Death row inmates in Japan spend decades in isolation and face inhuman conditions that can lead to mental illness, Amnesty International said Thursday. Some who have exhausted their legal options are not told they will be put to death until the last minute, the human rights group said. Japan executes such prisoners despite signing an international law that requires inmates with serious mental illness to be exempt from the death penalty, according to Amnesty. The report urged the government to ...

The dog days of summer have hit Italy hard this year. For my own family beach holiday on the enchanting island of Sardinia, the surprise star was Totò, a pint-sized, black-and-white, eight-month-old mixed-breed from Naples who our friends brought along in a house we shared near the southern town of Pula. Totò — named for the famed Neapolitan comedian rather than Dorothy's pooch — has exactly one trick in his repertoire: misbehaving. He swiped everything from pasta al ...

The head of a humanitarian agency in Chechnya and her husband were found dead early Tuesday, their bodies stuffed in the trunk of their car, a prosecutor's spokeswoman said. "These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year. Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist, traveled to ...

There was an "alarming spike" in the number of Iranian executions between the disputed June 12 presidential election and Wednesday's inauguration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second term, Amnesty International reported Friday. "In just over 50 days, we recorded no less that 115 executions. That is an average of more than two each day," said Irene Khan, secretary-general of the human rights watchdog. "This represents a significant increase, even compared to the appallingly high rate of executions that has been ...

A human rights group urged Burundi to reverse a law that makes homosexuality illegal, saying it risks worsening the harsh treatment of gays in the eastern Africa nation. The new law makes "sexual relations with persons of the same sex" illegal and punishable by up to two years in prison, Human Rights Watch said in a recently released report. It was enacted just as the gay, lesbian and transgender community had started to mobilize and call for equal treatment, according ...

Human rights supporters in dozens of cities around the world plan to rally Saturday to show solidarity with Iranians seeking democracy and civil rights, one of the organizing groups said. United4Iran said it expects protests at Iranian embassies and other sites to condemn the Iranian government's violent response to citizens who claim the June 12 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was fraudulent. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets after the election, and many were met with brutality ...

Saudi Arabia's campaign against the al Qaeda terrorist network has led to "massive human rights violations" by security forces, including torture and the arrests of non-violent reformists, the human rights group Amnesty International reported Tuesday.

Police and soldiers killed at least 133 people during two days of riots between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria last year, Human Rights Watch alleged Monday. Most of the victims of violence by security forces were young Muslim men, often unarmed, the group charged in testimony before a state commission examining the riots and in a separate report. More than 700 people died in the violence last November, the group said, citing local religious authorities on both sides of the ...

Government agents used tear gas to disperse demonstrators, and beat and kidnapped a human rights lawyer, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said Saturday, citing witnesses. The advocacy group said human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr, who was walking with friends to Friday prayers, was confronted by people dressed in civilian clothes. They pushed her into a car and drove off, the group said, citing witnesses. In a subsequent telephone call to her husband, Sadr said she had been ...

Wajeha al-Huwaider picked up her passport, got in a taxi, and headed from her home in eastern Saudi Arabia to the nearby island kingdom of Bahrain -- a 45-minute drive that many Saudis take to get away for the weekend. Despite having a valid passport, Saudi authorities at the border sent al-Huwaider home. That's because in Saudi Arabia, a woman needs permission from her male guardian before she can leave the country. Al-Huwaider -- a vocal women's rights activist in ...