Ali Khan : "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving on the right path in exploring the possibilities of negotiated solutions to the problems that threaten the peace of the Middle East. Her bold initiative to meet with two Muslim rulers, the Syrian President and the Saudi King, is in line with the UN Charter and [...]

John M. "Mike" McConnell , who succeeded John Negroponte as US Director of National Intelligence in February, delivered a policy address to the 2007 Excellence in Government Conference Wednesday criticizing federal surveillance laws as outdated and unresponsive to terrorist threats. McConnell, who previously served as the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1992 [...]

The Constitutional Court of Uganda Thursday rejected a law criminalizing adultery by women and parts of an estate law according greater rights to surviving husbands than to surviving wives. The adultery legislation effectively permitted married men to engage in extramarital affairs with unmarried women, but punished married women with fines or up to 12 years' [...]

Iraq has lost $8 billion through corruption over the past three years, Radi al-Radhi, the head of Iraq's public corruption commission, told AP Wednesday. Al-Radhi said his office has investigated 2,600 cases of wasted or stolen public funds, and blamed a clause of the Iraqi constitution for allowing cabinet ministers to block investigations. The Commission [...]

Amnesty International decried worsening conditions at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in a report released Thursday, claiming detainees have "suffered harsh treatment throughout their detention, confined to mesh cages or maximum security cells" and that the new facility opened late last year subjects detainees to "even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of [...]

The family of John Walker Lindh said Wednesday that a clemency petition has been filed on their son's behalf, seeking to reduce his 20-year sentence in light of the nine-month sentence handed down to Australian David Hicks last week. Lindh, the American caught fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, pleaded guilty in 2002 [...]

Virginia became the first US state to require by statute that girls be vaccinated against human papillomavirus when its General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to accept the governor's proposed amendment to a previously passed bill . The amendment makes it easier for parents and guardians to opt girls out of the vaccinations by striking a [...]

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have filed suit against five Jackson Hewitt franchises, seeking an injunction to bar the companies from preparing tax returns and alleging that all five corporations were involved in fraudulent tax return preparation including the filing of exaggerated claims and the use fake W-2 forms. [...]

The government of Thailand Wednesday banned access to the popular video-sharing website YouTube and several other websites that contain material deemed offensive to the country's monarch. The YouTube ban resulted from a video depicting King Bhumibol Adulyadej as a clown with feet pasted over his head, an insulting image in Thai culture that can amount [...]

The Fiji Human Rights Commission (FHRC) has accused Australian mining company Emperor Gold of human rights violations at Fiji's Vatukoula gold mine . The FHRC claims that mine workers have been subjected to sub-standard housing, paid disproportionate wages, and exposed to hazardous gases. FHRC Commission Director Dr. Shaista Shameem said that an FHRC investigation concluded [...]