Nineteen Armenian human rights NGOs and individual advocates on Friday jointly appealed to international organizations and foreign ambassadors in Azerbaijan, urging them to oversee the trials of Armenian detainees in Baku. Criminal hearings are currently underway in Baku involving former leaders of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. All the defendants, who are ethnic Armenians, face charges [...]

The US Supreme Court upheld the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” on Friday. This confirms that the application TikTok will be banned on Sunday. The act makes it unlawful for any entity to distribute a “foreign adversary controlled application” in the US. It explicitly singles out ByteDance Ltd, the parent company of TikTok. [...]

The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) on Thursday, emphasizing its commitment to end the current military conflict in Sudan. OFAC sanctioned SAF commander Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, stating that the leader is “choosing war over good-faith negotiation and de-escalation.” OFAC also [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed an appeal led by Indigenous elders who claimed that an under-renovation McGill University building contains Indigenous burial grounds. The Supreme Court’s rejection effectively permits McGill’s renovation of the building, which previously served as a psychiatric teaching hospital, to commence. The case arose after Historic Human Remains Detection Dogs discovered [...]

Amnesty International denounced Taiwan’s execution of Huang Linkai on Thursday, calling the event a “shameful setback” as it marked the first execution in Taiwan since 2020. Director of Amnesty International Taiwan E-Ling Chiu stated: “The execution of Huang Linkai (黃麟凱) was carried out in violation of constitutional and international safeguards on the use of the [...]

The South African Police Service confirmed the deaths of at least 78 people on Wednesday following the end of a rescue operation at an abandoned mine where miners, cut off from food and water, had been working illegally. The announcement relayed that the bodies of 78 miners had been retrieved, and a total of 246 [...]

A UN expert expressed concern Thursday over Türkiye’s “misuse” of counter-terrorism laws to detain nine prominent human rights defenders and lawyers. UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders Mary Lawlor noted arbitrary arrests, unfair trials, and lengthy sentences handed to the nine activists and lawyers, emphasizing that these practices undermine fundamental freedoms [...]

Oral arguments began in federal court on Wednesday in a case between a coalition of news organizations led by The New York Times and OpenAI, the creator of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, which alleges copyright infringement by OpenAI’s use of copyrighted material for machine learning. The case centers on allegations that OpenAI unlawfully utilized [...]

The Supreme Court (SC) of Bangladesh unanimously acquitted the former prime minister and leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Khaleda Zia, of graft charges related to the Zia Orphanage Trust case on Wednesday, local media reported. The verdict also acquitted Khaleda Zia’s son, Tarique Rahman, and four other individuals who had been convicted [...]

“Science, by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual, is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation… The latter is not possible without the former.” Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Man and Crisis (1958)  For now, the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria has [...]