Mvuleni Fana was walking down a quiet alleyway in Springs - 30 miles east of Johannesburg - on her way home from football practice one evening when four men surrounded her and dragged her back to the football stadium. She recognised her attackers. One by one, the men raped her, beating her unconscious and leaving her for dead.

The next morning, Mvuleni came round, bleeding, battered, in shock, and taunted by one overriding memory - the last thing they said to her before she passed out: "After everything we're going to do to you, you're going to be a real woman, and you're never going to act like this again".

Corrective rape is a hate crime wielded to convert lesbians to heterosexuality - an attempt to 'cure' them of being gay. The term was coined in South Africa in the early 2000s when charity workers first noticed an influx of such attacks.

But despite recognition and international coverage, corrective rape in the region is escalating in severity, according to Clare Carter, the photographer behind these images. This is amid a backdrop of parts of the country "becoming more homophobic", as one recent victim asserts.

Compared to many of South Africa's victims, Mvuleni was lucky: she survived. At least 31 women in the past 15 years did not. In 2007, to cite one incident, Sizakele Sigasa, a women's and gay rights activist, and her friend Salone Massooa, were outside a bar when a group of men started heckling and calling them tomboys. The women were gang raped, tortured, tied up with their underwear and shot in the head. Executed. No one was ever convicted.

Mvuleni's case was also unusual as, unlike 24 out of 25 rapes that even reach trial in South Africa, two of her attackers were convicted and imprisoned for 25 years. The others remain at large.

Ever since a 1998-2000 report by the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs ranked South Africa as highest for rapes per capita, it has repeatedly been described as the rape capital of the world: 500,000 rapes a year; one every 17 seconds; one in every two women will be raped in her lifetime. Twenty per cent of men say the victim "asked for it", according to a survey by the anti-violence NGO, CIET. A quarter of men in the Eastern Cape Provinces, when asked anonymously by the Medical Research Council, admitted to raping at least once - three quarters of whom said their victim was under 20, a tenth said under 10. A quarter of schoolboys in Soweto described "jackrolling" - the local term for gang rape - as "fun".

If ever there were two states that were going to be pioneers in legalizing marijuana, they were Colorado and Washington. Smoking pot has been an accepted part of life in both places for decades.

This week, the world's only state-licensed marijuana retailers, legally permitted to sell pot for recreational use, opened their doors in Colorado. By all accounts, business was brisk. The state of Washington expects to follow suit in a few months, as officials there have found the process of building a state-regulated marijuana industry from the ground up a little more complicated.

This was all permitted as a result of referendums that were held in both states in 2012, when residents voted in favour of ending marijuana prohibition and treating the drug much like alcohol. Now, the world is watching to see what unfolds - will it lead to anarchy and depravation? Or will life in both jurisdictions continue on pretty much as normal, while state coffers get infused with a fresh source of revenue?

Colorado is expecting to gross $578-million annually from marijuana sales. Washington calculates it will bring in about $2-billion in the first five years. That is nothing to sneeze at. And you can bet that legislators around the United States are eyeing the grand experiment and imagining what they would do with all that cash.

A Malaysian boy aged six has been accused of raping his five-year-old cousin in a case believed to be the one of the first of its kind in the world.

Doctors discovered she had been sexually penetrated after a medical check-up - and despite initial scepticism a consultant urologist at the Kuala Lumpur Hospital said it was possible for a child that young to have an erection.

The extraordinary case came to light after the children's grandmother found them naked and playing 'mothers and fathers' at the family home in the town of Pendang, Kedah - a rural area covered with paddy fields

A former Christian pastor has decided to give atheism a try by "living for a year without God."

Ryan J. Bell, who recently explained his journey in a Huffington Post blog entry, was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. While he inevitably decided to become a pastor, Bell now realizes that there was always a tension present in his faith walk.

But for the past 22 years, he said he has either served as a preacher or has been in school learning how to be a more effective pastor - until now. Bell's journey into atheism didn't come all at once.

An eastern Kentucky woman says Facebook helped save her life, after she posted a bloody picture of herself following a brutal pistol-whipping by her husband, Raw Story reported.

Susann Stacy said the incident began when her husband, Donnie Stacy, confronted her about a conversation she had on the phone. When Susann failed to respond to his questions, Donnie began to assault her with the handgun.

Susann said her husband then pulled out the phone line leaving her with no way to call 911 and no reception on her phone.

However, with some quick thinking, Stacy used the WiFi in her house to turn to social media for help. Stacy posted a confronting 'selfie' with the words, "Help please anyone," prompting many of her friends who saw the image to call 911.

A short time after, deputies arrived on the scene and found the handgun near their son's tire swing in the backyard. Donnie had left the house but deputies soon caught up with him nearby and arrested him.

Leslie County Sheriff's Deputy Sam Mullins said Susann suffered "several lacerations to the head. They appeared to be bad but we really couldn't tell at the time, due to (the fact) her hair was matted to her, and the blood," WKYT-TV reported.

