Human Rights Glance
Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live?
It's hard to say. But while the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions are attracting interest in Israel and elsewhere, hardly anyone notices or protests what's going on in the Jordan Valley.
In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron.
CIA interrogators exceeded legal limits on harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees during the Bush administration, according to a former top Justice Department official who was interviewed by congressional investigators.
Argentina has become the first Latin American country to allow gay couples to marry and adopt children, defying Catholic opposition to join the ranks of a few mostly European nations with similar laws.
D.C.'s highest court has ruled against opponents of the city's same-sex marriage law, saying they cannot ask voters to overturn it. Opponents had wanted to challenge a law that took effect in Washington in March allowing same-sex couples to marry. They attempted to get approval to put an initiative on the ballot asking city voters to define marriage in the city as between one man and one woman.
Former Guantanamo detainees can proceed with lawsuits accusing Britain of complicity in torture overseas, a High Court judge ruled Wednesday, rejecting a government request to suspend the action.
The Palestinians of Gaza, most of them descended from refugees of the 1948 war that created Israel, have lived through decades of conflict and confrontation. Their scars have accumulated like layers of sedimentary rock, each marking a different crisis — homelessness, occupation, war, dependency.
