The desperate need to find an alternative investor for the closed Luanshya Copper Mines (LCM) in Zambia’s Copperbelt has not prevented some Zambians from fiercely opposing the government’s decision to let Chinese-owned Non-Ferrous Metals Mining Company (NFCA) run the mine.

Egyptian cyber-dissidents are becoming increasing vocal in their online criticism of President Hosni Mubarak's regime, utilising a widening repertoire of Internet networking and publishing tools to expose government abuses.

At his inaugural ceremony Monday, the first-ever leftwing president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, said his main goal was to 'beat poverty, political backwardness, the marginalisation of broad sections of society, desperation, and the lack of future prospects for our young people.'

The world is on track towards negotiating a solid deal in Copenhagen at the end of this year, Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate change official, told reporters at the opening of a 12-day conference in Bonn Monday.

Sunday's announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Washington will begin talks with Cuba on bilateral migration issues and resume direct postal service between the two countries suggests the new administration of President Barack Obama intends to proceed cautiously toward normalising ties with the Caribbean nation, according to veteran experts here.

The International Criminal Court has struggled since its inception to realise its core mandate to prosecute the world’s worst human rights offenders, putting on trial propagators of genocide, war crimes and the inductors of child soldiers into civil conflict.

Despite President Barack Obama’s formation of a new task force to review government secrecy, and an ongoing investigation into use of the so-called 'state secrets doctrine', lawyers for the new administration refused last week to disclose information on the government’s use of warrantless wiretaps and backed legislation to block the release of photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Drug trafficking was once thought to be a largely Latin American problem, but the international community increasingly finds itself fighting this phenomenon in Africa.

Handed down from generation to generation, traditional knowledge about medicinal plants has reached state laboratories in Brazil through a programme that has already identified 71 native and exotic species for producing herbal medicines.

South Africa is slowly moving towards exploring renewable energy sources, having set itself a target of three percent of energy being generated from renewable sources by 2013.