The Zimbabwe parliament Thursday passed a controversial bill banning foreign-funded human rights groups from operating in the country and requiring all other rights groups to register with the governmet. Pro-government legislators have accused outside rights groups of being tools...

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma signed a decree Thursday effectively firing the country's Prosecutor-General, according to Russia's Interfax news agency. Gennady Vasilyev had submitted his resignation Wednesday, which Kuchma had accepted as part of a parliamentary deal to pass a...

Military planners are seeking $25 million to build a state-of-the-art 200-cell permanent detention facilty in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be guarded by a special 324-member professional guard force, according to a story running Thursday in the Miami Herald. The...

The UK House of Lords ruled Thursday that immigration controls set up by the British government had systematically discriminated against Roma Gypsies trying to enter Britain, largely from the Czech Republic where many faced prosecution. Roma, known for their...

Reference re Same-Sex Marriage, Supreme Court of Canada, December 9, 2004 [ruling that the Canadian federal government has the right to legalize same-sex marriage but declining to rule on the question of whether the traditional definition of marriage is constitutional...

Acting at the instance of President Lucio Gutierrez, the Ecuadorian Congress has narrowly voted to dismiss all 31 members of the country's Supreme Court on grounds that the institution had become too politicized. The mass dismissal, approved by 52...

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has announced that his state will sue the federal government to block enforcement of the so-called Weldon amendment, a provision in a massive federal appropriations bill awaiting signature by President Bush that could deny...

CTV News is reporting that the Supreme Court of Canada has approved a proposed federal law that would make same-sex marriage legal across Canada. Lower courts in six Canadian provinces and one territory have already ruled that the traditional...

Judge Charles Pickering, named by President Bush to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals through a "recess appointment" in January of this year after his regular nomination stalled in the Senate, has said he is retiring and will...

A Pentagon spokeman has said that four members of an elite US military special operations team have received administrative punishment for using Tasers - electronic stun guns - on Iraqi prisoners. Taser devices subdue human targets by delivering a...