The Dutch Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that the Netherlands wants to secure a prisoners' rights guarantee in Afghanistan with its NATO allies, including the United States, before deciding whether to send additional troops there. Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot told parliament "We want very good guarantees. That is an important condition for the cabinet for [...]
New German chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday that she plans to revive the European constitution , on hold since French and Dutch voters rejected the charter earlier this year. While indicating that the charter will be at the top of her agenda when Berlin assumes the EU presidency in 2007, the first woman chancellor said [...]
Austria has joined several other countries investigating whether the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted unauthorized flights through their airspace in 2003 while transporting terror detainees. An Austrian air force commander told state radio that a US transport plane traveling from Germany to Azerbaijan crossed Austrian airspace on Jan. 21, 2003. Austria refused to allow [...]
Defense lawyers in the Saddam Hussein trial announced Thursday that they will attend the next session of the trial scheduled for November 28 despite the recent assassination of two of their colleagues. The defense team had threatened to boycott the proceeding unless security was provided to both the lawyers and their families, which has not [...]
Members of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting in Vienna agreed Thursday to pursue a Russian compromise proposal rather than report Tehran to the UN Security Council for its nuclear activities. Iran has refused to suspend uranium enrichment, claiming it wants to develop its nuclear power capabilities, not weapons. Moscow has proposed allowing [...]
A group of gay marriage opponents in Massachusetts said Wednesday they had gathered enough signatures to put a proposed constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage on the state ballot. The group, lead by the Massachusetts Family Institute and comprised of Christian and conservative activists, was required to gather 65,825 signatures before state lawmakers could decide whether [...]
The National Education Association (NEA) has promised to appeal a Wednesday ruling by a federal judge in Michigan dismissing its lawsuit challenging the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) . According to the complaint , filed by the NEA and individual school districts in Texas, Michigan and Vermont, school districts should not be forced to [...]
Leading Thursday's international brief, the Turkish Parliament has voted to investigate the grenade bombing of a former Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) member in the primarily Kurdish town of Semdinli. The attacker, an informant for the paramilitary police, was chased from the scene and captured at his vehicle, along with two paramilitary police officers. Parliament set [...]
Clinic for Women, Inc. v. Carl J. Brizzi, Indiana Supreme Court, November 23, 2005 . Excerpt: The Indiana Legislature has passed a law that requires a woman seeking an abortion to give her informed consent prior to the procedure and, except in the case of a medical emergency, specifies that a physician (or other medical [...]
Army prosecutors Wednesday dropped charges against a US soldier accused of abusing a mentally retarded detainee in Afghanistan . Spec. Nathan A. Jones was accused of kneeing or kicking the detainee in the thigh at the Bagram detention center in 2002 and then lying about it. Officials at Fort Bliss said, however, that although Jones [...]
