Taiwanese Foreign Minister James Huang said Friday that a national referendum on Taiwan's membership in the United Nations would proceed despite opposition from China. On Monday, the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs rejected Taiwan's fifteenth bid for member state status, reiterating the One-China Policy and recognizing the People's Republic of China (PRC) as the [...]
The government of Sudan said Thursday that it will appeal a US court verdict ordering it to pay $7.96 million in compensation to the families of 17 US Navy personnel killed in the 2000 al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole . Sudanese Justice Minister Mohammed Ali al-Mardi denied that Sudan bore any responsibility for [...]
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday that UN officials will not testify before the East Timorese-Indonesian Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF) because the CTF's terms of reference allow for the possibility of amnesty for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Ban, who reiterated the recommendations in the Report of the Secretary-General on justice and [...]
The UN Human Rights Committee Friday urged the Sudanese government to "take all appropriate measures" to guarantee that all state agents, including the military and armed militias, discontinue "widespread and systematic" violations of human rights. The recommendations, presented in the panel's concluding observations , also call on the Sudanese government to end immunities in Sudanese [...]
US District Judge Edward Nottingham Friday sentenced former Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio to six years in prison and ordered him to pay the maximum $19 million fine and forfeit of $52 million in assets obtained through insider trading. Nacchio, who was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in April, had faced a maximum [...]
The European Commission (EC) confirmed Friday that its Directorate General for Competition has sent a Statement of Objections (SO) to semiconductor manufacturing giant Intel , notifying the company that the EC believes it has abused its dominant position in the x86 architecture processor market to exclude its biggest rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) from the [...]
French magistrates have filed preliminary charges of "complicity in slanderous denunciations" against former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin , Villepin's lawyer said Friday. Villepin is accused of ordering a smear campaign against former political rival and current French President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as being responsible for several anonymous letters sent to a magistrate [...]
The United States and the European Union Thursday signed an agreement on the regulation of trans-Atlantic airline passenger data-sharing , allowing the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to continue using passenger data when the existing interim agreement expires at the end of July. Under the terms of the new agreement, air carriers will transmit [...]
A Nigerian court sentenced former state governor Dieprieye Alamieyeseigha Thursday to a total of 12 years in prison after Alamieyeseigha pleaded guilty to six counts of corruption and money laundering. Alamieyeseigha, who governed the oil-rich Bayelsa state from 1999 to 2005, has spent almost two years in custody. He will be eligible for release soon [...]
US President George W. Bush signed the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007 Thursday, expanding the investigative scope of the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to include foreign investments in vital infrastructure and energy and adding an additional 45-day review of proposed acquisitions from foreign state-owned entities. [...]
