Japan is reviewing the death penalty and Singapore's frequent use of capital punishment is under the spotlight, but Asia remains a bastion of support for executions despite outrage from rights groups.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will visit Lebanon together on Friday to ease political tension over a UN tribunal set up after the 2005 killing of Lebanese statesman Rafik al-Hariri.
A Greek urban guerrilla group threatened on Wednesday to step up attacks and disrupt the tourist season in a pamphlet claiming responsibility for shooting dead a journalist last week.
Four white South Africans faced sentencing Wednesday after they pleaded guilty to humiliating five black housekeepers in a video depicting racial abuse at their former university.
Lawmakers dealt the death blow to bullfighting in Catalonia on Wednesday, outlawing the centuries-old blood sport for the first time in a mainland region of Spain.
The main suspect in the massacre of 57 people in the southern Philippines, Andal Ampatuan Jr, and 17 of his followers on Wednesday pleaded not guilty to the final murder charge in the case.
Iraq executed 230 people from 2005 to 2009 and a further 1,200 have been sentenced to death, a government spokesman said on Tuesday.
After four years of negotiations the UN General Assembly has agreed to the establishment of a new UN body for Gender Equality.
Federal prosecutors said Monday that a former Rwandan mayor had been arrested for a third time in Germany over his alleged involvement in the country's 1994 genocide.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has denied early release to the former head of the Bosnian Serb parliament, convicted of forcing thousands of Muslims and Croats from their homes in the 1992-95 Bosnian wa