In a move that highlighted its sub-par human rights record, the government of Burma announced Oct. 11 that it would release 6,359 prisoners, but how many of these will be drawn from the country's estimated 500 to over 2,000 political prisoners remains uncertain.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has one of the most desperate human rights situations in the world.
It was a political sensation: 8.9 percent of the 1.53 million Berliners who participated in the city-state parliamentary elections on Sep. 18 (overall turnout was 60 percent) voted for the Pirate Party (Piratenpartei).
About 80 percent of Qatar's population is foreign. Of the 1.6 million people living in the Arab emirate in 2010, 685,000 were Indian or Pakistani, 160,000 were Iranian and about 430,000 came from other parts of the world.
"If this was a meeting about climate change, I am pretty sure that the room would have been more crowded," Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), commented at a press conference Tuesday.
More than one billion people worldwide live with disabilities, some 15 percent of the world's population.