China’s top negotiator at the UN summit on climate change practically gushed as he described his country’s relationship with California […] And with a slew of agreements with foreign leaders, Gov. Brown has turned California’s Air Resources Board and Environmental Protection Agency into de facto diplomatic organizations […] “California basically has a foreign policy,” said David Victor, a UC San Diego professor.

In a bitter irony, Prince Harry was pictured coming face to face with the bloody work of illegal poachers in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, just hours before the palace released a selection of his own personal photographs and videos that were taken during his summer visit to Africa, where he worked on frontline conservation projects.

For the first time in the 19-year history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), civil society observers of the talks were walking out. So what? Because the so-called observers have become an integral part of the open U.N. negotiations, and the thousands of activists who attend the yearly climate conference serve as the unofficial conscience of the entire process.

The United Nations is marking this year’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities today with the theme “inclusion matters” to raise awareness and mobilize support for some one billion people living with disabilities who remain one of the most marginalized groups in the world.

When an Indian man invented a simple machine for poor rural women to make cheap sanitary pads, the idea was to provide jobs for some, and hygiene for millions - often for the first time. The story gave one British woman an idea that quickly became her mission in life.

On Monday, at the United Nations climate summit in Paris that has drawn together leaders from most of the countries on Earth, Gates unveiled his plan to create a multibillion-dollar fund to pay for research on clean and renewable energy.

Pope Francis held a private meeting with South Sudan's President Salva Kiir on Friday, pushing for peace in the world's newest nation that has endured nearly two years of civil war, a Vatican spokesman said.

Ten years in the making, "The Study Quran" is more than a rebuttal to terrorists, said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-born intellectual and the book's editor-in-chief. His aim was to produce an accurate, unbiased translation understandable to English-speaking Muslims, scholars and general readers.