Nepal's House of Representatives Sunday passed a citizenship bill granting opportunity to apply for citizenship to an estimated four million people living in the Terai region along the country's southern border with India. The bill declares that individuals born before mid-April 1990 and who have been residing in Nepal since that date, are eligible to [...]

In a controversial meeting late Saturday the Lebanese cabinet of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora renewed its agreement to the terms of a UN-supported international tribunal to try suspects accused of assassinating former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. The approval came over the objections of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud , the militant Shiite Hezbollah [...]

Former Abu Ghraib commander Janis Karpinski has repeated her claim that outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally ordered "making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation … playing music at full volume" and so on at the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Karpinski told Spanish newspaper El Pais in an interview published [...]

Loyalist militant Michael Stone was charged Saturday with 5 counts of attempted murder after he threw a package of explosives into the entrance of the Stormont parliament buildings in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Friday and attempted to force his way past security guards. The recently-reconstituted Northern Ireland Assembly was in session at the time, meeting [...]

A Yemeni court has convicted Kamal al-Aalafi, editor-in-chief of the al-Rai al-Aam newspaper, and sentenced him to one year in jail for violating Article 103 of the Press and Publications Law of 1990 as punishment for publishing offensive cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad . The weekly paper has additionally been closed for six months. Earlier [...]

A scheduled Saturday meeting of the Lebanese cabinet on the establishment of an international tribunal to try suspects in the February 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri has thrown Lebanon into crisis again even before it has taken place. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called the meeting after pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud rejected [...]

The New York Times asked the US Supreme Court Friday to block a federal investigation into a terrorism probe leak from acquiring the telephone records of two Times reporters until the high court rules on a certiorari petition in the case. A Chicago grand jury is seeking to identify the sources that leaked information of [...]

Officials with the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) said Saturday that a meeting of the tribunal's judges convened to consider Draft Internal Rules for pending genocide trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders had failed to reach agreement on the regulations and that further meetings would be necessary. The rules cover every phase [...]

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney Friday filed a request with the state's Supreme Judicial Court to put a measure effectively banning same-sex marriage on the 2008 Massachusetts ballot if legislators fail to vote on the issue before the end of their term on January 2. Romney took the anticipated action after state lawmakers voted 109-87 to [...]

The UN Committee against Torture (CAT) urged Russia Friday to investigate and prosecute what it called the "widespread use of torture" in Chechnya . The human rights body cited "reliable reports" of the existence of secret detention facilities where "detainees faced torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." CAT also expressed its concern that "numerous, [...]