New service regulations will allow US Coast Guard members to wear religious head coverings under their uniform head covers, according to Coast Guard officials quoted by AP Wednesday. The new regulations have already taken effect verbally, but must still be formally adopted. The Coast Guard, which falls under the domain of the US Department of [...]
An Italian court in Rome will consider whether to try US Army Specialist Mario Lozano this November in connection with the death of Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari at an Iraqi checkpoint in March 2005, according to a court source Wednesday. Italian prosecutors requested an indictment in June after investigators concluded their probe into Calipari's [...]
Ethiopia on Tuesday submitted its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) to the UN Secretary-General. The CTBT bans any nuclear explosion, for testing purposes or otherwise, and was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1996. Thirty-four of the 44 signatories possessing nuclear research and power capabilities at that time have ratified the [...]
Anthony D'Amato : "Israel's decision to launch a massive ground attack on Lebanon appears to entail an unnoticed and unintended effect. In the past weeks the Security Council had been scrambling to come up with enough national pledges for troops to constitute a U.N. peacekeeping force for southern Lebanon. At first, Turkey seemed to be [...]
Human Rights Watch denounced Iran on Wednesday for threatening to prosecute the Iranian Center for Defense of Human Rights (CDHR) , a human rights group based in Tehran founded by 2003 Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi. Last week, the Iranian Interior Ministry banned the group, calling it illegal because it did not have a proper [...]
San Diego city officials and management broke federal securities laws by failing to fulfill their fiduciary duties in administering the city's pension fund for police officers, firefighters, and other public officials, according to an independent audit presented to City Council of the investigation, led by former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt , [...]
The UN Human Rights Council announced Wednesday that it will hold an emergency session on Friday to discuss the ongoing Middle East conflict and its worsening impact on Lebanese citizens. Responding to a special request from Tunisia on behalf of the UN Group of Arab States and the Organization of the Islamic Conference , the [...]
The US military has arrested four Iraqi members of an insurgent kidnapping cell in connection with the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll . Carroll was working in Iraq when she was kidnapped on January 7 and released on March 30 of this year. A US official said the arrests were made one [...]
The Serbian government has called for the prosecution of Bosnian military officer Atif Dudakovic after a Serbian television station broadcast a video Tuesday that allegedly shows Dudakovic ordering his troops to burn a Serb village in 1995. The Dudakovic video follows last week's broadcast of a video that allegedly shows the unprovoked murder of a [...]
The Jakarta Court of Appeal has ruled that Indonesian Attorney General Abdul Rahman Saleh was correct to drop a corruption case against former President Suharto , citing Suharto's inability to speak or write due to permanent brain damage . Saleh appealed a lower court ruling in a lawsuit filed by several human rights groups . [...]
