Pakistan's National Assembly , the lower house of parliament, passed the 2006 Protection of Women Bill Wednesday, transferring rape case jurisdiction from religious Sharia courts to civil courts. The bill also classifies rape under the penal code and makes it easier for women in Pakistan to prove rape allegations. Religious leaders decried the legislation, saying [...]

Shaun Hansen, former owner of the telemarketing firm Mylo Enterprises Inc., pleaded guilty to two federal counts of conspiracy to commit interstate telephone harassment on Wednesday for his involvement in the New Hampshire GOP's 2002 phone jamming plot against the state's Democratic Senate candidates. Prosecutors alleged that Hansen was paid $2,500 to make phone calls [...]

US Army Spc. James P. Barker pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges stemming from the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family in the Mahmudiya (also "Mahmoudiya") area in March. Barker, who will be spared from capital punishment as a result of the plea, agreed to testify against the [...]

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud Wednesday rejected his cabinet's approval of a UN draft proposal for an international judicial tribunal to try suspects in the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri . Lahoud said the measure was invalid because in the midst of other domestic political turmoil all five Shiite ministers had [...]

The Labour Party government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged Wednesday to "put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system support the police and all those responsible for the public's safety" in its new legislative agenda for the 2006-2007 session of Parliament. In the Queen's Speech , read by Queen Elizabeth II [...]

The US decision to build a 700-mile fence along the US-Mexican border is "inhumane," a senior Vatican official said Tuesday while delivering Pope Benedict XVI's yearly message on migrants . Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Council on Migrant and Itinerant People , compared the proposal in the Secure Fence Act of 2006 to [...]

The US Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged the existence of a memorandum, signed by President Bush, that authorizes the detention and interrogation of terror suspects overseas in a letter sent to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU requested the memo in a FOIA request , sent to the CIA in 2004 , that specifically [...]

A Nepal newspaper reported Tuesday that a blue-ribbon panel investigating possible human rights violations in the police response to anti-democracy protests last spring that left 22 dead and more than 5,000 wounded will blame King Gyanendra for the crackdown. The report may undergo revisions before it is presented to the government Friday, but the current [...]

US Vice President Dick Cheney and his former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby asked a federal court Tuesday to dismiss the civil lawsuit brought against them and other current and former administration officials by Valerie Plame, the undercover operative whose revealed identity precipitated the CIA leak case . Cheney argued that his office [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked a federal appeals court Tuesday to uphold a lower court ruling that the NSA domestic surveillance program is unconstitutional, arguing that the program is an unconstitutional intrusion on privacy and free speech and oversteps the limits of executive power. In August, US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled [...]