Relations between Beijing and Washington have been far from smooth since the beginning of the year.

Two weeks before a major donors conference, the Haitian government has estimated that the country will need some 11.5 billion dollars over the next three years to recover from the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.

On average women constitute 18.8 percent of representatives in parliaments across the world according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). This gender imbalance has been subject to much feminist criticism and many campaigns for change have been staged to address the status quo. The situation is however different in Rwanda.

Plummeting revenues from the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) could cause severe financial difficulties in the region, economic experts warn. To make matters worse, the organisation is split over the future of its tariff pool that largely bankrolls the national budgets of its poorer members.

Dozens of civil society organisations in the Americas are demanding greater transparency and accountability as well as structural reforms in the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), ahead of the multilateral lender's annual meeting of governors that starts Friday in the Mexican resort of Cancún.

Equipment designed for torturing prisoners is still being exported from European Union (EU) countries despite a four-year-old ban on such trade, according to a new report by Amnesty International.

Spain is breaking new ground in its relations with Africa through an ambitious programme which has seen it increasing its development funding to the continent more than six-fold from 2004 to reach 1,4 billion euros in 2008.

As the water level in the Mekong River dips to a record 50-year low, a familiar pattern of fault-finding has risen to the surface. China, the regional giant through which parts of South-east Asia’s largest waterway flows through, is again at the receiving end of verbal salvoes from its neighbours.

On Tuesday tens of hundreds of Palestinians of all political persuasions took to the streets, alleys and sidewalks as widespread rioting and protests spread across East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and into Israel proper.

Argentina is building its first solar energy park in the northwestern province of San Juan. The project calls for the manufacture of photovoltaic panels to supply the rest of the country and the other member countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur).