Karin Laub And Dalia Nammari, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SALEM, West Bank - Majdi Jabour was beaten to the point of passing out by the Fatah-allied interrogators in the West Bank who accused him of ties to rival Hamas. In Gaza, the same fate befell a Fatah supporter who was bloodied in a lockup by club-wielding Hamas security men. Two human rights groups on Monday decried widespread mistreatment and torture in Palestinian jails ...

JOURNALISTS working from the Olympics press centre in Beijing are unable to access amnesty.org, the Amnesty International website, the organisation claimed today. A number of other websites are also reported to have been blocked, they claimed. It comes as Amnesty International prepares to launch a new report evaluating the Chinese authorities’ human rights performance in the run-up to the Olympics. It is embarrassing to the International Olympic Committee, who had highlighted the loosening ...

By Tendai Maphosa | A report by a group of African human rights agencies says the joint African Union - United Nations peacekeeping force in Sudan's Darfur region is not providing sufficient protection to civilians there. Tendai Maphosa has more from our Bureau in London. The report by the Darfur Consortium, a coalition of non-governmental human rights groups warns that the international peacekeeping force in Darfur is "in ...

SFGate | The role of DNA testing in the justice system has seemed unassailable - who can argue with the odds of two people sharing the same genetic markers being, in some cases, as low as 1 in 113 billion? So DNA testing has been used to convict defendants in cases that are otherwise scant of evidence, and it's been used to spring prisoners who rotted in jail ...

By Joss Garman | It provoked an absolute storm. CNN’s ticker screamed that Britain was ‘under siege’ from environmental activists. Sky News dubbed it ‘the world’s most organised protest’ and the New Statesman ‘the most important protest of our time’ A band of pioneering environmental activists landed outside Heathrow airport last summer and injected energy and urgency into the climate change debate. The Climate Camp showed there are people sufficiently fed ...

By Joseph Zacune | During the climate talks in Bali last December, NASA scientist James Hansen presented new data showing that serious climate change impacts are already happening more rapidly and at lower global ttemperature rises than previously projected, indicating that the atmosphere is more “sensitive” to greenhouse gases than previously assumed. (1) Based on this more rapid pace of change, eight million squares kilometres of ice sheet ...

RAW STORY | A new Justice Department report concludes that politics illegally influenced the hiring of career prosecutors and immigration judges, and largely lays the blame on top aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Monday's report singles out the department's former White House liaison, Monica Goodling, for violating federal law and Justice Department policy by discriminating against job applicants who weren't Republican or conservative loyalists. The full 146-page Justice Department ...

By Heidi Stevenson | You might think you have the right to vote. You might think your vote counts. You might think that there's a problem here or there, but that they're the exceptions. You might think that the 2000 presidential election was an aberration, in which the U.S. Supreme Court violated ethical and court precedents to crown the election loser, countering the will of the people. You ...

How important is your diet to your overall health? A recent study suggests that a healthy diet can add as many as 14 years to your life. This mindset is largely ignored by most people. The good news is that even small changes can make a big difference, though. And kids are one of the most important groups of people who should be making changes! Parents have a responsibility to ...

By Stephen Lendman - RINF | When it comes to observing US and international laws, treaties and norms, the Bush administration is a serial offender. Since 2001, it's: -- spurned efforts for nuclear disarmament to advance its weapons program and retain current stockpiles; -- renounced the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and asserted the right to develop and test new weapons; -- abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) because it ...

Coercive interrogation Can any Bush officials be prosecuted for the policies that paved the way for secret imprisonment, rendition to other countries that torture, or American torture of terrorism suspects? These government lawyers and policymakers decimated the Geneva Conventions, defined their way out of compliance with the Convention Against Torture, and also sailed by the War Crimes Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They either approved or allowed for ...

By MICHAEL KAMBER and TIM ARANGO BAGHDAD — The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war. Zoriah Miller, the photographer who took images of marines killed in a June 26 suicide ...

MPs and peers have said they may have been misled over UK troops' use of banned interrogation methods in Iraq. Not all troops had known "conditioning" techniques such as hooding and sleep deprivation were banned, the Joint Committee on Human Rights said. The committee had received assurances by a minister and a senior military officer that they did know. The use of such techniques emerged after the death of Iraqi ...

THE LAWYER representing a British resident detained in Guantánamo Bay has written to Taoiseach Brian Cowen seeking information on CIA flights involved in his client's "extraordinary rendition" which landed in Shannon in 2002 and 2004. Clive Stafford Smith wrote to Mr Cowen on Friday on behalf of Binyam Mohamed, whom he is representing in the US military commissions process and US habeas corpus litigation. Mr Mohamed, a janitor from Kensington in London, ...

WASHINGTON: Nayyar Zaidi, the well-known US-based Pakistani-American journalist, who has been a citizen of the United States for more than 30 years has been in US custody for the last four months on what are said to be terrorism-related charges. According to one report, Zaidi is being held on the charge of “obstruction of justice”, a very serious offence. He is also said to be awaiting a trial. The Homeland Security Department ...