Faisal Naseem Chaudhry : "At 6:16 pm this evening, Pakistan lost Benazir Bhutto (BB). Plenty of individuals in this country had severe differences of opinion with her policies and politics, yet one could never imagine such a demise for Pakistan's most popular leader. She was, after all, a leader, and the loss of her life [...]

A Russian military court in the North Caucasus region sentenced Russian Interior Force officers Yevgeny Khudyakov and Sergei Arakcheyev to 17 and 15 years in prison respectively Thursday for killing three construction workers during a January 2003 operation in the war-torn region of Chechnya . Khudyakov was sentenced in absentia, his whereabouts apparently unknown. Both [...]

Israeli military officials said Thursday there was a 36 per cent increase in 2007 of investigations of members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for acts of violence committed against Palestinian civilians. The announcement came a week after a report from Israeli human rights group Yesh Din criticized the Israeli government for only opening 239 [...]

The French Foreign Ministry Thursday formally requested that Chadian authorities transfer six French aid workers to a French prison, one day after the workers were sentenced to eight years of hard labor by a Chadian court for attempting to kidnap 103 African children. The request was made under the 1976 France-Chad Agreement on Judicial Matters [...]

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a suicide attack Thursday at a rally in Rawalpindi. Bhutto, head of the opposition Pakistan People's Party , was campaigning in the lead-up to January 8 parliamentary elections, where her party is challenging Pakistani Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) . Her candidacy was [...]

Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra will be arrested if he returns home from self-imposed exile in England, despite his party's success in general election earlier this week, according to Thai officials Thursday. Thaksin and his wife Pojamarn, who have been living in exile since a bloodless military coup ousted him last September, have been [...]

Leading legislators from Lebanon's majority party were expected to file a petition in parliament Thursday seeking a constitutional amendment to allow Gen. Michel Suleiman to become president of Lebanon. Under the current Lebanese constitution , the presidency cannot be held by a sitting military commander . Anti-Syrian and pro-Syrian members of Lebanon's parliament have been [...]

Diane Orentlicher : "The history of U.S. efforts to punish genocide is full of paradoxes. The United States led postwar efforts to prosecute Nazi crimes in Nuremberg and played the lead role in establishing international tribunals to prosecute those responsible for the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and perpetrators of atrocities, including the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, [...]

Six French aid workers were sentenced to eight years of hard labor Wednesday after being convicted in a Chadian court for attempting to kidnap 103 African children . The six, affiliated with the Zoe's Ark charity, claimed that they were attempting to airlift orphaned children from the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur to safety in [...]

Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor Vladmir Vukcevic said Wednesday that fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladic is in Serbia, and that authorities are closing in on him. Vukevic's comments are the first acknowledgement by a Serbian official that Mladic is hiding in the country, although that has been widely suspected. Vukcevic said that Serbian authorities have [...]