If Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa appears unassailable after the September ratification of a constitutional amendment lifting a limit on presidential terms, blame the main opposition party.

The floods that have submerged one-fifth of Pakistan have begun to recede, but the crisis has brought to fore one of the country’s hidden miseries: the plight of mothers, who are dying in tens of thousands each year.

A level of enthusiasm seldom expressed at United Nations appointments welcomed the naming of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet as the first head of UN Women, the new agency created to raise the profile of gender and women's issues.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's confrontational approach towards the Iranian parliament could turn into a wider systemic crisis and is provoking appeals for a much more resolute intervention by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Campaigners for increased health financing welcome the commitment by African Union member states to direct more resources to health. But as the September MDG review of progress towards health and other development goals approaches, the needs of the continent seem to dwarf available budgets.

The U.S. transfer of Iraqi detainees to national authorities with a long record of human rights abuses could prove illegal under international law, Amnesty International cautioned in a new report Tuesday.

Half a century after OPEC came into being, the world is very different, thanks partly to the actions of this organisation, the first to be formed in the developing South specifically to protect an export product.

Eighty percent of Zambians live on less than one U.S. dollar a day, a situation that has contributed to high levels of hunger and malnutrition for a majority whose staple diet consists largely of white maize.

Like many primary school teachers in Kenya, Nemwel Mokua is not coping. He has to teach a least six subjects a day, which include a mix of arts, mathematics and science.

Figures the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) presented here Tuesday revealing a reduction in the world's number of hungry people in 2010 for the first time in 15 years should be a cause for celebration. In reality it is a hollow success.