UN troops failed 242 women and children who suffered a mass rape attack in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a top UN peacekeeping official has said. 　　Congo hosts the largest and most costly UN peacekeeping mission in the world, but the mass rape attacks happened just 30km from... More

　　The Israeli government has, for weeks, insisted that the 10,000 tons of supplies on board the Gaza aid flotilla are not necessary. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister, reiterated that claim on Friday, telling reporters "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza". 　　"Israel is conducting itself in the most humanitarian manner,... More

　　Israel offered to sell apartheid-era South Africa nuclear warheads in 1975, British newspaper The Guardian has reported. 　　According to documents obtained by the newspaper, a secret meeting between then-Israeli defense minister Shimon Peres and his South African counterpart PW Botha ended with an offer by Jerusalem for the sale of... More

　　Foreign forces in occupied Afghanistan have caused more than $100 million damage to fruit crops and homes during offensive in southern Kandahar province, a government delegation said on Tuesday. 　　In November, the Afghan Rights Monitor (ARM), a human rights group, reported widespread damage to hundreds of houses in the same... More

　　Pakistan's agriculture industry -- a pillar of the economy -- could take up to two years to start recovering from floods, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on Monday. 　　ADB and the World Bank are assessing the damage caused by one of Pakistan's worst natural disasters. 　　Philip Erquiaga, director general... More

　　On November 2, 1917, Lord Arthur Balfour, the then British foreign secretary, promised to create a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. Known as the Balfour Declaration, the document became the first stepping stone towards the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. 　　Palestine was still under Ottoman rule when... More

　　Hundreds of Israeli rabbis have signed a religious edict forbidding Jews from renting or selling homes or land to Arabs and other non-Jews. The public letter instructs Jews to "ostracize" those who disobey the order, which is widely viewed as an attack on the country's Palestinian citizens. 　　When the decree... More

　　It is astonishing that despite the huge gaps between the maximum that Israel is willing to concede and the minimum that the Palestine Authority could accept as the basis of a final settlement of the conflict, governmental leaders, especially in Washington, continue to pull every available string to restart inter-governmental... More

　　For two-year old Nasma Abu Lasma, the Israeli announcement in June that the blockade on the Gaza Strip would be relaxed offered a ray of hope. 　　Nasma was suffering from leukemia, and the movement restrictions on Palestinians in Gaza that went along with the blockade meant that she had little... More

　　When the UN Human Rights Council convened a special session on Sri Lanka last May, many were hoping for meaningful discussion about possible war crimes committed during the final phase of the country's civil war. 　　Thousands of civilians, who had been trapped between the Sri Lankan military and increasingly desperate... More

　　New information on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) campaign of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan directly contradicts the image the Barack Obama administration and the CIA have sought to establish in the news media of a program based on highly accurate targeting that is effective in 'disrupting al-Qaeda's plots' against... More

　　Government soldiers in the DR Congo have attacked and raped women in villages where rebels already committed mass rape this summer, a high-level UN official has said. 　　UN peacekeepers in the Walikale territory have reported that army troops are committing "rapes, killings and lootings," Margot Wallstrom, the special representative for... More

　　More than 650 women and girls have been raped during mass expulsions from Angola to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the past two months, according to a body of the United Nations. 　　Many of the victims said they were locked up and tortured for several weeks while they... More

　　The Middle East policies of US President Barack Obama may well prove the most detrimental in history so far, surpassing even the rightwing policies of President George W. Bush. Even those who warned against the overt optimism which accompanied Obama's arrival to the White House must now be stunned to... More

　　In recent months, Europe has witnessed mass deportations and crackdowns on religious and ethnic minorities. With the face veil ban in France and parts of Italy, the anti-Roma movements in France and Hungary and police surveillance cameras set up in predominately Muslim neighborhoods in the UK, the continent seems to... More

　　A specialist team appointed by the government to investigate claims of abuse by British troops in Iraq has received 90 complaints involving 128 Iraqi civilians. The files, relating to allegations between March 2003 and July 2009, have been sent to Geoff White, a former head of Staffordshire CID, who heads... More

　　Having dispensed of any pretense that the military is going to start withdrawing in July, NATO officials are now painting for the public a picture of what the Afghan War is going to look like in 2015, 14 years after the occupation began. 　　The answer, of course, is that so... More

　　Saturday’s anniversary of last year’s disputed election in Iran follows eight days after another milestone: the one-year anniversary of US president Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo. 　　The election and the speech - coupled with other events, like Obama’s Nowruz message - created a brief moment of... More

　　Nato's top civilian spokesperson in Afghanistan has come under fire for playing down the country's level of danger over the weekend. 　　"The children are probably safer here [Kabul] than they would be in London, New York or Glasgow or many other cities," Mark Sedwill told CBBC Newsround, the televised news... More

　　A newly released WikiLeaks cable describing a late 2009 meeting with European Union President Van Rompuy had the EU chief warning that “no one believes in Afghanistan any more.” 　　President Van RompuyVan Rompuy, whose comments came in the wake of President Obama’s December escalation announcement, said the European nations in... More