The United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries has warned of an alarming resurgence of the use of mercenaries in armed conflict –'often in new and novel ways'. The expert panel also noted in a report to the UN General Assembly that the growing activities of private military and security companies raise numerous human rights challenges, and called for international regulation. 'Recent events in Africa clearly demonstrate that the problems posed by mercenaries are still a live issue,' said Ms. Faiza Patel, who currently heads the Working Group. 'Mercenaries pose a threat not only to security, but also to human rights and potentially to the right of peoples to self determination. It is crucial that States cooperate to eliminate this phenomenon.'

Bribing public officials when doing business abroad is a regular occurrence, and companies from Russia and China, which invested US$120 billion overseas in 2010, are seen as most likely to pay bribes abroad, according to Transparency International’s 2011 Bribe Payers Index. The index, which involves a survey of 3,000 business executives from developed and developing countries, also shows that companies from the Netherlands and Switzerland are seen as least likely to bribe.

At a recent conference on statelessness and gender discrimination organised by Refugees International (RI) at the US Institute of Peace (USIP), international human rights advocates urged countries around the world to take action on issues of statelessness, a legally invisible status that United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Antonia Guterres, said is 'probably the most forgotten global human rights problem in today's international agenda'. According to RI, about 12 million people worldwide lack effective citizenship, a status that deprives them of rights such as legal representation, identity documents, and access to public schools. And in many countries, discrimination against women in nationality laws aggravate or actively create statelessness.

A website has been launched to promote transparency in the Democratic Republic of Congo's mining sector, which is plagued by conflict and corruption. The Carter Center said it helped launch congomines.org to give people more information about the mining sector, including contracts and payments. Hundreds of mining documents and maps will be published on the site, it said.

Commonwealth leaders have ignored warnings that their decaying association will die without urgent reforms and have failed to reach significant agreement on how to ensure its member nations abide by human rights principles and the rule of law. The development came Saturday, as the leaders spent the second day of their biennial gathering - known as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) - debating the merits of a report delivered by an advisory group established two years ago. But instead of endorsing the report, the leaders adopted a distrustful view about its contents - even deciding that it should be kept secret and not be published.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

This rabble.ca page contains the latest news on the global Occupy Movement. 'From Wall Street to Bay Street, and hundreds of cities and towns around the world, a movement is underway to reclaim the commons and to challenge corporate power.'

This video on the rabble.ca website is about the moving visit of members of the Egyptian Revolution to Occupy Wall Street. It features Asmaa Mahfouz - the girl who helped spark the Egyptian Revolution through her famous youtube video, which went viral. The video clip is part of an upcoming feature documentary, 'Occupy Love'.

In this video, John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and co-author of 'The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences' discusses the causes of the current global financial crisis. 'You’ve all heard of the 700 billion bailouts…but the US government has so far committed over five trillion dollars to directly bailing out or providing a backstop to financial operations…you’ve probably only heard of the 700 billion…they’ve been bailing like hell and they’re failing…every part of the world is now in state of economic crisis.'

More than a quarter of countries represented at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth have failed to allow basic industrial rights for workers, the ACTU said. ACTU President Ged Kearney said a survey by the Commonwealth Trade Union Group showed workers’ rights were being ignored across the Commonwealth, with the worst abuses currently occurring in Fiji and Swaziland. The CTUG, representing over 30 million workers in 50 countries, is calling on the CHOGM to suspend Swaziland for wholesale violations of democratic rights.

UN agencies and NGOs are urging the Côte d’Ivoire government to reconsider its planned shutdown of sites for displaced people in the west in a bid to force them to return home. Some 18,455 internally displaced persons (IDPs) remain in 36 sites in the west, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates, while a further 169,486 are living in Côte d’Ivoire with host families. Teams are currently out verifying the latest numbers.

Since 1998, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) has produced The World's Abortion Laws map to visually compare the legal status of abortion in different countries - and to advocate for greater progress in ensuring access to safe and legal abortion services for all women worldwide. Visit the website for more information.

Sahrawi refugee camps have been ‘safe from any kind of security problems for the last three decades’, writes Malainin Lakhal, arguing that Morocco could be behind the recent kidnapping of three humanitarian workers, in an attempt to challenge the Sahrawi national project and terrorise Western Sahara’s supporters into stopping their humanitarian aid and political efforts.

‘From the minute a United Nations resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya became a green card to regime change’, NATO’s ‘plan A was always to capture and kill’ Gaddafi, writes Pepe Escobar.

Tuberculosis is the main killer of people with HIV infection; drug-resistant strains continue to spread; and paediatric tuberculosis remains an area of neglect. In the past decade, the number of new cases of tuberculosis worldwide has barely declined, and the number of deaths remains catastrophic: more than 4,500 per day for this largely treatable disease. As a Lancet editorial has pointed out, 'A status quo in tuberculosis control is unacceptable.'

The global demand for secondary education has risen exponentially, says a new United Nations report, which adds that governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are having a hard time keeping up and many children are being left out. The 2011 Global Education Digest by the Institute for Statistics of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), says there are only enough seats for 36 per cent of children who want to enrol in secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa.

Zimbabwe's Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa has rejected calls by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to enshrine gay rights in a new constitution. Chinamasa told the BBC that gay rights could not be 'smuggled' into the constitution because most Zimbabweans opposed it. Earlier, Tsvangirai told the BBC that gay rights were a 'human right' that should be respected.

With 31 October marking the point at which the global population reaches a staggering seven billion, this National Geographic page collects a year's worth of reporting looking at all aspects of population growth - demographics, food security, climate change, fertility trends, managing biodiversity.

The idea that the few dominate the many will not come as news to those gathered either to occupy Wall Street or to occupy everywhere. But up until now it has been just an intuition that a few corporations control the world. Not any more. A team of Swiss mathematicians just proved that out of over 43,000 transnational corporations (TNCs), relatively few control almost 80 per cent of the global economy. Find out who has the power by clicking on the link to this article.

Europe's largest and most influential biotech industry group, whose members include Monsanto, Bayer and other GM companies, is recruiting high-profile 'ambassadors' to lobby European leaders on GM policy. Green MP Caroline Lucas said: 'This brazen attempt by EuropaBio to recruit covert "ambassadors" to "change the debate" on GM is yet further proof that the powerful GM lobby will stop at nothing to push its hugely unpopular and unnecessary products onto European citizens. We need far stronger regulation on corporate lobbyists across the EU to prevent this kind of insidious behind-the-scenes manoeuvring from seriously undermining our democratic system.'