The military conflicts raging across Africa, Asia and Latin America have been significantly influenced by the heavy flow of illicit small arms, cocaine and rich minerals.

As Kuwaitis prepare to vote for a new parliament on May 16, trends suggest that while elections serve as a reminder of the Gulf country’s democratic traditions, the exercise is unlikely to end the political chaos that it was meant to quell.

Scientists around the world are trying to decipher the influenza H1N1 virus in order to develop a vaccine, while others are tracking its origins to fight its spread more effectively.

Argentina’s grain harvest, which grew steadily over the last five years, fell by 30 percent this growing season due to the worst drought in a century, a reduction in the area sown, and meagre investment in technology to improve yields.

Julio Guerrero came from Mexico to the U.S. state of North Carolina on a legal, H2-A temporary visa to work on a tobacco farm in 2002. After only a few weeks on the job, his fingers began to hurt and before long his fingernails had fallen off.

Daisy Duck is the first to greet visitors to the Soweto Islamic Centre, from a television in the lounge of this former pre-primary school in Katutura, Windhoek’s oldest township. Beyond a kitchen is a humble, light-filled prayer room, the ground covered with carpets.

The financial crisis that has sent economies reeling the world over is beginning to adversely affect Africa, threatening to plunge many people back into poverty and thwarting efforts to meet the target of halving the share of the population living on less than one dollar a day by 2015.

Before stepping into Jerusalem's interfaith and inter-political Middle East minefields, Pope Benedict XVI had posited himself as a 'pilgrim of peace'. But, only hours into his spiritual mission, the Pope found himself crashing up against the walls erected by pain - Jewish pain and Muslim pain, the memory of the Holocaust, and Palestinian pain of the continued Israeli occupation.

Yet another sign of the growing unpopularity of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) was evident on the streets of Ramallah last weekend.

‘My husband rapes me repeatedly. I asked the ulama (religious leader) for help, but he sided with him, saying that according to Islam, a woman has to obey her husband. I have nowhere else to go. I have no tears left to shed. I no longer scream.’