starve the beast" mentality that has dominated the Republican Party since the Reagan era have never been clearer or more urgent. Raise the gas tax, if necessary, but fix the bridges. Len Gardner Laguna Woods -- You can't help but get the feeling that this place is falling apart.

The nonprofit that aims to seed the developing world with inexpensive laptop computers for schoolchildren has made peace with Intel Corp., the project's most powerful rival. The One Laptop Per Child program and Intel said Friday that the chip maker would join the board of the nonprofit and contribute funding.

FOR the freight trains rolling through this Central American nation, every journey is a one-way trip to trouble. Scrap-metal pirates plunder the tracks. Purloined spikes cause derailments. Seasonal rains bring washouts. Squatters build homes in the right of way. The track supervisor packs a 9--millimeter pistol. Just in case. Engineers carry shovels to scoop garbage off the line in Sanarate, whose residents use it as a municipal dump.

Egypt made the most progress among developing countries in reducing deaths of children younger than 5 from 1990 to 2005, while Iraq deteriorated the most, a U.S.-based charity reported Tuesday. Save the Children tracked child mortality trends in 60 developing countries during the 15-year period. Twenty made no progress in reducing deaths or had higher death rates. The 60 countries accounted for 94% of child deaths worldwide, the report says. About 10.

The founder of the ambitious "$100 laptop" project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine, for now, costs $175 and that it would be able to run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system in addition to its home-grown, open-source interface.

Re "Want peace, love and understanding? Pony up," Opinion, April 13 I agree that the government is overspending on the defense budget and underspending on more effective ways to bring peace and stability to the world. Why are we fueling what looks to be an unending war when we could spend a fraction of it on helping people struggling with extreme poverty, people living on less than $1 a day? What people don't realize is that, by helping the poor, we create stability and promote democracy in Third World countries without shedding any blood.

Like most of their neighbors in the sprawling, ramshackle Oasis Mobile Home Park, the Aguilars have no heat, no hot water. On cold nights, the family of eight stays warm by bundling up in layers of sweaters and sleeps packed together in two tiny rooms. Bathing is a luxury that requires using valuable propane to boil gallons of water. So the farmworker clan spends a lot of time dirty. Jose Aguilar, a wiry 9-year-old, has found a way around the bath problem. He just waits until dinner.

A multinational health group announced here Friday that it would commit $500 million over three years to strengthen healthcare systems and train additional health workers in developing nations, addressing a key problem for implementing its vaccination programs.