Amrutha Gayathri

Initial signs say that the former Godfather's pizza CEO and Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain's highly-anticipated next campaign move can be anything except dropping out of the race.

Meet Lynsey Addario - a Pulitzer-winning news photographer who says being a woman works in her favor when she is out covering war zones, infamous for their gross ill-treatment of women.

The Israeli Defense Ministry issued an apology Monday, for mistreating Pulitzer Prize-winning American news photographer Lynsey Addario, who was in Israel recently on a New York Times assignment.

These are sad days for Republican Presidential hopeful Herman Cain, who has been accused of a 13-year-long extramarital affair and faced scandalous allegations of sexual misconduct by four other women, all within the span of a month.

Muslim medical students in one of Britain's reputed medical institutes are refusing to attend lectures on evolution claiming that Darwinism clashed with their Quranic faith.

A group of nurses in New Jersey are asserting their religious right to not assist in abortion with a federal lawsuit, which says that health professionals should be able to decide whether or not to help in an abortion procedure, based on their beliefs.

Egyptian Internet revolutionary and controversial blogger, Aliaa Magda, Elmahdy, whose self-pubilshed nude photographs shocked the country, has called on men in Egypt to wear a Hijab (a headscarf) and show solidarity with women.

The year is giving out, and it was not exactly an annus mirabilis. However, 2011 had its sensational moments, marked by major political upheavals in the Middle East, deaths of historic figures, and economic uncertainty highlighted by the Occupy movement.

The year-end is when you recount the tales of those who rose to stardom or of those who fell from their coveted positions. IBTimes lists the top ten most disgraced personalities of 2011 whose downfalls shook the world.

The skeletal structure with an oversized skull and miniature rib cage, discovered in Peru recently, has been creating quite a buzz, with several anthropologists claiming that it cannot possibly belong to any human ethnic groups on earth and thus has come from another planet.

A former Chicago fundraiser for President Obama, Antoin Tony Rezko, was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison after a U.S. judge found him guilty of corruption and extortion.

The allure of Christmas is about the warmth and delight that fill the days leading to that wintry December night. Christmas gets its charm from the meticulous planning that precedes it.

The Egyptian military and police have allegedly been using tear gas that could cause acute damage to the lungs, liver, and heart, and increase the risk of miscarriage. Apart from its detrimental side effects, the gas canisters were at least five years past the expiry date.

It was not the acclaim of an international prize that motivated a 11-year-old Pakistani girl to oppose the Taliban's decision to ban education for girls in her neighborhood. Malala Yousufzai, now 13, attracted attention from around the world and focused it on the sorry state of affairs in the Swat Valley, which is located close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, simply because she wanted a better life, where nobody would stop her from learning or watching her favorite Indian television series.

How free can an individual be? -- Modern day debates on freedom of expression are arguably about the extent to which people can exercise their freedom. Egyptian activist and blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy has brought the debate into spotlight once more, in the wake of a massive political upheaval in her country, by posting a series of nude photographs of herself on her blog.

In yet another sexist and repressive act, a conservative Islamic committee in Saudi Arabia has proposed a law to stop women from revealing their tempting eyes to the public.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on Friday the current version of its climate report predicting extreme weather events such as heat waves, heavy rains, and droughts.

U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Friday that he will send Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Myanmar, a nation that was plagued by one of the longest running civil wars and a repressive military regime, until recently.

We still live in a world where the subtexts of a majority of hugely popular and not-so-popular advertisements are racist, anti-feminist, and deeply prejudiced against the marginalized sections. But when the Benetton group launched an advertizing campaign, featuring world leaders in liplock, all hell broke loose.

The vicious remark by a Republican student leader at the University of Texas, on Twitter, was met with scathing criticism on Wednesday. Hours after the police arrested a 21-year-old Idaho man for firing a rifle at the White House, Lauren Pierce tweeted that the idea of assassinating the U.S. President was tempting.

Panning across all nationalities and ethnic groups, immigrants to the U.S. are assimilating into American life, at higher rates than their predecessors. The overall progress of the people who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1990s shows that various aspects like home ownership and higher education are set to grow from 2000 to 2030 despite their current financial setback due to the economic meltdown.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the four co-founders of open source social networking start-up Diaspora, died at his home in San Francisco over the weekend. An officer from the San Francisco Police Department said Zhitomirskiy's death appeared to be a suicide, adding that the final decision would have to wait until after the medical examination procedures.

One of Bollywood's most anticipated events of the year was announced with a tweet from veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan, who announced: I AM DADA to the cutest baby girl!! The event - actress and former Miss World, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, gave birth to a baby girl, her first child with husband and fellow actor Abhishek Bachchan, on Wednesday morning (IST), at Mumbai's suburban Seven Hills Hospital.

Men and women who resort to online dating sites frequently lie about their looks, physique, jobs and financial status, a survey of 1,000 single adults commissioned by online dating community BeautifulPeople.com, discovered.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors are being ousted from their Zuccotti Park encampment in New York City by hundreds of New York City police officers, who say that the camps will be returned cleaned and restored before the morning.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 22, the co-founder of open source social networking site Diaspora, was found dead at his home in San Francisco this weekend. An officer from the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) confirmed on Monday that the initial police report described the incident as a suicide.

Being able to offend gays, women and vegetarians in the same sentence -- well, sounds great had it been from a stand-up comedian. But unfortunately he is a Republican hopeful for the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Herman Cain, whose campaign has been plagued by a series of sexual harassment allegations, still doesn't sound like he has tamed his instincts.

The Malaysian states of Penang and Malacca, which retain a colonial-era penal code criminalizing sodomy, are considering even stricter laws against the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender communities, allowing them the authority to punish offenders twice.

A former Guantanamo chief prosecutor and an outspoken critic of military commissions, Col. Morris Davis, is condemning President Barack Obama's national security policy, saying his presidency seems to him like a third Bush term.