This will be the fourth consecutive emigration of the last three generations of my immediate family. My grandparents emigrated from Portugal to Mozambique during the 1940s and 50s in search of a better life. The massive and undeveloped colony seemed like the land of milk and honey for those willing to get their hands dirty. A few decades later my parents-to-be immigrated to South Africa as Mozambique headed towards what would become a 10-year war for independence. Then when I was just 4 years old they decided that a fascist state fully enveloped with the evils of apartheid was no place to raise a child. My mother was fortunate enough to get a work visa into the United States and that's where we've been ever since.

Now the time has come for me to follow in my family's footsteps. Maybe it's in our blood to not only yearn for change but to have the fortitude to go out into the unknown in search of it. But this time something is different. I'm leaving the United States of America, the shining city on the hill; a land where millions of people try to enter each year, often at great risk.

Upon learning of my wife and my decision to leave our friends, family, great jobs, and fantastic home, everyone immediately asks us: Why? It's such a painfully awkward question to answer. How could the answer be anything but obvious? That said, we learned our lesson early and have stopped telling people the truth behind our exodus. Instead we've been answering with generic statements like "Oh, just for a change of pace" or "We've always wanted to experience another culture."

I'm tired of holding my tongue. It's not healthy to keep so much bottled up inside and it's even more painful to watch those closest to me living a most ignorant and animal-like existence. So here are our real, unfiltered, and honest reasons for fleeing the land of the free.

After rejecting an anti-war license plate for being offensive, the state of Michigan defended its decision in court by arguing that it was protecting children by prohibiting an area driver from registering a vanity tag that would have read "WAR SUX."

According to a December filing in Grand Rapids federal court, the state asked the judge to throw out a lawsuit that accuses Michigan of violating the plaintiff's First Amendment-protected freedom of speech when it rejected the proposed license plate.

Ann Arbor, Michigan's David DeVarti is suing the state with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. He requested the plate but was denied by the Michigan Secretary of State's office, which called the lettering offensive.

In court, the state clarified its position by suggesting the move was made with the best interest of children at heart.

"Many young children of reading age ride in vehicles and are unwillingly exposed to license plates on other vehicles," reads the motion to dismiss the suit. "They sometimes amuse themselves by reading or playing games with license plates. And because vehicles often travel in residential neighborhoods, youth may be exposed to license plates from their yards or driveways"

A five-story building under construction in the southern Indian state of Goa collapsed on Saturday, killing at least seven workers and leaving dozens more feared trapped under the rubble, police said.

Authorities were trying to determine how many people were at the construction site when the structure crumpled in Canacona, a city about 70 kilometers (44 miles) from the state capital of Panaji, Police Superintendent Shekhar Prabhudessai said.

Witnesses said about 40 workers were at the site.

The government of France has declared all-out war against Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, a French comedian whose comedy sketches are performed at large, sold-out venues and remain popular with French audiences despite the fact that he has long since been banned from appearing on national television. The comedian stands accused of 'anti-semitism', particularly in relation to a gesture he makes in his comedy sketches, 'La Quenelle', which has become widely popular in France.

Many charges have been brought against the comedian in recent years - some were successful and resulted in fines, others were thrown out of court. What's different this time around is that the French state itself is going after Dieudonné. Up until recently, French Jewish organizations have pressed charges 'on behalf of French Jews', on the grounds that Dieudonné's public comments and comedy sketches broke France's strict 'hate crimes' laws forbidding expressions of 'anti-semitism'.

The French state's strategy to date of ignoring Dieudonné and minimizing his access to mass audiences apparently changed between Christmas and the New Year when top government officials, including President François Hollande, publicly declared their intention to shut the comedian out of French public life altogether. The Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, declared he would "thoroughly examine all legal options that would allow a ban on Dieudonné's public gatherings, which no longer belong to the artistic domain, but rather amount to a public safety risk."

The extent of the world's obesity epidemic has been thrown into stark relief as a report from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) puts the number of overweight and obese adults in developing countries at more than 900 million.

Future Diets, an analysis of public data about what the world eats, says there are almost twice as many obese people in poor countries as in rich ones. In 2008, the figures were 904 million in developing countries, where most of the world's people live, compared with 557 million in industrialised nations.

"The growing rates of overweight and obesity in developing countries are alarming," said the report's author, ODI research fellow Steve Wiggins. "On current trends, globally, we will see a huge increase in the number of people suffering certain types of cancer, diabetes, strokes and heart attacks, putting an enormous burden on public healthcare systems."

The report warns that governments are not doing enough to tackle the growing crisis, partly due to politicians' reluctance to interfere at the dinner table, the powerful influence of farming and food lobbies and a large gap in public awareness of what constitutes a healthy diet.

According to the report, overweight and obesity rates since 1980 have almost doubled in China and Mexico, and risen by a third in South Africa, which now has a higher rate than the UK. Regionally, north Africa, the Middle East and Latin America all have overweight and obese rates on a par with Europe.