HUMAN RIGHTS

China and the United States should reduce trade and investment barriers to create jobs, U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke said on Friday, striking a broadly cooperative tone in his first official public address since assuming the position in August.

It's an underground prison in the compound of the presidential palace.

Two lawsuits by three Chinese dissidents and a human rights group accusing Cisco Systems Inc. of abetting imprisonment and torture could have far-reaching impact on how U.S. technology companies conduct business in authoritarian regimes.

South African President Jacob Zuma appointed evangelical pastor Mogoeng Mogoeng to the Chief Justice position on Thursday. But, the choice of Mogoeng, who will now hear the country's Constitutional Court, has already sparked fury in some South Africans.

Gulnara GooGoosha Karimova is probably hoping her Fashion Week critics have kinder words than the diplomats who described her role in Uzbekistan's brutally repressive government.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's threat to get tough with Chinese trade practices has moved China from the background to a potentially significant issue in the 2012 presidential campaign.

[Romania] has no information whatsoever showing that there existed secret CIA detention centers on its territory, the Foreign Ministry stated, responding to allegations that the country hosted secret black sites, where terror suspects were tortured.

Iran on Sunday hanged three men found guilty of forbidden acts as well as two convicted rapists and a drug trafficker in prison of the southwestern city of Ahvaz, the ISNA news agency reported.

The government must tell the public how it tracked suspects by cellphone without having given a judge detailed reasons for the tracking in some cases, an appeals court ruled on Tuesday, in a case pitting new technology against privacy rights.

Spurred by a massive drought in the Horn of Africa, the famine in Somalia has already left tens of thousands of people dead. Making matters worse, Somalia's ineffective government has been unable to counter the crisis on its own, and is desperately relying on the humanitarian efforts of foreign powers.

Before the United States denounced Muammar Gaddafi's repressive reign and helped to topple him, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was enlisting Gaddafi's notoriously brutal security forces to question terrorism suspects, according to documents discovered in Qaddafi's compound.

The Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg demands that European governments come clean about hiding the CIA's secret prisons.

Four Republican state senators crossed party lines in June to vote in favor of New York's historic same-sex marriage bill -- and now the National Organization for Marriage has them in its crosshairs.

Libyan forces made ready to storm a desert town held by loyalists of Muammar Gaddafi on Monday but held off in the hope of a surrender that would avoid bloodshed.

An independent inquiry will investigate allegations that British security services were involved in illegally sending terror suspects to Libya where they risked being tortured by Muammar Gaddafi's government, officials said on Monday.

Documents found in the abandoned Tripoli office of Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence chief indicate the U.S. and British spy agencies helped the fallen strongman persecute Libyan dissidents, Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.

The papers were discovered by members of Human Rights Watch (HRW), a London-based activist group.

Documents found in Tripoli detail close ties between the CIA and Libya's intelligence service and suggest the United States sent terrorism suspects for questioning in Libya despite that country's reputation for torture, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Israel has also refused to apologize for the killings.

One of the diplomatic cables recently released by Wikileaks offers new evidence that American troops massacred 10 handcuffed Iraqi civilians and destroyed the evidence with an airstrike -- charges that the U.S. military has categorically denied.

Wikileaks on Friday has confirmed that it has released an entire archive of 251,287 unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables, endangering the lives of individuals whose names were exposed.