'I cut down all of that section,' said Esteban Martínez as he pointed to a rectangle of land cleared of trees in the central Mexican state of Querétaro.

As the Barack Obama administration continues to roll out justifications for its policy of targeting U.S. citizens and others thought to be attacking U.S. troops, legal and national security experts are pondering a central question: What if there's a mistake and the wrong person gets killed?

When garment factory workers outside Colombo once organised a noisy protest over a bonus issue, police threatened to file charges — of hostage taking -- against them.

Olli Heinonen, the Finnish nuclear engineer who resigned Thursday after five years as deputy director for safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was the driving force in turning that agency into a mechanism to support U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran.

Nine million more people have fallen into poverty in Latin American and Caribbean countries since the global financial crisis struck, threatening the achievement of all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the 2015 deadline, according to a report released Thursday by 18 U.N. agencies.

Madagascan female activists are asking that the right of women to participate directly in politics be included in a new draft of the country’s Constitution, so that there can be 30 percent of female politicians in parliament by 2012 and 50 percent by 2015.

Nearly 50 government delegations spent the past week at U.N. headquarters in New York hashing over the progress that has been made and challenges that remain in pursuing gender parity worldwide, one of the crucial elements of the Millennium Development Goals.

In contrast to what has happened in most countries that have switched from analogue to digital television, in Argentina the technological leap has begun with the poorest households.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is heading for a second round of political brawling with the powerful 118-member Non- Aligned Movement (NAM) over his decision to appoint a panel of experts to advise him on possible violations of humanitarian law by the Sri Lankan military during the concluding stages of its war against Tamil separatists last May.

Human rights crimes committed in Peru in the 1990s -- initially amnestied but later tried in court -- will be presented in the trial of Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón as evidence that crimes against humanity cannot be legally pardoned.