Parliamentary elections in Pakistan will be held in mid-January as scheduled, despite Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's weekend proclamation of emergency rule , Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said Monday. Aziz's comments came amid fears that the elections would be postponed because of the imposition of emergency rule and ensuing demonstrations by Pakistani lawyers throughout the [...]
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A Pakistani law student from the Lahore University of Management Sciences describes the clash between lawyers and riot police at the Lahore High Court Monday: "Today, November 5th, the lawyers of Pakistan were to boycott the courts and protest at the promulgation of emergency and the issuance of the Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO). What transpired [...]
Eleven more detainees have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay , the US Defense Department said Sunday. According to the DOD announcement, eight detainees were transferred to Afghanistan and three were transferred to Jordan. The names of the eleven men were not released. In October, another six detainees were transferred to Afghanistan . With the transfer, [...]
Italian opposition leader and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Sunday urged Italy to ban Romanian workers from entering Italy, while conservative ally Gianfranco Fini suggested that Italy should expel 20,000 Romanian workers in response to a wave of violent crimes blamed on foreigners. Romanian workers have been detained in several recent crimes, and statisticians [...]
Amidst discussions among members of the Bush administration on closing the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay , officials are considering providing detainees expanded court access and transferring them to federal custody in the United States, the New York Times reported Sunday. Under the current approach backed by the White House, military Combatant Status Review Tribunals [...]
An Egyptian court sentenced two police officers to three years in prison Monday for torturing a bus driver after video clips of the incident circulated on video-sharing website YouTube . Islam Nabih, a police captain, and Reda Fathi, a non-commissioned officer, sodomized and beat Emad el-Kabir in 2006 while videoing the incident on a cell [...]
Pakistani riot police and security forces fired tear gas at dark-suited lawyers and law students assembled at the High Court in Lahore Monday and charged them with batons as some 2000 demonstrated against President Pervez Musharraf's Saturday proclamation of emergency rule , suspension of the constitution and dismissal of the country's Supreme Court. The initially-peaceful [...]
A top official with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Sunday that an unsuccessful bid by a French charity to fly 103 children out of Chad late last month violated international law. UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman was quoted by Reuters as saying that it was “simply unacceptable to see children taken out of [...]
US Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said Sunday that he will support the nomination of former federal judge Michael Mukasey as US attorney general. Mukasey's nomination has come under fire over his refusal to call waterboarding torture. Specter, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on CNN's Late Edition that Mukasey could have provided [...]
Chadian authorities Sunday freed seven Europeans – three French journalists and four Spanish flight attendants – held in connection with a French charity's attempted airlift from Chad of 103 children alleged to be Darfur orphans. French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Chad Sunday to personally intervene with the Chadian government over its handling of the [...]
