Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said on Monday that Japan is considering whether launching a pre-emptive strike on North Korean missile bases would violate its constitution if there is no other option to prevent an attack from North Korea . Though Article 9 of the post-World War II Japanese constitution bars the use of [...]
Prisoners at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay have been subjected to "systematic physical, psychological, sexual, medical and religious abuse," according to a report released Monday by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) . CCR describes the 51-page "Report on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," as [...]
The government of Sri Lanka said Monday that it will propose constitutional reform in a series of meetings beginning Tuesday in a bid to end a two decade old civil war with Tamil Tiger rebels , who want a separate ethnic homeland in the north and east of the country. The Tamil Tigers have indicated [...]
Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker on Monday filed an emergency appeal with the Georgia Supreme Court on behalf of Governor Sonny Perdue , asking the court to overturn a lower court judge's Friday decision to issue a temporary restraining order blocking the implementation of a law requiring Georgia voters to produce photo identification cards. In [...]
The British government is sending Home Office minister Baroness Scotland to the US on Thursday to push for US ratification of the treaty aligning extradition requests between the two nations, which the UK has already ratified. Under the UK Extradition Act 2003 which enshrines the treaty in British law, three British bankers wanted in the [...]
Mexican leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has asked Mexico's Federal Electoral Court to order a manual recount of returns from the July 2 presidential election, which conservative Felipe Calderon won by just 0.6 percent. Lopez Obrador turned over to the court nine boxes of evidence of alleged fraud and dirty campaign practices relating [...]
Saddam Hussein, along with several co-defendants and defense lawyers, boycotted trial proceedings Monday at the Iraq High Tribunal as the defense was scheduled to begin closing arguments. The court did hear from a lawyer for defendant Ali Dayih Ali, but Hussein sent a letter to the court saying "the tribunal is lacking in all procedures [...]
Cyrus Kar , the Los Angeles-based filmmaker of Iranian descent and US Navy veteran detained by US forces in Iraq for 55 days, has sued Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top military officials in the US District Court for the Central District of California . Kar argues that his detention in Iraq, which [...]
The trial of six men accused of war crimes in Kosovo in 1999, including former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic , began at the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Monday. Milutinovic and his five co-defendants – former Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic , former Yugoslav army chiefs of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic and Nebojsa Pavkovic, [...]
AP is reporting that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has ruled that a proposed state constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage can be placed on the ballot for voter approval, if the amendment is approved by the state legislature. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2003, when the Supreme [...]