Former president Nelson Mandela, accompanied by his wife Graca Machel, traveled home to Qunu in the Eastern Cape in an unscheduled visit with his extensive medical team. Sources close to the 92-year-old anti-apartheid icon said he had told his family: “I want to go home.” Staff at Mthatha Airport in the Transkei—usually warned days in [...]

Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi has told activists in Hong Kong and the mainland to remember their aims and not to give up. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was speaking via live video conferencing in her “first dialogue with an Asian university” since her release from house arrest in November as part of [...]

It is a crime that is perpetrated against the most vulnerable members of the world’s most broken societies – one that destroys the lives of its victims and rips apart the fabric of communities. Sexual assault is increasingly being used as a weapon of warfare, especially in clashes that are tribal or ethnic in nature. [...]

by Jose Ramos-Horta Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and President of Timor-Leste While I have welcomed the United Nations Security Council Res. 1973 on the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya as a means to protect civilians, I have advised our friends to avoid being pulled into a complex political crisis and entangled with one side [...]

The battle for control of the Grameen Bank, the pioneering Bangladeshi microfinance institution, has reached a new intensity after its government-appointed chairman unilaterally declared that its founder and managing director, the Nobel prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus had stepped down because he was too old. The bank, however, said Yunus remained in his his post. Yunus [...]

A group of 23 Communist Party elders in China has written a letter calling for an end to the country’s restrictions on freedom of speech. The letter says freedom of expression is promised in the Chinese constitution but not allowed in practice. They want people to be able to freely express themselves on the internet [...]

China plans to tighten control over Tibetan Buddhist monasteries to reduce the influence of the exiled Dalai Lama and other ‘internal and external separatist forces,’ according to a government notice seen on Monday. The State Administration of Religious Affairs issued the ‘Management measure for Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and temples’ to be applied from November 1, [...]

The wife of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, was allowed to meet with her husband on Sunday at the prison in northeastern China where he is serving an 11-year sentence, but she was then escorted back to Beijing and placed under house arrest, a human rights group said. Prison officials had informed [...]

China’s official news media has aired its anger over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo on 8 October, with editorials describing Liu as a “criminal” and accusing the prize committee of attempting to “humiliate” the country. Some newspapers in Hong Kong were upset at the Nobel Committee’s decision, whilst [...]

The Dalai Lama has criticised China’s opposition to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader said the Chinese government did “not appreciate different opinions”. Building an open society was “the only way to save all people of China”, he told Japanese media. Meanwhile, Mr Liu’s wife has [...]