US Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) said Wednesday that General Michael Hayden , the Bush administration's nominee for CIA director replacing Porter Goss, has suggested that he might welcome a modification to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bringing the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program within the scope of statutory authority. Hayden, the former National [...]
Maurice Vellacott , a Conservative Party member of the Canadian Parliament , resigned Wednesday from his position as chairman of the House of Commons Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Committee after making comments over the weekend about Canadian judges using their roles to "play God." In an interview with CBC News on Saturday, Vellacott singled [...]
British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith , already a critic of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay , Wednesday made a forceful public call for the shutdown of the facility. Making a speech in London's Whitehall, Goldsmith reminded his audience the British government had succeeded in negotiating the return of all its nationals held at [...]
British doctors belonging to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) have said they oppose a bill now before the UK House of Lords that would permit terminally ill patients to choose death by euthanasia. The RCGP says it "firmly believes that with current improvements in palliative care, [...]
Judge J. Michael Luttig , 51, of the Richmond, Virginia-based US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit resigned from the bench Wednesday to accept a position as senior vice-president and general counsel of the Boeing Company , the giant airplane manufacturer and defense contractor. Luttig became the nation's youngest appellate judge when he was [...]
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour on Wednesday called the election by the UN General Assembly of 47 member states to founding seats on the new UN Human Rights Council "very encouraging" and said that there was "reason to believe that we are putting aside some of the difficulties we saw with the [...]
A panel of the US District Court for the District of Columbia has rejected a challenge brought by a nonprofit political interest group to the electioneering communication ban in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that prohibits TV advertisements funded with corporate or union money that mention a specific candidate from airing 30 days [...]
The Australian and US governments will both have to approve the transfer of prisoners sentenced by US military commissions under the terms of a new agreement reached earlier this week, according to a statement from Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. The agreement, reached Tuesday, may apply to David Hicks , the Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee [...]
The federal government is violating First Amendment free speech rights by withholding federal HIV/AIDS funding from human rights groups working abroad who refuse to sign a pledge condemning prostitution, according to an opinion released Tuesday by a New York federal judge. US District Court Judge Victor Marrero said that the US Supreme Court has "repeatedly [...]
The lawyer for Moustafa Hassan Nasr , the Egyptian cleric who CIA operatives allegedly kidnapped and moved out of Italy to Egypt in 2003 in an instance of extraordinary rendition , has claimed that Nasr was physically beaten while in US custody. Montasser Zayat told Knight Ridder newspapers that Nasr informed him of the abuse [...]
