Kudos to MP Irwin Cotler on two points:

his stand on Canada’s human rights commissions
his stand on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

On point number one Mr. Cotler recognizes Canada’s human rights commissions have strayed far from the mandates they were originally set up to follow.
…it’s clear Cotler believes the commissions have, in investigating a number of complaints [...]

Has anyone else seen this story? The Saudis are actually going to execute a woman for the crime of witchcraft. From the BBC,
The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.
Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made [...]

Once again a Canadian citizen has mysteriously died in Mexico. 19-year-old Josh Iwasiuk was vacationing at the Getaway Resort in Puerto Vallarta with his older brother Jerry last week. The two brothers were drinking in a hotel bar Saturday afternoon which is the last time Jerry saw his younger brother.
After Jerry awoke the next morning [...]

While most of the industrialized nations of the world deal with such mundane matters as economics, health care, justice, education and global warming to name a few, Japan is preoccupied with more pressing concerns.
Japan’s Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba is considering how his Self-Defense Forces could respond to an attack by space aliens while adhering to [...]

A draft resolution introduced by Canada and backed by other western nations including the US was approved by the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. The resolution expresses “deep concern” at the ongoing human rights abuses in Iran and cites as examples “torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including flogging and amputations.”
It specifically [...]

Interesting piece by Peter Foster in the Financial Post called Road to Bali.
The fate of the Earth hangs in the balance in Bali, but the issue is not whether humanity will succumb to a “climate crisis,” or how the international community might craft a successor to the tattered Kyoto Accord (Let’s call it KyoTwo). The [...]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used to be a popular guy - not anymore. Students who once were the power base of his reform movement are turning against him in ever increasing numbers.
Hundreds of Iranian students expressed their anger over a government crackdown on activists in a protest Sunday at Tehran University, the second such demonstration [...]

Afghanistan has ended a 3-yr + moratorium on capital punishment by executing 15 prisoners.
Afghanistan has executed 15 prisoners, including a man convicted of killing three western journalists and an Afghan photographer, in the country’s first use of the death penalty in over three years, Chief of Prisons Abdul Salam Ismat said Monday.
Ismat said the mass [...]

This is an unexpected albeit pleasant surprise. Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory adds a new dynamic to world politics. It will be interesting to see how the new France fits into the European Union - or the United Nations for that matter.

I had to chuckle when I read this story.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been accused of indecency after he publicly embraced and kissed on the hand an elderly woman who used to be his schoolteacher.
The ultra-conservative Hezbollah newspaper, which is not related to the group in Lebanon of the same name, criticised him on the [...]