When an Amsterdam court acquitted far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders of all charges of discrimination and inciting hatred against Muslims on June 23, it seemed a fitting climax to a week that saw the end of the decade-long Dutch experiment with integration. Judges ruled that although the comments the politician made in the Dutch press and on the internet between October 2006 and March 2008 comparing Islam to Nazism may be offensive, they are nonetheless legal and part of a legitimate government ...

A newly released report on student achievement finds that members of the nation's second largest ethnic group are still woefully underperforming their white counterparts. The report, issued June 23 by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics shows that while scores have gone up for both groups, Hispanic students lag by the same amount today as they did in 1990, which means that the achievement gap between Hispanic and white students has been ...

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has never shied away from talking about his religious faith. So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that he invoked "God's law" throughout his long, rambling press conference on June 24 — after going missing in Buenos Aires for six days — to confess his yearlong extramarital affair with an Argentine woman. But in acknowledging his infidelity, Sanford was actually admitting that he had broken a state law: adultery is ...

Few government programs have delivered on america's promise as a land of opportunity as explicitly as the GI Bill. When it was signed in June 1944, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act

Three people were killed Saturday when hostile fire caused a Pakistani military transport helicopter to crash, Pakistani officials said.

The first search of Michael Jackson's bedroom a day after his death found marijuana, skin-bleaching and hair-growing ointments, anti-insomnia pills and empty bottles of several anti-anxiety drugs, according to court documents unsealed Thursday. A substance initially suspected to be tar heroin proved not to be a narcotic, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation. An affidavit, written by Los Angeles Detective Orlando Martinez, was used to outline probable cause for a warrant to search Jackson's Holmby Hills, California, ...

Top Iranian military officials have called for even faster prosecutions and demanded "swift retribution" for post-election detainees, despite more than 100 Iranians going through mass trials this month, Iranian media reported. The detainees were among those arrested amid protests against the disputed election, in which hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the overwhelming winner. The protests sparked a brutal government crackdown that led to thousands of arrests, scores of injuries and at least 30 deaths. Most of those arrested ...

Jewish groups and the Argentine government condemned Friday the nomination of a man accused in the 1994 terrorist bombing of a Jewish center to serve as Iran's defense minister. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nominated Ahmad Vahidi to fill the cabinet position on Wednesday, which drew a rebuke from Jewish leaders in Buenos Aires, including one from the Delegation of Israeli-Argentine Associations, or DAIA. "The decision adopted by the Iranian president, who systematically denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction ...

Iran has released a French academic from prison, though it's not clear when Clotilde Reiss can return home, French President Nicolas Sarkozy's office announced Sunday. Reiss, 24, is the second French woman facing charges as part of mass trials in Iran who was released on bond. French authorities are now demanding that Iran drop all charges against Reiss and Nazak Afshar -- an employee of the French embassy in Tehran who was released August 8, the statement from Sarkozy's office ...

Amid turmoil over the treatment of post-election detainees and controversy over the mass trials of political figures, