Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner on Thursday said that she is “sure” that the death of prosecutor Albert Nisman was not a suicide as initially indicated . Nisman had been appointed to lead the investigation of the 1994 bombing of the Argentinian Jewish Mutual Association, a terrorist attack, known as the worst in the [...]
An Egyptian court on Thursday ordered the release on bail of ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s two sons, pending a retrial in a corruption case. Alaa and Gamal Mubarak were charged for using state funds to renovate family residences and sentenced to four years in prison. Their father was sentenced to three years in prison for [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday criticized the Ethiopian government, accusing it of systematically restricting media in anticipation of the country’s May 2015 elections. The 76-page report, entitled “Journalism Is Not a Crime: Violations of Media Freedom in Ethiopia,” indicates that the country’s restriction on media has been part of an effort to curb freedom [...]
The UN General Assembly is holding a daylong informal meeting Thursday devoted to anti-Semitism in response to a global increase in violence against Jews. The meeting was requested by 37 countries in a letter to the General Assembly president in October. The meeting will include a keynote address by French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, [...]
Egypt’s Court of Cassation on Thursday ordered a retrial for four policemen facing accusations of involuntary manslaughter relating to the deaths of 37 prisoners in a van outside the Abu Zaabal prison in 2013. The prisoners, arrested days before during peaceful protests in support of former president Mohamed Morsi , were being transported from the [...]
Members of a UN investigatory commission reported on Wednesday that crimes against humanity have been widely committed by all parties to the conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) and called for the establishment of an international court to objectively investigate and prosecute perpetrators of these crimes. The UN International Commission of Inquiry on the [...]
Two Democratic state senators in California introduced a bill on Wednesday to legalize assisted suicide and modeled the bill after the physician-assisted suicide law enacted by voters in Oregon in 1994. The bill would require two doctors to confirm that the patient has six months or less to live before the drug that accelerates death [...]
The second highest court in Malaysia ruled Wednesday in a high-profile transgender case that Islamic law is restricted to familial matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, and the constitution provides a secular federal government. The ruling is based on the 1988 Supreme Court case, Che Omar Che Soh. The Court of Appeal cited the [...]
The Iran Supreme Court sentenced former vice president Mohammad Reza Rahimi to more than five years in prison and imposed a fine of 10 billion rials (USD $360,000), the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported Wednesday. Rahimi was also ordered to return 28.5 billion rials worth of goods. This sentence is the result of an [...]
As part of the 70th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp (USHMM backgrounder), UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson on Wednesday called for an examination of why genocide continues to be perpetrated in some parts of the world. Titled “Why Have We Failed in Preventing Genocides and How to Change That?,” [...]
