Officials in Qatar on Monday launched a new human rights department which will function as a branch of the country's Interior Ministry . The department will work closely with the National Human Rights Committee, a state-financed human rights watchdog, as well as other embassies, the labor department, the ministry of civil services affairs and the [...]

After Iraq accused Kuwait last week of encroaching on Iraqi terroritory and even stealing Iraqi oil , an Iraqi official said Monday that inspections showed no border violations being committed. Khaled al-Atiyah, who headed the inspection as an envoy to Kuwait, instead detailed a few Iraqi encroachments of "no more than a few meters". Atiyah [...]

The so-called G-4 plan for expansion of the UN Security Council now appears likely to fail as talks with the African Union to back the plan have broken down. Japan, Brazil, Germany and India along with the African Union had originally agreed to submit a single plan, but the African Union's efforts to agree on [...]

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani welcomed a diverse group of leaders to his Baghdad residence on Sunday in an effort to sort out the remaining stumbling blocks in the Iraq constitution . Talabani also met with the US ambassador, who on Saturday had cautioned Iraq against creating a hard-line Islamic state based on Islamic law with [...]

In a speech to the American Bar Association annual meeting in Chicago this weekend, US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens noted "serious flaws'' in the American capital punishment system, though he stopped short of saying it should be completely done away with. Stevens pointed to recent exonerations, jury-selection processes, and statements from victims' families [...]

Haroon Rashid Aswat , a British man who was arrested by Zambian police last week, was returned to the UK on Sunday to face charges that he made phone calls to the bombers in preparation for the July 7 London bombing attacks. He was subsequently arrested under a US warrant on charges that he conspired [...]

Sixty years after deadly atomic blasts hit the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , thousands rallied across the US over the weekend to call for a ban on nuclear weapons. Protesters gathered in New Mexico, Tennessee, California, and Nevada at sites with historical significance linking them to the bomb or places that are currently [...]

Three days after a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a lower court ruling and struck down a Hawaiian school policy of only admitting native Hawaiians , nearly 15,000 people marched through downtown Honolulu Saturday to protest. The schools were established in 1883 and educate about 5,100 Hawaiian students [...]

Benon Sevan , the former head of the UN Oil-for-Food Program , resigned from his current honorary position at the UN Sunday one day before an independent panel investigating corruption charges and program irregularities was due to present a new report on its findings. In a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Sevan, who has denied [...]

British police Sunday charged three more individuals, including two alleged bombers, in the ongoing investigation into the July 21 attempted terror bombings in London. Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, and Ramzi Mohammed, 23 were charged with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to cause explosions and possession of an explosive substance. Manfo Kwaku Asiedu, 32, was [...]