On a cold Sunday night in June, sitting on plastic chairs in a grey town hall in the Buenos Aires suburban town of Ciudad Evita, a dozen residents are gathered. They have heard that a landfill is going to be constructed just outside their town to receive rubbish produced in the city of Buenos Aires – and they have decided to stop it.

It all started with a simple question. How long does it take for an unlocked bicycle to be stolen in Buenos Aires? A group of porteños have come up with a novel idea to put this question to the test.

American writer Tom Wolfe is fascinated by Paris Hilton. Using the heiress as an example of how the truth is often so much more implausible than fiction, Wolfe told the audience at this year’s Buenos Aires book fair he ‘could not have predicted’ Hilton would have become a household name throughout the world because she made a sex tape.

Alcohol intoxication is the cause of 50% of all traffic accidents around Argentina and kills more youngsters under the age of 25 than any illness, reports the association Luchemos por la Vida.

Two years ago, Julieta Paus couldn’t consume anything without counting the calories. “For lunch I chewed gum and drank mate, but nothing else,” the 18-year-old said. “I felt bad even after drinking mate, so I’d run to the bathroom to get rid of it.”

Amnesty International states that two women die a week in Argentina as a result of domestic violence, and statistics seem to indicate that domestic violence is rising rather than falling. Is enough being done to ensure the safety of Argentine women?

During the month of March an international convention on HIV took place in Brazil, hosted by the UN. The task: to review the situation from location to location around the world and try and improve the way HIV is prevented and treated.

A massive ‘white elephant’; a road that stops mid-air; and a man-made island housing infrastructure that looks built by Smurfs (those little blue animated characters). The connection? All are unfinished constructions around Argentina’s capital.

Traffic accidents killed 20 people across Argentina during the Semana Santa of 2007– that’s a single week. This year, the figure rose to 56, according to reports. Road safety has been an issue since vehicles became available and commercialised in the late 19th century. Since the world’s first reported traffic-related death in 1896, an estimated 25m people have been killed on the roads.

In February 2007, a fire in Buenos Aires’ ‘worst shantytown’ highlighted the problems of housing in the capital. A year on, despite government pledges, little has been done to improve the living situation of the country’s most poor and vulnerable, and the housing deficit is bigger than ever.