The World Bank (WB) approved last week a $7.7 million loan for St. Lucia to improve water service on the small Caribbean nation. The St. Lucia Water Supply Infrastructure Improvement Project will support an urgent investment program to carry out critical works to alleviate the water shortage in the north of the country, the most densely populated and developed region of the island.

The planned cultural center at the World Trade Center site will house a visual arts area devoted to drawing, a visitor´s hub and a center focusing on the global struggle for freedom, according to plans unveiled last week. The avant-garde WTC Cultural Center will be suspended from a support bridge and its crystalline surface will be sprinkled with glass prisms pulsating with light. The building´s roof will be landscaped.

China said earlier this week it will let mainland tourists visit Taiwan, ending a decades-old ban and pressing its campaign of offering economic benefits to woo its rival into pursuing closer ties. Allowing tourism was among promises made by Beijing during recent visits by two Taiwanese opposition leaders in an effort to build sentiment on the island, which China claims as its own territory, in favor of uniting with the continental territory.

Professionals from France´s travel industry and government agreed recently in Paris to come together in the war against sexual exploitation of minors, an ever-increasing problem that´s sweeping the world today. French Tourism Minister Leon Bertrand and a group of seventeen travel professionals are now determined to force tourists to respect the rights of children.

Skyrocketing airfares in Paraguay is chasing travelers off and becoming one of the main hurdles the country´s tourist industry has to cope with right now. A 16-hour roundtrip flight from Buenos Aires to Miami set passengers back some $549. However, a much shorter hop between Asuncion and Buenos Aires that takes approximately three hours to and fro is in the neighborhood of $310.

Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003. The latest figures suggest that half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.