South America

Margaret Thatcher re-established the United Kingdom as a major force on the international scene. But she failed to see that the best hope for Europe's future was integration.

The Vatican is banking on Pope Francis to revive the Catholic Church in Latin America or, at the very least, help slow its decline. But those hopes are unfounded. Catholics in Latin America are leaving the church in record numbers because they find other religions more self-empowering, more modern, and less hierarchical. The fact of a Latin American pope won't change all that.

Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s anointed heir, is expected to cruise to victory in Venezuela’s upcoming presidential elections. But the easy part ends there. Once in office, Maduro will face a dysfunctional economy, high crime, and the broken political system Chávez left behind.

Since 1988, Brazilians have cleared more than 153,000 square miles of Amazonian rain forest, devastating the environment and driving global climate change forward ever faster. Recently, however, Brazil has changed its course, reducing the rate of deforestation by 83 percent since 2004. At the same time, it has become a test case for a controversial international climate-change prevention strategy that places a monetary value on the carbon stored in forests.