Thousands of kilometres from Ukraine, where the worst nuclear accident in history occurred 23 years ago, the sun and fresh air of a Cuban beach provide therapy for Ukrainian children, who continue to be born with problems stemming from the disaster.

Mamata Bannerjee, six-time member of Parliament from West Bengal, bucks the stereotype of women political leaders in India.

Despite an overhaul of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, it appears that the U.S. strategy there is running into obstacles as varied as the U.S. Congress and the leaders of those countries, who are both visiting Washington this week.

Jihad el-Shaar is pleased with his mud-brick house in the Moraj district of Gaza. The 80-square metre home is a basic one-storey, two-bedroom design, with a small kitchen, bathroom and sitting room, made mostly with mud and straw.

While India's major political parties are pledged to increase the space for women in the electoral process, a major deterrent to female participation is the steady criminalisation of politics in this country.

When she went to the doctor, 25-year-old Francisca Barros received two pieces of earthbreaking news. The welcome news was that she was pregnant. The terrifying news: that she was HIV-positive.

The U. S. should quickly accede to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, according to a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) report.

A coalition of human rights and pressure groups fighting for political reform in Zimbabwe and refugee community in South Africa has called for the immediate release of 18 members activists who have been detained on terrorism charges.

The rain was falling hard in the early hours of April 17, when forty detainees kicked down the doors to their cells at the National Palace of Corrections, scaled the prison’s barbed wire fence and rear watchtower, and disappeared into the dark, sodden jungle.

The global financial crisis is on everyone’s lips. With first hand reports of job losses, house foreclosures and citizens living on credit card debt, the impact of the crisis on the individual worker in the developed world is clear. In Africa, there have been threats of closures and retrenchments in the Zambian copper mines and Botswana’s diamond mines, amongst others. But the impact on the individual citizen and African women in particular, given the existing gender inequalities, has not been well documented.