'This place used to be beautiful. It was truly a mangrove forest. When the shrimp farmers arrived, we lost 60 percent of it because of the logging,' said Francisco Vásquez, manager of a hotel on the Pacific coast, in the southeastern Guatemalan department of Jutiapa.

Izmir has for years been luring migrants and refugees who dream of crossing into Europe.

After its May trip to Saudi Arabia recently garnered attention, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has come under a hailstorm of criticism by defenders of Israeli policy who claim that the trip raises ethical questions about HRW's work in the Middle East.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), tens of thousands of women and girls have suffered horrific acts of sexual violence at the hands of the government army, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), said Human Rights Watch in a report released Thursday.

Egyptian courts have handed down unprecedented numbers of death sentences in recent months, most of them for violent crime. 'Two hundred and thirty death sentences in six months', read the Jun. 24 headline of independent daily Al- Dustour. 'Fifty in the last week alone'.

Apart from sporadic civil society initiatives, Bosnia has attempted little by way of inter-ethnic reconciliation.

Civilians who fled the Malakand region in northwest Pakistan after the army launched operations against the Taliban, are starting to trickle home. On Wednesday, the government said 2,885 families have returned to Swat and Buner.

The story of ethnic strife engulfing China’s far-western province of Xinjiang may have been relegated to the inner pages of the country’s state-controlled newspapers, but it found space on the front pages of almost every other Chinese daily.

The United States and the European Union are cranking up the pressure for talks brokered by Costa Rican President Óscar Arias to bring about a restoration of democracy in Honduras, while urging both sides to refrain from violence.

A new survey released on Thursday shows that the publics in four majority Muslim and African nations, contrary to the positions of their governments, largely approve of the indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.