Surrounded by glass jugs and beakers full of bubbling green slime, Mohamed Ashour appears to be experimenting with a new formula for pea soup. As part of his daily rounds, the Egyptian researcher checks the valves on the tubing connecting each vessel, ensuring their verdant-hued contents are adequately aerated.

The word 'sanctions' was among the first five words mentioned to the new European Union (EU) ambassador to Zimbabwe Aldo Dell Ariccia when he first arrived and met with government officials in Zimbabwe a few months ago.

They are young, educated, urban women who frequent cafes, shop at ritzy fashion outlets, and go to yoga classes whenever they have time off work.

Environmentalists here are on the verge of a significant victory in their efforts to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution, as the Victorian state government negotiates with the owner of the country’s 'dirtiest power station' to shut down the coal-fired facility.

Two weeks after U.S. voters gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives and a sharply reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate, President Barack Obama is scrambling to save his foreign policy agenda.

Over the past several years, the number of people needing treatment for HIV/AIDS has risen, but so has the amount of funding for the treatment and prevention of the disease. The United States has been at the forefront of that funding, but with the new emphasis in Washington on reducing government spending that may be about to change.

International donors meeting in Dakar next week are expected to finance the prosecution of former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré nearly two decades after his removal from power, according to a coalition of rights organisations.

'It is essential for the amnesty law to be repealed' in Uruguay, Argentine poet Juan Gelman told IPS after hearings at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ended in Quito, in the cases of the murder of his daughter-in-law and the kidnapping of his granddaughter.

Privacy advocates called on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Tuesday to end its controversial new initiative of whole-body scans and enhanced pat-downs of airline passengers, calling the programme 'dangerous to health, ineffective and unconstitutional'.

The United States’ policy to double agricultural exports shows that its government 'has learnt nothing' from the last food crisis, a problem reflected in the dramatic increase in that country’s trade-distorting farm subsidies between 2007 and 2008.