A Human Rights Watch expert Thursday told members of a European Parliament committee formed to investigate allegations that the US has transferred prisoners through Europe on secret extraordinary rendition flights that the United States has gone to great lengths to cover up evidence of the flights and urged the EU lawmakers to encourage other witnesses [...]

HealthSouth on Thursday finalized a settlement agreement with plaintiffs in several federal securities class action suits for a total $445 million. HealthSouth itself will pay defrauded investors $215 million, and its insurance carriers will pay $230 million, pending final approval by the court. Additionally, the settlement agreement will remit to defrauded investors 25 percent of [...]

The International Labour Organization (ILO) , a UN agency, on Thursday officially adopted the long-debated Maritime Labour Convention , a bill of rights applicable to maritime workers that sets minimum standards for wages, work-to-rest ratios, and lays out comprehensive health and safety standards. The convention will become effective upon ratification by 30 of the 100 [...]

Opposition politicians in Uganda have said that Thursday's election, the first multi-party elections held in the country in more than twenty years, was marred by fraud. Though it appears that incumbent President Yoweri Museveni will win re-election, claims of voting fraud have been leveled at the ruling party by challenger Kizza Besigye of the opposition [...]

Two separate reports issued in Britain Thursday strongly criticized the anti-terror strategy of Prime Minister Tony Blair's government, documenting domestic deprivations of human rights, condemning UK policy on torture, and urging the government to press the US to shut down its controversial detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The annual human rights report of the [...]

An Amnesty International spokesman said Thursday in Berlin that torture was still practiced and legally recognized in Turkey despite the latest reform efforts of the Turkish government. Wolfgang Grenz made the statement at the presentation of a new study of 18 cases carried out by a German investigator in October. Grenz said that Turkish courts [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has granted a rehearing in a case challenging the native-only admissions policy of a Hawaiian school. In August 2005, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the admissions policy of the Kamehameha Schools , which accepts no federal funding, violated 42 USC 1981 , a law forbidding racial [...]

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said Thursday that the European Union will suspend membership negotiations with Serbia if it did not fully cooperate in seeking the arrest of war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic . Mladic faces charges brought by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes [...]

California faces a virtual moratorium on executions in the wake of a court ruling that medical professionals must monitor executions by lethal injection to be sure that the inmate feels no pain. The execution of condemned killer Michael Morales , was put on hold late Monday after two anesthesiologists refused to take part . The [...]

The US military should take a greater, perhaps sometimes even temporarily a leading role in disaster recovery, and policy steps should to be taken to facilitate this, according to a 228-page White House report released Thursday on lessons learned from the Hurricane Katrina disaster . Noting that the military response to Hurricane Katrina had been [...]