World News

Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown speaks at a conference in London titled "The Future of Progressive Governance", Friday, Feb. 8, 2008.

photo: AP / Kirsty Wigglesworth, pool

UK party leaders agree to first live TV debates
read more The Star

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown will face the leaders of the two biggest opposition parties in Britain's first live televised election debates in the run-up to polls next year, the government said on Monday. Britain's Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party Gordon Brown addresses media at the news conference in Copenhagen...

File - U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Morgan Curry briefs Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III on the capabilities of a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle at Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan, Sept. 10, 2009.

photo: USAF / Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison

From the Beast of Babylon to the Beast of Kandahar (Part One)
read more WorldNews.com

Article by WorldNews.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Although it was a very sacrilegious act to call the first atomic test "Trinity," naming the new stealth unmanned aircraft the "Beast of Kandahar" was truly prophetic, even an apocalyptic correction. Evidently, the U.S. Air Force's Beast of Kandahar is designed to provide reconnaissance and...

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (left) and United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown address correspondents at the Bella Centre in Copenhagen, where the United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place.

photo: UN / Mark Garten

Copenhagen treaty was 'held to ransom', says Gordon Brown
read more The Guardian

Gordon Brown calls for reform of UN climate talks after Copenhagen talks end in weak agreement Gordon Brown has called for a reform of the way UN climate talks are held. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images...

File - Navanathem Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, speaks at the opening event for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, organized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

photo: UN / Paulo Filgueiras

LRA leaders must be put on trial - U.N. rights chief
read more The Star

GENEVA (Reuters) - Leaders of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army must be brought to justice for carrying attacks of deliberate brutality in neighbouring Sudan and Congo, the top U.N. human rights official said on Monday. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay addresses a news conference in Geneva April 24, 2009. (REUTERS/Denis...

Anti-Myanmar government protesters hold posters of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a protest to demand her release in front of the U.N. office in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, May 22, 2009.

photo: AP / Sakchai Lalit

Suu Kyi to appeal Myanmar detention
read more Al Jazeera

Myanmar's supreme court is to hear an appeal against the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's opposition leader, after she was sentenced to a further 18 months in detention. The court did not release a date for the hearing, but Nyan Win, Suu Kyi's lawyer, said he expected to present the case within a month. Lawyers are appealing the...

Mourners attend the funeral ceremony of Iranian Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the spiritual father of Iran's reform movement, his body in a casket at left, in the city of Qom 78 miles (125 kilometers) south of the capital Tehran, Iran, Monday, Dec. 21, 2009.

photo: AP

Witnesses: Protests at funeral for Iranian cleric
read more The Press Democrat

Iranian authorities have barred foreign media from covering the processions in the holy city of Qom for Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died Sunday at age 87. But witnesses said many mourners shouted protest cries including "Death to the Dictator" in displays of anger against Iran's ruling establishment. There were no immediate reports...

Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., left, and John Kerry, D-Mass., center, talk with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., chat following a 60-40 cloture vote which is the first step on passing a health care bill on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 21, 2009.

photo: AP / Harry Hamburg

Obama's healthcare bill clears stern senate test
read more DNA India

Washington: US president Barack Obama's landmark healthcare reform bill cleared a major hurdle as the US Senate today voted 60-40 to advance a massive $871 billion bill to extend coverage to nearly all Americans and tighten regulations on private insurers. Though the vote marked just the first of the several procedural votes on the issue, before...

Anas Mustapha foreground who was one of the children tested with the meningitis epidemic experimental drug and now suffering brain damage stands near the entrance of their house in Kano, Nigeria Thursday, July 19, 2007 New York-based Pfizer is facing four court cases two filed by the federal government , two by the state in Nigeria over a decade-old drug trial in the northern Muslim city of Kano. It is accused of using a 1996 meningitis epidemic to push through a sloppily managed study without the full understanding of the parents or the proper regulatory approval.

photo: AP / George Osodi

Nigerians await Pfizer settlement
read more Al Jazeera

Families in the Nigerian state of Kano have been awarded millions of dollars by Pfizer, the world's biggest drug-maker, in a settlement over a medical trial that allegedly caused deaths and injuries. Pfizer carried out medical trials in Kano in 1996, when about two-hundred children were tested with an antibiotic called Trovan, which was...

Jehuda Hiss M.D, the director of the Israeli National Center of Forensic Medicine, poses at his Tel Aviv office, June 16, 2002

photo: AP / Eitan Hess-Ashkenazi

Israel admits to organ thefts
read more Al Jazeera

Israel has admitted that it harvested organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians and Israelis in the 1990s, without permission from their families. The admission follows the release of an interview with Jehuda Hiss, the former head of Israel's forensic institute, in which he said that workers at the institute had harvested skin, corneas, heart...

Pro-reform Iranians attend the funeral ceremony of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the spiritual father of Iran's reform movement, in the city of Qom 78 miles (125 kilometers) south of the capital Tehran, Iran, Monday, Dec. 21, 2009.

photo: AP

Thousands attend Iranian dissident's funeral: report
read more Yahoo Daily News

TEHRAN (AFP) – Hundreds of thousands of mourners turned out in Iran's holy city of Qom on Monday for the funeral of top dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, opposition websites reported. Montazeri, an inspiration to Iran reformists and human rights activists and a fierce critic of the clerical regime he helped create,...