HUMAN RIGHTS

Columns of tanks, helicopter gunships and fixed-wing fighter jets have been witnesses in or near Aleppo, raising concerns that escalating skirmishes between loyalists and rebels was about to get much worse for the city's 2.1 million residents.

Freedom and democracy don’t come easily to a land that’s known precious little of it over time.

Pakistani militants have vowed revenge for the Burmese attacks on Muslims.

Syrian army reinforcements were filing into Aleppo from the city of Homs, 40 miles to the north, as rebel forces established checkpoints and sniper positions.

Triple jumper Voula Papachristou has been expelled from the games because of an inappropriate use of an inappropriate tweet.

80 new prisoners enter the country’s prison system every day. Under Iran’s penal code, more than 1600 separate offenses are punishable by imprisonment.

Why Ghana has been spared much of the chaos that surrounds it in West Africa?

When the 2012 London Olympics get underway Friday, Voula Papachristou won't be there. The Greek triple jumper's controversial tweet about African immigrants in her country and West Nile Virus led the Hellenic Olympic Committee to expel Papachristou from the games.

Greece has removed triple jumper Voula Papachristou from its Olympic team following posts she made on Twitter mocking African immigrants and expressing support for the fascist Golden Dawn Party.

This time, China's bid is unlikely to be blocked by the government, as its attempted takeover of Unocal was seven years ago

The Syrian government appeared to be reasserting its control over most of Damascus Tuesday after a week of heavy clashes in the capital, even as fighting reached the gates of the ancient quarter of Aleppo in the north, the country's most populous city and one largely free of conflict until recently.

The forgotten country of Tajikistan is actually of pivotal importance, and the rumblings of an increasingly bold crowd of Islamist dissenters there should not be ignored.

As non-Persians, they have long faced discrimination, particularly with respect to employment, housing, and civil rights.

British Members of Parliament have condemned the UK Border Agency for failing to address its growing backlog of immigration cases involving foreign nationals who should have been removed from the country.

The Venezuelan government announced that security forces on Saturday ended a 20-day prison riot during which at least 22 inmates died.

A national election is expected to take place in Zimbabwe next year. Without sanctions to condemn, Mugabe would be hard-pressed to find something else to blame.

Hill, who has an IQ of 70, will be put to death via lethal injection, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on the execution of mentally disabled prisoners.

The Arab League has offered a safe exit for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his family if he quickly resigns and leaves the country, in the latest attempt from the international community to end 17 months of bloodshed in Syria.

In the old days of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the party of President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto, a systemic culture of government corruption ensured that the drug cartels would be more or less left alone in exchange for hefty bribes at multiple levels, and as the drugs flowed north into the U.S. there was relatively little violence.

Machine guns rattled overnight in Syria's largest city, Aleppo, 220 miles north of Damascus, which itself is seeing an escalation of fighting.

A senior Iraqi official told the New York Times that all four of the country's crossings into Syria have now been closed, because the rebels have seized the Syrian sides of them.