Female slaves in Mauritania have long suffered unimaginable pain and torment. Some are now free and have found the courage to speak out about their ordeals and their new lives.

TUAL, Indonesia (AP) — All he did was ask to go home. The last time the Burmese slave made the same request, he was beaten almost to death. But after being gone eight years and forced to work on a boat in faraway Indonesia, Myint Naing was willing to risk everything to see his mother again. His nights were filled with dreams of her, and time was slowly stealing her face from his memory.

On Dec. 3, 1794, a Portuguese slave ship left Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, for what was to be a 7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil, and the sugar plantations that awaited its cargo of black men and women. Shackled in the ship’s hold were between 400 and 500 slaves, pressed flesh to flesh with their backs on the floor. With the exception of daily breaks to exercise, the slaves were to spend the bulk of the estimated four-month journey from the Indian Ocean across the...

What needs to happen now is the immediate and regionally coordinated rescue of the boat loads of people in desperate conditions.

The TV host expressed concern that Affleck's request could tarnish their branding and would be a violation of PBS rules, 'even for Batman.'

Louisiana’s River Road runs northwest from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, its two lanes snaking some 100 miles along the Mississippi and through a contradictory stretch of America. Flat and fertile, with oaks webbed in Spanish moss, the landscape stands in defiance of the numerous oil refineries and petrochemical plants that threaten its natural splendor. In the rust-scabbed towns of clapboard homes, you are reminded that Louisiana is the eighth-poorest state...

A government official, foreground, meets with salt farm owners and workers as a part of human rights inspection on Sinui Island, South Korea. Life as a salt-farm slave was so bad Kim Jong-seok sometimes fantasized about killing the owner who beat him daily. Freedom, he says, has been worse. In the year since police emancipated the severely mentally disabled man from the farm where he had worked for eight years, Kim has lived in...