When an Asian ambassador hosted a sumptuous lunch for more than a dozen U.N. correspondents in his swanky New York apartment many moons ago, he confessed he had a hidden agenda.

Feng Jun's fight against a local government and the steel mills he believes polluted the water that killed his daughter has cost him nearly everything.

A breakdown in Pakistan's justice system, a sign of a society desensitised to violence, an example of mob brutality.

As the November general election in Burma approaches, the country's junta is revealing the political designs underway in order to place the powerful military under civilian authority after a lapse of 22 years.

Thirty-four years ago, Canada was one of the first Western countries to abolish the death penalty. In 1987, the question of capital punishment and whether it should be reinstated resurfaced in the House of Commons.

As details emerged this week of the U.N.'s knowledge of rebel activity in the villages where nearly 200 women were systematically gang raped by armed groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) late last month, human rights groups are demanding an investigation into the U.N.'s failure to prevent the raid from occurring.

In the wake of the bungled hostage-rescue operation that left eight Hong Kong tourists and the gunman dead, the Philippine media are finding themselves a target of anger by many who say that sensationalism and no-holds-barred coverage added to the bloody end to a crisis they call an international embarrassment.

As Hamas cracks down on the rights of Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip, their sisters in the occupied West Bank are slowly gaining ground. But a bureaucracy, that is sometimes supported by foreign aid, is crippling these advances.

Experts from 13 Latin American countries called for a shift in counter-drug policies from a punitive to a public health-based approach for users, in order to reduce drug-related violence, on the argument that the current "war on drugs" has been lost in the region.

Sudan's elusive President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir and the unrelenting Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno-Ocampo are playing a political cat- and-mouse game.

New challenges and a long list of shocking cases involving hidden power structures are faced by the new head of the United Nations-mandated International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

In the first ever U.N.-mandated self-assessment of the United States' human rights record, the Barack Obama administration has reaffirmed its commitment to closing the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and to fixing the country's "broken immigration system".

After all the turbines in the Xiaowan hydropower station sputtered to life this week in China's south-west Yunnan province, the Asian giant was able to lay claim to having the world's largest hydropower capacity.

Green activists have various ways of pushing their causes, from enlisting movie stars to launching protests, but India's campaigners have also been quietly using legal weapons to try to get the projects they oppose, such as thermal plants, stopped or reversed.

Striking health workers have continued their work stoppage despite accusations that it endangers patients' lives. They are part of a nationwide strike by public sector workers that has some observers concerned that rising wage demands could harm South Africa's economy.

Peasant activists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera hope to find, at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the justice that eluded them in their home country of Mexico, to which they hope to return to rejoin their families.

Irene Wangolo was advised to undergo an HIV test during her antenatal visit and to return to the clinic with her husband so they could be counselled on preventing HIV transmission to their unborn baby. But her husband refused to accompany her saying it was not his business and Wangolo never returned to the clinic in Bungokho in eastern Uganda. So she missed all the services, including the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT).

News that Malawi's November local government elections are to be postponed yet again has hit female candidates hard – and mostly in their pockets. And it could mean that the country will have less female candidates to vote for when they finally go to the polls.

Health rights activists still insist that, despite some improvements to Uganda's controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Bill, it will affect the availability of generic medicine if enacted in present form.

The poverty rate in the districts of southern Chile where the logging industry is the main economic activity is nearly twice the national average, a new study shows.