The Grade 10 student was first drugged, and then four men raped her. The group then apparently tried to extort money from her family. When the family filed a complaint with the police instead, the extortionists in October then posted a cellphone video of her whole ordeal on the Internet.

Yu Mengxiang is a 24-year-old office manager at a foreign company in Beijing. Although he looks and acts like a typical urban male, his household registration — or ‘hukou’ — is in a village in north-east Liaoning province, which means he isn’t entitled to government benefits in the capital. Bucking conventional wisdom, he doesn’t want any.

Given all the other foreign policy challenges he is dealing with, the last thing U.S. President Barack Obama needed three weeks after Republicans swept mid-term elections was the outbreak of a major new crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

Sufficient evidence was presented to sentence the members of the Peruvian army responsible for the killings of 12 women, men, children and elderly persons from two highlands villages in Peru. But after a 24-year wait for justice, a court acquitted the defendants this week.

Aluminium giant BHP Billiton’s Mozal smelter has begun bypassing its fume treatment centres, emitting potentially dangerous fumes into the air without treating them first - despite a pending court case on the matter.

'My mother used to beat me. She would lock me away, and then she started chaining me to the table,' says Elizabeth. Teresa recounts how she was seven months pregnant when her husband grabbed her by the hair, threw her to the ground and kicked her.

While many U.S. residents prepare for their annual Thanksgiving feast Thursday, one in six are at risk of hunger — including a quarter of all children in the country.

What if young boys were imbued with a sense of empathy and fair play to counteract a culture that victimises women? Could they grow up to become part of a generation that renounces gender violence once and for all?

The revelation that the man presumed to be a high-ranking Taliban leader who had met with top Afghan officials was an imposter sheds new light on Gen. David Petraeus's aggressive propaganda about the supposed Taliban approach to the Hamid Karzai regime.

They were not looking for war, but it found them anyway: Yosmireli and Griselda, two and four years old, died by bullets to their heads from soldiers' guns. Their mother, aunt and seven-year-old brother Joniel were also killed, on a rural road in northwest Mexico.