The US House of Representatives Friday passed a compromise version of a bill amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and including a controversial provision granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the NSA warrantless surveillance program . The bill also grants the FISA court authority to review a wider range of wiretapping [...]
The European Council agreed at a Friday meeting of government leaders in Brussels to reconvene in October to discuss the future of the Treaty of Lisbon . Last week, Irish voters rejected the Treaty with 53.4 percent voting against it, raising serious concerns that the Treaty, which sets out guidelines for EU reform, will fail [...]
The Court of Appeal of Quebec ruled Thursday that a national law which regulates the use of human embryos and bans human cloning encroaches upon provincial authority. The court held that regulatory provisions included in the Assisted Human Reproduction Act fell within provincial authority to generally regulate health and medical research and were beyond the [...]
European nations are among the worst violators of refugee rights because of the countries' strict border policies and their treatment of refugee seekers, according to a report released by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) on Thursday. The 60 main refugee host countries were graded based on their adherence to the UN Convention [...]
A German court convicted an Iraqi man for disseminating terrorist materials online in an attempt to recruit members for al-Qaeda on Thursday. The man, Ibrahim Rashid, an Iraqi political refugee of Kurdish descent, was convicted on 22 counts of recruiting for a non-German terrorist organization. He was arrested in 2006 and detained until his trial [...]
The UN Security Council Thursday condemned the use of sexual violence against civilians as a war tactic, saying that it can be "a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide." The resolution, adopted unanimously after a debate on women, peace and security , demands that warring parties immediately [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report Friday urging South Africa to grant temporary asylum and work permits to Zimbabweans who have fled to the country. The group said that the South African Department of Home Affairs has mischaracterized the refugees fleeing "political repression and economic deprivation," as ordinary migrants and that massive government deportation efforts [...]
Several Bolivian opposition groups have said that the nation's new constitution is illegitimate, alleging that supporters of Bolivian President Evo Morales used legal loopholes to rush its approval. An International Crisis Group report released Thursday said the opposition may react to the constitutional reform attempts through violence. The opposition consists mainly of Unidad Nacional (UN), [...]
A representative for the US nursing home industry urged members of Congress Wednesday not to pass legislation that would eliminate the arbitration clauses which are typically part of admission contracts to nursing homes. In a joint meeting between the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition and Consumer Rights and the Special Committee on Aging , Kelley [...]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Thursday announced that more than 400 people had been indicted in connection to what has been termed the US "sub-prime mortgage collapse." The vast majority of the indictments involved fraud related to individual mortgages, with the FBI focusing on lending fraud, foreclosure rescue scams and mortgage-related bankruptcy schemes, which [...]
