Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry Friday "after receiving numerous complaints and serious allegations for misconduct, misuse of authority and actions prejudicial to the dignity of office of the Chief Justice of Pakistan." Musharraf has directed the Supreme Judicial Council , the oversight body of Pakistan's judiciary, to investigate the allegations [...]
Portugal's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic , loosened Portugal's strict abortion law Thursday to allow abortions in the first 10-weeks of pregnancy. The legislation still requires the endorsement of President Anibal Cavaco Silva to come into effect. In February, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said he would look the Assembly to pass liberalizing abortion [...]
Britain's most senior judge assailed recent government sentencing guidelines in a speech Thursday, warning that minimums set in 2003 threatened to eventually fill up the country's prisons with "geriatric lifers" and would have negative consequences for years to come. Speaking at Birmingham University, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers , also expressed [...]
Six foreign medics sentenced to death in Libya will not be executed, according to Libyan Secretary of the Foreign Affairs Committee Suleiman Shahoumi, quoted by Bulgarian media. In December, a Libyan court found five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor found guilty of deliberately infecting 426 children with the HIV virus and sentenced them to [...]
A US Department of Justice review of the FBI's use of so-called national security letters (NSLs) and ex parte orders for business records criticizes the Bureau for ineffective management, monitoring and reporting of the programs. The DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conducted the review under the terms of the 2005 Patriot Act renewal [...]
UN High Commissioner Louise Arbour marked International Women's Day Thursday with a stark message on violence against women , urging an end to impunity for what was paradoxically the "most common but least punished crime in the world" in an environment where "most States have largely accepted the international normative framework aimed at preventing, tackling [...]
US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told senators in a private meeting Thursday that the Bush administration would drop its objection to proposed legislation requiring Senate confirmation of all US Attorneys, reversing a rule change approved a year ago in the Patriot Act reauthorization allowing the Attorney General to replace removed US attorneys with permanent substitutes. [...]
Two Albany, New York men convicted in a money laundering scheme set up as an FBI sting were each sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison. Former imam at Masjid as-Salam mosque Yassin Aref and mosque co-founder and pizzeria owner Mohammed Hossain were convicted in October for their roles in a money laundering scheme involving [...]
The Sudanese trial of Ali Kushayb , one of the two suspects accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of committing war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region, and two other security officials has been delayed after Kushayb filed an appeal in the case, Sudanese court officials said Thursday. Kushayb, Hamdi Sharafeddin and Abdel Rahman Daoud [...]
A new law to protect private property in China was presented to the Chinese legislature on Thursday. The law, in the making since 1993, would define the scope of public and private property to advance the developing socialist market economy, according to its proponents. In his speech to the fifth session of the Tenth National [...]
