Weeks after a watershed general election in Singapore, the influential role played by social media to dramatically transform political debate in this affluent city- state continues to reverberate through cyberspace.

In a sign of growing war weariness in Congress and among the general public, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted Thursday to bar the deployment of U.S. troops to Libya and narrowly defeated a provision requiring President Barack Obama to submit a plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Despite the risks involved, a man who is under the witness protection programme in Brazil and his wife decided to tell their story to IPS, to denounce flaws in a system that, in their case, has added neglect and isolation to the total anonymity in which they must live.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced a new package of unilateral sanctions targeting Iran that would challenge U.S. President Obama's discretionary authority to enforce such sanctions and would impose comprehensive restrictions on foreign entities that ship, refine or provide any other related services to Iran's energy sector.

The world has witnessed a decline in global peace over the last year, according to the 2011 Global Peace Index, or GPI, released by the Institute for Economics and Peace Wednesday.

'Nothing can bring back our husbands or children, but this means so much for us; the man who ordered them killed is finally going to face justice,' says Hajra Catic, head of the Women of Srebrenica Association, following the arrest in Serbia of the former head of the Bosnian Serb army Ratko Mladic.

Earlier this month, Georgia became the third state to enact some of the most anti-immigrant legislation in recent U.S. history, when Governor Nathan Deal, a Republican, signed the bill, HB 87.

In the Arab world, most trade unions are affiliated to governments, but independent labour organisations are starting to emerge.

A project to help reforest after the devastation of Hurricane David 32 years ago has grown into a plan to lift small coffee farmers out of poverty, all by the introduction of a gourmet ice cream.

For the past quarter century, the United States' relations with Pacific island nations were framed by the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, which combines foreign aid, subsidies to the U.S. fleet of purse-seine fishing vessels and their largely unfettered access to the islands' waters, which contain the world's last major stocks of tuna.