The social stigma attached to homosexuality is hardly unique to Azerbaijan, whose mores are forged from a conservative mix of Muslim faith and Soviet-style squeamishness. But as Baku prepares to host next week's 57th Eurovision Song Contest -- a bejeweled meringue of a spectacle, with unabashedly gay overtones -- the country's unyielding stance on sexual minorities is coming under fresh scrutiny.

As the long-awaited trial of Ratko Mladic began in The Hague on May 16, one country was not watching. Serbia.

When NATO meets in Chicago, Washington will be looking for partners to help fund Afghanistan's security needs after 2014. Any takers?

Opposition figure and anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny says he has teamed up with an unidentified Russian bank to issue a new debit card that will raise funds to fight graft.

As NATO prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan, Iran has stepped up efforts to increase its influence on its neighbor's territory. But Kabul's wariness of Tehran's intentions has led to tensions and to concerns that Afghanistan could once again find itself the battleground of a regional proxy war.

A prominent Iranian rapper is facing death threats over his new song, which refers jokingly to Naghi, the 10th imam of the Shi’ites, and mentions social problems and sexual themes. A hard-line website based in Iran has put a $100,000 bounty on Najafi’s head and a campaign demanding his execution has reportedly begun.

In an exclusive interview with a major NATO summit on the horizon where Afghanistan is supposed to dominate the agenda, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen talks about a range of issues, including expressing regret that Moscow continues to see missile defense as a national threat.

A 19th-century Kazakh poet who was previously all but unknown in Russia has become an unlikely figurehead of opposition protests already marring Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin.

Everyone knows that the U.S. Constitution protects the right to free speech. Fewer people know whether that right applies to online speech or even what constitutes online speech. Now, a U.S. judge has just ruled on a case involving Facebook, and legal scholars are scratching their heads.