Cubans have overwhelmingly voted to ratify a new constitution that enshrines the country’s one-party socialist system as “irrevocable” and institutes other economic and social reforms. The president of Cuba’s national electoral commission, Alina Balseiro Gutierrez, claims that 84.4 percent of Cuba’s 7.8 million potential voters participated in the Sunday referendum. Of the potential electorate, 73.31 [...]
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear Maryland’s bid to revive a 2017 law aimed at reining in prescription drug costs. The law, aimed specifically at the practice of price gouging by pharmaceutical companies, was enacted after several high-profile price increases. In particular, Turing Pharmaceuticals in 2015 increased the price of its anti-parasitic [...]
The lower house of the Australian Parliament passed amendments Tuesday that would give doctors more power to bring over asylum seekers stranded in the country’s offshore camps for treatment. Australia has held thousands of asylum seekers in camps on the island nation of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island since 2013, with about 1,000 [...]
Dominique Ray, a Muslim inmate in Alabama, was executed on Thursday after the US Supreme court voted 5-4 to lift a stay of execution in place over his request to have an imam present in the room with him at the time of death. Ray’s attorneys argued that Alabama’s execution policy favored Christian inmates, who [...]
The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) agreed Monday to hear a challenge to the bulk data surveillance regime employed by UK intelligence agencies. A lower chamber of the court ruled in September that the UK’s surveillance practices violated human rights law but ruled that the process of bulk data collection [...]
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Friday that the US will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a nuclear arms control pact between the US and Russia established during the Cold War. The INF treaty “bans ground-launched missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.” Pompeo cited Russian noncompliance with the [...]
A senior judge at one of the UN courts in The Hague is reportedly resigning over “shocking” political interference from the White House and Turkey. Christoph Flügge, a German judge, claims that the US had threatened other judges who took steps to investigate the conduct of US soldiers in Afghanistan. He also claims that Turkey [...]
A Ukrainian court on Thursday sentenced former president Viktor Yanukovych to 13 years in prison after finding him guilty of treason for a 2014 crackdown on pro-Western demonstrations. In 2014 Yanukovych spiked an association agreement with the EU in favor of retaining close ties with Russia. This sparked massive protests and police crackdown that killed [...]
France’s data protection watchdog group (CNIL) fined Alphabet’s Google on Monday for breaching EU internet privacy rules. The €50 million (USD $57 million) fine is the largest penalty thus imposed on a US tech company, thanks to an increase in sanction limits under the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR, enacted in [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Thursday filed a lawsuit against seven federal agencies, intending to obtain information on how the government surveils social media. The suit seeks to compel the agencies to turn over documents related to communications with social media platforms and the guidelines they use. The suit accuses the agencies of [...]
