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U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Myanmar's government has made progress in reducing the recruitment of children into the armed forces but still needs to stamp out the practice.Ban's comments came as Myanmar President Thein Sein was making a landmark visit to Washington. The former general met with President Barack Obama on Monday, marking a turnaround in the Asian nation's international acceptance after decades of isolation and direct military ruleSince last year, Myanmar's new government has overseen a wave of political reforms and progress toward democratic rule, though activists accuse Thein Sein of stalling of some commitments and failing to stem ethnic violence.Last June, Myanmar's new civilian government signed an agreement with the United Nations to end the recruitment of children under the age of 18 as child soldiers.While complaints about recruitment of child soldiers in Myanmar declined to 32 cases in 2012 from 172 cases in 2009, a new report to the Security Council fo...
An international human rights group said Monday that respect for basic rights and liberties has declined in Sri Lanka in the four years since the government defeated...
Residents say armed men invaded a remote village in Central African Republic and killed six people.The attack comes just days after rebels assaulted another nearby t...
A military commander in eastern Congo says rebels attacked an army position north of Goma, a major provincial capital in the country's troubled east.Lt. Col. Mamadou...
"Star Trek Into Darkness," the newest edition in a space saga that reaches back a half-century, was, of course, a big hit at the box office this weekend.We might con...
Fierce street fighting in a Syrian town near the Lebanese border has killed at least 28 elite members of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group, activists said Monday, a...
A Senate panel has voted to provide weapons to rebels battling the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.The vote by the Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday mar...
After months of ignoring Chinese warnings to give up nuclear weapons, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a high-level confidant to Beijing on Wednesday, in a possi...
The number of Afghan women and girls jailed for "moral crimes" has risen dramatically in the past 18 months, raising concerns that gains in women's rights might be r...
Iran will preside over the UN-sponsored Conference on Disarmament, tapped to chair the panel later this month despite longstanding accusations the Islamic Republic h...
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is holding out hope that an international conference to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the Syrian civil war will be held in ea...
Lakhdar Brahimi wants to resign as the joint United Nations-Arab League envoy to Syria because his efforts to find a political solution to the escalating conflict ha...
Police shot dead a couple suspected to be terrorists after they threw four grenades, wounding five officers in an overnight stand-off, a police official said Sunday....
The U.N.'s top Mideast envoy says there are mounting reports of chemical weapons use in Syria.In response, Robert Serry says the United Nations is again urging the S...
A spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo says that a mortar landed in a neighborhood of Goma, a major city in eastern Congo, which last year ...
The illegal trade in elephant ivory may constitute an important source of funding for armed groups, including the Lord's Resistance Army, threatening peace and secur...
The European Union is reassessing whether to declare the Lebanese party Hezbollah's military wing a terrorist organization, a move it has long shied from despite pre...
Paraguay exports enough soy, wheat and corn to feed 80 million people, more than 10 times its population, and its rivers provide abundant fresh water. But 14 percent...
Zimbabwe's president signs into law a new constitution and vows to hold peaceful and clean elections later this year.President Robert Mugabe said Wednesday the new c...
Along the northwestern Philippine coast, poor children with claw hammers clamber aboard an abandoned fishing vessel to pry loose and steal rusty nails from its deck....