Literacy programmes are teaching millions of Egyptians to read, but are struggling to keep up with the country's high population growth.

'The best laid-schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley' (Scottish for 'going wrong').

After Chen Lusheng, a police sergeant from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, died in December after an off-duty night of heavy drinking with local officials, his superiors tried to have him designated a 'martyr' who 'died in the line of duty,' so that his family would receive greater compensation.

Releasing its annual report on the state of human rights around the world, the U.S. State Department Thursday said it was increasingly concerned about curbs imposed by foreign governments on civil society groups, the press, and Internet use.

Sri Lanka, which won a grueling decades-long battle against one of the world's most ferocious terrorist organisations last May, has scored a diplomatic victory in its ongoing war of words with the United Nations.

While Chile's new rightwing President Sebastián Piñera, who announced that he would lead 'a government of reconstruction,' was being sworn in Thursday, the earthquake-ravaged country was shaken by major aftershocks.

Lillian Mutuku, a 34-year-old mother of three, describes her home in Katine area, in Kenya’s Eastern province Tala, as a harsh place to live. The soil is poor, she says, the sun beats down mercilessly and vegetation is sparse.

Despite diplomatic maneuvering designed to block any review of its human rights record, a United Nations special rapporteur has told the U.N. Human Rights Council that proposed changes in Egypt's constitution 'would create a permanent legal state of emergency'.

With the 15th-year review of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women taking place at the ongoing Commission on the Status of Women in New York, South African teachers and education experts say they fear that a special focus on the advancement of girls is getting lost amidst the growing levels of poverty in the country.

'I think that Islam has been misinterpreted. No Islamic law says violate women's rights and repress women,' says Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi. 'Democracy, human rights and women leadership are absolutely not hostile to the Islamic doctrine.' And women in Iran are well aware of that, she says.