(IPS/Al Jazeera) - Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's pro-democracy leader, and newly elected MPs from her National League for Democracy (NLD) party have refused to attend the opening session of parliament over a dispute regarding the wording of the parliamentary oath.

Increasing numbers of Malian women are being raped by Tuareg rebels and armed groups that have swept across the north of Mali since the beginning of year, expelling all government troops from the region.

'With the fuel from the agriculture project, we are encouraging farmers to look at possibilities they might have to produce their own energy, while at the same time getting the Agricultural University and Farmers’ Association to work towards supporting and encouraging the farmers,' says Haraldur Benediktsson, chair of the Icelandic Farmers’ Association about the campaign to reduce energy bought by farmers by 20 percent by 2015 and 80 percent by 2020.

Increasing numbers of Malian women are being raped by Tuareg rebels and armed groups that have swept across the north of Mali since the beginning of year, expelling all government troops from the region.

In a major speech commemmorating the Nazi Holocaust, U.S. President Barack Obama Monday announced several steps his administration will take to curb mass atrocities abroad, including in Syria where he is under continuing pressure to intervene with military force.

A criminal lawsuit against 1,500 former members of DINA, the secret police of Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, is seeking to shed light on the most active player in the repression, which stretched outside the country’s borders.

A truce negotiated between El Salvador's main gangs has drastically reduced murders and encouraged hope that this country may have found a way out of the labyrinth of violence in which it seemed lost. But the deal is fragile, causing uncertainty.

The World Bank continues to facilitate land-grabbing in poor and developing countries around the world, according to new research released here on Monday.

After scientists in Kashmir successfully cloned the pashmina goat, that produces the famous ‘cashmere’ wool, hopes are running high for the revival of the traditional shawl-making industry in this Indian state.

The mass acquisition or lease of arable land in developing countries, especially in Africa, by foreign investors — a practice aggravated by the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007 — has reached record highs, according to several new studies.