Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said Saturday he will lobby the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to make blasphemy an internationally-recognized criminal offense in the wake of controversy surrounding the worldwide republication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that first appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper in September. A spokesman told reporters [...]
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US Federal District Court Judge Jose Linares, presiding over a lawsuit by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to block United Arab Emirates -owned Dubai Ports World from taking over the management of six major US seaport facilities including New Jersey's Port Newark, issued an order Friday asking federal officials to explain [...]
An Afghan court Saturday found Asadullah Sarwari , head of the country's intelligence department in the communist era, guilty of ordering hundreds of murders and sentenced him to death. Sarwari, who defended himself in the one-day trial, is expected to appeal the ruling that arose from his conduct under Afghanistan’s Soviet supported communist regime in [...]
The trial of 129 lawmakers, journalists and human rights activists on treason charges opened Friday in Ethiopia. The charges relate to mass demonstrations in the wake of Ethiopia’s May 2005 elections; the 129 defendants were arrested after street protests in July and November . The opposition Coalition of Unity and Democracy (CUD) claims that Prime [...]
The US Department of Justice insisted in a court filing Friday that the information the search engine data government is seeking from Google as part of its effort to revive the Child Online Protection Act would not be traceable to specific users. Google had previously refused to comply with a subpoena to hand over internet [...]
The Utah Supreme Court Friday ruled to remove a polygamist judge from the bench, explaining that Hildale Justice Court Judge Walter Steed clearly broke the law by being married to three women at once. Steed worked as a part-time justice court judge since 1980 in the border town of Hildale, a polygamous town. The high [...]
Police in Manila Saturday raided the offices of the Manila Daily Tribune and detained several high-profile critics of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines a day after she declared a state of emergency in order to stop an alleged coup against her government. Since her declaration, Arroyo has banned rallies in the country, but hundreds [...]
A Nigerian court in the southern city of Port Harcourt Friday ordered Royal Dutch Shell to pay $1.5 billion to compensate local communities for environmental pollution caused by the company's activities in the southern Niger delta region, the focus of long criticism by environment and rights groups. Shell's oil production activities make up nearly half [...]
US District Judge Reggie B. Walton Friday granted defense attorneys for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby access to Libby's personal handwritten notes taken over a nine-month period around the time that the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame was first published in the media. Libby's defense team plans to use the notes to support Libby's [...]
In a speech Friday in Cleveland, US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Mark Everson said that the IRS had found a sharp increase in prohibited political activity by 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charities, including some churches, during the 2004 election cycle. According to an IRS study , three quarters of 82 charitable organizations examined engaged in some [...]
