A government-led crackdown on violent and explicit sexual lyrics seems to have stalled reggae music's 20-year slide into what has been dubbed 'murder music'.

Across the globe and against the tide, the United States is one among a dwindling count of industrialised democracies that continue to practice capital punishment.

A thin Palestinian boy, no older than ten, darts between the piles of garbage and the congested lines of traffic which converge at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

When nearly 1,000 Burmese migrant workers launched a strike at a fishnet factory in north-east Thailand a week ago, activists expected it to be a short burst of anger. After all, this frequently abused labour force was often gripped with fear during brief work stoppages in the past elsewhere in this South-east Asian kingdom.

Security first or borders first: security says Israel, borders retort the Palestinians.

Last month's bloody gun battle in the streets of a heavily populated Beirut neighbourhood may have been triggered by an individual incident; its sectarian dimension, however, has once again highlighted the underlying battle of two currents — two visions of Lebanon that have been tearing the country apart for the last four years.

A processed fish cake, made of a mixture of deep sea fish species pounded into paste and sold either deep fried or frozen, is the brain child of Takuhira Kaneko, head of Act for Company, which trades in fish and located in western Fukuoka city in Japan.

Civil society is calling for an end to impunity for the harassment of human rights activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The renewed call comes as an activist kidnapped at the end of August have described their detention and torture by uniformed captors.

The elimination of half a million public sector jobs, starting immediately and lasting through the first quarter of 2011, is one of the most complex and sensitive aspects of the reforms announced by Cuban President Raúl Castro.

Despite an unusual dip in global weapons sales in 2009, the United States retained its spot as the world's top arms supplier of developing countries, according to an authoritative new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).