Text of a televised address on the CPE (contrat premiere embauche) by French President Jacques Chirac, March 31, 2006 . Excerpt: Le Parlement, les élus de la Nation, ont voté la loi sur l'égalité des chances et le Conseil constitutionnel vient de juger cette loi en tout point conforme aux principes et aux valeurs de [...]

The EU on Friday extended its deadline for Serbia to hand over wanted war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic to April 30 after chief ICTY prosecutor Carla del Ponte confirmed the country's willingness to cooperate with the tribunal. Mladic has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for genocide and crimes against [...]

French President Jacques Chirac said Friday that he will sign the First Employment Contract (CPE) , a controversial labor law which, in its current form, includes a provision allowing employers to hire workers under 26 for a conditional two-year period at the end of which they can be dismissed without cause. In a televised address [...]

Tony Rudy , former deputy chief of staff and press secretary to US Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) , pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy Friday. Rudy admitted to working with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff , among other people, to corrupt public officials and defraud clients while he was employed by DeLay and later while [...]

In a verdict upholding gender equality, the Supreme Court of Nepal ruled Thursday that men can no longer divorce their wives on grounds of the latter's infertility. A special bench of the court declared a provision in the 43-year old Civil Code relating to husband and wife "ultra vires." The discriminatory provision in the code [...]

Polish prosecutors on Friday charged General Wojciech Jaruzelski with "organizing crimes of a military nature" and "carrying out crimes that consisted of the deprivation of freedom through internment" for his imposition of martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981. The charges, which prosecutors have been preparing since late last year, were brought by the [...]

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for the United Nations to reduce the number of reports it produces each year as part of his ongoing UN reform agenda first announced in March 2005. In a report delivered to the General Assembly on Thursday, Annan indicated that the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human [...]

The Alabama House of Representatives has unanimously passed a bill that would pardon Rosa Parks and others arrested for violating segregation-era laws. Under the proposal, arrest records of those pardoned would not be removed from the public record, but instead would be sent to the Alabama Department of Archives and History in order to preserve [...]

Manfred Nowak , the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture , has said that he is certain that the United States has secret detention facilities in Europe and has demanded access to the facilities. In an interview with the Associated Press Thursday, Nowak cited the refusal of the United States to provide details of interrogations used [...]

Pascale Duparc Portier : "The French Constitutional Council has now ruled on the constitutionality of Article 8 of the Statute on the Equality of Opportunities (Loi pour l'egalite des chances) dealing with the highly controversial First Employment Contract (CPE, contrat première embauche) which is tearing France apart. The country has been at a standstill and [...]