Reporting on the Americas

By James Kelly / Managing Editor

For the past nine years, Tim Padgett has covered Latin America for us, first from Mexico City and now from his base in Miami. He has covered the sudden crises (Elian Gonzalez comes to mind), the outsize personalities (Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is but the most recent example) and the long-running tragedy that is Haiti. He has chronicled the rise of the NAFTA generation in Mexico, the cocaine guerrillas in Colombia and the crusade of Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya as he struggled for a national referendum on Castro's rule. We're delighted that for this work, Tim is one of this year's recipients of the Maria Moors Cabot award, which honors reporting about Latin America and is the oldest international award in journalism.

"What I am most interested in covering is the post--cold war struggle between making revolutions and building institutions in Latin America, if only to keep U.S. readers from becoming complacent about our own institutions," says Padgett. "I thought about this a lot while riding into New Orleans on a Marine helicopter last month to watch our country's dysfunctional rescue of Hurricane Katrina victims. It showed that no country in the Americas is immune to disaster; what really matters is how those mistakes are addressed."

Global Health 2005 We're putting the finishing touches on our program for next week's Global Health Summit in New York City, which will take place from Nov. 1 to Nov. 3. We will be playing host to several hundred people from different walks of life, all devoted to finding solutions for the health problems in the developing world. ABC News and Charlie Rose will be devoting segments of their shows to the conference, while PBS will be running a six-hour series titled Rx for Survival, premiering Nov. 1 to Nov. 3 from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Look for our own special report in next week's issue, and check in with TIME.com for regular reports during the meeting.