The Supreme Court of Pakistan on Friday declared that the 2007 emergency decree imposed on the country by former President Pervez Musharraf was unconstitutional, Pakistan's attorney general said. Sardar Muhammad Latif Khan Khosa said the court also ruled illegal all judicial appointments by Musharraf, who dismissed about 60 judges when he declared the state of emergency. The fired judges included 14 of the 18 on the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. The country's top attorney, Ali ...

A British multiple sclerosis sufferer who hopes to die one day by assisted suicide will learn Thursday whether she can die with her husband by her side. Debbie Purdy, 46, has been waging a lengthy legal battle to clarify Britain's ambiguous laws on assisted suicide. Her battle reaches its end Thursday afternoon when Britain's highest court, the Law Lords, issues a ruling on her appeal. Purdy's condition is getting worse. She has primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which means her symptoms ...

Twenty milligrams; that's the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article. Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more. This may not ...

Goldman Sachs is a giant pig. A giant pig that blows bubbles through a wand shaped like a dollar sign. A giant pig that laughs at us when we invest in worthless dot.com stocks. A giant pig that happily watches us get carried away and burned by rising home prices. A giant pig that smiles widely when we have to fill our tanks with $4.00 a gallon gas. Quite simply, the investment bank that is revered on Wall Street ...

Reports of a lone child having survived Tuesday's crash of a Yemenia Airways flight in the Indian Ocean have people wondering: How does anyone survive a plane crash? "I just don't think there's any pattern to survivability. It's just luck of the draw and depends on how the plane goes in," said aviation expert John Eakin, head of Air Data Research in Helotes, Texas. Not counting Tuesday's disaster, there have been 12 airliner crashes since 1970 that yielded a sole ...

Are some people hardwired to get the blues? Scientists have long believed that a tendency toward melancholy runs in families, much like dimpled chins and blue eyes. But the tricky part has been figuring out which genes are involved and how strongly they are correlated with a risk for developing depression. A new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association now threatens to send researchers back to the drawing board. The meta-analysis of ...

Google was going to help democratize data in China. Instead, about three years after entering the Middle Kingdom, the search company still finds itself in an uncomfortable working relationship with government censors. For about eight days between June 3 and June 11, Google.cn blocked all results that might come from searches for Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Not just politically sensitive results, not just historical accounts of the hundreds of deaths on June 4, 1989, but every single result -- including ...

Shortly after 8 a.m. on July 12, 2006, Hezbollah fighters snatched two Israeli soldiers after carrying out an ambush on their patrol. What followed was a bloody 34-day fight -- centered in southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were pounded by Israel, and Northern Israel -- which was hit by an onslaught of Hezbollah rockets. Even to this day, it's hard to say how many were killed, but estimates put the civilian death toll in Lebanon at ...

"The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion," Barack Obama said in his elegant Notre Dame commencement speech, "and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm." You can say that again. In recent weeks, the President and just about every other major politician from both parties have been boggled by soldier-lawyer disputes. Some have been small: whether or not House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was adequately briefed ...

Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient "small cat"-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, primates and humans. Scientists say the fossil, dubbed "Ida," is a transitional species, living around the time the primate lineage split into two groups: A line that would eventually produce humans, primates and monkeys, and another that would give rise to lemurs and other primates. The fossil was formally named Darwinius masillae, in honor of the anniversary of Charles Darwin's 200th ...