News stories by William Fisher, page 2

As immigrant advocate groups held marches, demonstrations and hunger strikes across the U.S. and feverishly lobbied lawmakers in Washington, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, announced he would file a motion Wednesday to permit the Senate to take up the DREAM Act, thus setting up a showdown over the controversial immigration bill.

After first resisting the efforts of human rights and legal advocates, the British government has now backed down and placed an immediate ban on the export of lethal injection drugs to be used in U.S. executions.

Some of the nation's leading human rights groups - who are almost always on the same page - are taking widely opposing positions on the latest Wikileaks document dump of diplomatic cables.

Wikileaks' spectacular paper dump of U.S. diplomatic cables may not yet have produced any blockbusters, but many of the restricted or secret documents released to the world on Sunday have served to peel back the scabs of serious injuries inflicted by the administration of George W. Bush.

Democratic lawmakers will attempt to summon up their waning power by using the so-called 'lame duck' session of Congress to pass what will likely be the closest they will get to comprehensive immigration reform.

Egypt's authoritarian government ramped up its crackdown on journalists and opposition politicians ahead of the Nov. 28 parliamentary elections and rebuffed a U.S. call for international observers to monitor 'free and fair' balloting.

While U.S. immigration authorities are 'understandably eager to trumpet the overall number' of people they deport, close to one in three deportations recommended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is being rejected by immigration courts, according to an analysis of case-by-case government data.

The conviction of the first Guantanamo Bay detainee brought to New York for trial is triggering a wide range of reactions from politicians and legal experts.

Privacy advocates called on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Tuesday to end its controversial new initiative of whole-body scans and enhanced pat-downs of airline passengers, calling the programme 'dangerous to health, ineffective and unconstitutional'.

The British government will reportedly pay millions in compensation to seven British nationals who were unlawfully 'rendered' to U.S.-run prisons and tortured with the cooperation of British intelligence.