Two Georgian women are facing the death sentence in Malaysia in a case that human rights campaigners say has highlighted worries over the continued imposition of capital punishment for drugs offences.

It takes little to bring out the scars that many women who were raped in Bosnia still carry. Rumours, later shown to be unfounded, that Angelina Jolie would star in a film to be shot in Sarajevo on the war-time love between a Serb man and a Bosniak Muslim girl he raped, had women's groups lodging strong protests.

Kosovo youths looking to address issues treated as taboo by mainstream media are taking increasingly to online activism. The new platform is being used particularly to fight high-level corruption.

Currency and trade tensions may have grabbed the headlines from the two-day summit of the Group of 20 advanced and developed economies, but the bigger story is how the tables have turned and given developing countries a much stronger voice at the international negotiating table.

The resurgence in religious fundamentalism and the inordinate influence of certain church leaders over public health policy present major obstacles to the prevention of needless deaths and injuries of women from unsafe abortion on the African continent.

In a small city where most of the 22,000 inhabitants rely on subsistence farming to put food on the table, one young woman has gone against the grain with a business venture that embodies the changing times in Timor-Leste, South-east Asia's newest and poorest nation.

After an agonising eight-month delay, the first concrete steps toward the formation of a new coalition Iraqi government were greeted by senior U.S. officials here Thursday as a major advance in stabilising the long-suffering nation.

After a three-year investigation, President Barack Obama's mantra — 'look forward and not backwards' — appears to have trumped the rule of law as a special prosecutor declined to pursue criminal charges against the Central Intelligence Agency operatives involved in the destruction of video recordings of interrogations of 'war on terror' suspects.

The Spanish government is 'analysing mechanisms to contribute' one million euros (1.3 million dollars) to the Yasuni-ITT initiative, one of the few definite contributions received by Ecuador for a scheme to leave oil reserves untouched in a highly biodiverse area of the Amazon jungle.

Since the creation of the United Nations over 65 years ago, successive secretaries-general have won re-election for a second five-year term mostly by currying favour with the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia.