Heads of state of 15 Caribbean nations will gather in St Vincent on Monday to unveil a plan demanding reparations from Europe for the enduring suffering inflicted by the Atlantic slave trade. In an interview with the Guardian, Sir Hilary Beckles, who chairs the reparations task force charged with framing the 10 demands, said the plan would set out areas of dialogue with former slave-trading nations including the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark

In less than four years, more than 1.6 million individuals and businesses, mostly start-ups, have created a website with an address ending with .co. That is a staggering number for a new top-level domain (the last bit of a web address). Contrast that with .biz, which was introduced in 2000 and by April last year had chalked up just 2.4 million registrations.

Townspeople gathered at dusk in the central square of this city of ranches and lemon groves, planning to pick a committee to support and oversee the activities of a recently arrived self-defense group here. The vigilantes gained acceptance when they recently ran off a cartel accused of everything from extracting extortion payments to making people it didn’t like in the community disappear.

Over the last two decades, Brazil’s trade policy has centered on two main negotiations. At the regional level, Brasília has spent much of its time and effort trying to lay the groundwork for a common economic space in the Southern Cone of South America. Since 1991, Mercosur, the Common Market of the South, has been the centerpiece of that strategy.

If you have a compelling start-up idea, the Chilean government will give you $40,000 to move there and build it. The Chilean embassy in your country will grant you a one-year visa within days. When you arrive in Chile, you’ll have free offices, fast Wi-Fi, unlimited coffee and croissants, and a community of intrepid friends. Not surprisingly, the Chilean program has received thousands of applications from entrepreneurs worldwide.

In 2010, I returned to London to meet again with the nation-branding consultants I had interviewed three years earlier. I expected to encounter a very different portrait of the field from the one that had been painted for me a few years earlier. Aftershocks from the global financial crisis of 2008 – 2009 continued to make themselves felt, upending the foundations of market value.

Earlier this week, Germany’s Der Spiegel reported the latest leak of confidential documents from former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. According to these reports, the NSA monitored former Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s e-mail account and personal communications, gaining insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability.

When President Daniel Ortega granted a Chinese telecommunications executive exclusive rights to develop a $40 billion canal through Nicaragua and operate it for 100 years, his administration touted the CEO's record of success heading a wireless communications firm with projects in 20 countries. Wang Jing's company, Xinwei, boasted that it had orchestrated an array of deals worth more than $5 billion over the last three years, in places as far-flung as Zimbabwe and Ukraine.