UPDATE 4/23 7:42 The dense cloud of smoke has returned to Buenos Aires, bringing with it a familiar smell and the expected round of transportation cuts. Visibility has dropped to 400m in the city and large sections of Rutas 9, 12 and 14 are all closed. Retiro bus station has stopped service to the northern part of Argentina as well as Brazil and Uruguay.

Everything about this Pope’s visit to the United States is turning heads. Many thought he would wag a finger at the President over Iraq… It didn’t happen. Additionally he has repeatedly reached out to the victims of pries sex abuse.

Smoke clouded the Buenos Aires skyline this afternoon, the result of island grass fires in the Parana Delta. Strong winds are driving the smoke down river, creating severe visibility problems on the highways and enveloping the city in an acrid odor. The fires are located 30 minutes north of Buenos Aires and provincial governments are proving unable to extinguish them.

Lorenzo Pepe, former Argentine Congressman and staunch Perón supporter, has called for the latest episode of The Simpsons to be censored because of a scene in which Juan Perón is referred to as a dictator.

Every day of the year, Atilio’s home is open to throngs of hikers seeking a warm meal, mate, and a place to the rest their heads. Refugio Cajón del Azul is set against the startling beauty of the Andean Comarca of the 42nd Parallel, a mountainous area west of El Bolsón and Lago Puelo that has become of one Argentina’s most treasured wilderness sanctuaries.

In recent years Buenos Aires, and indeed the rest of Argentina, has been experiencing a development boom. It has in fact been described by property developer John Boyle as the largest in the nation’s history.

But it is the regularity with which ambitious projects seem to be left unfinished that grabs the attention of so many. Dramatic empty buildings with no windows or doors and roads that stop in mid air… All can be seen in Argentina’s capital and all lead to one big question: How is this possible?

In the past two weeks the Kirchners have launched an organized offensive against Clarin, the largest independent newspaper in Argentina. Although widely believed to be pro-Kirchner, Clarin drew the ire of Christina with a political cartoon criticizing her handling of the campo crisis.

The current housing crisis has caused people throughout Argentina to homestead in abandoned buildings. In Santa Fe a group of men have taken the squatting epidemic to a new level by seizing a community plaza and constructing a pair of houses on it.

During the early hours of 8th February 2007, a fire ravaged Villa Cartón, a shantytown built under a motorway flyover in the neighbourhood of Villa Soldati, in the south of Buenos Aires. Nearly 400 families’ homes were destroyed, and 170 people were treated for asphyxia, minor cuts and light burns.

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.

On the corner of Plaza and Olzabal in Buenos Aires there is a park hedged on two sides by the exposed brickwork of the adjoining buildings. It’s midday, overcast, and a light breeze is shaking the park’s only tree. Otherwise nothing, no one. Except for a diminutive little man standing on a crate, running a pole up and down a wall.

Meet Blu, one of the most innovative artists working on the streets today.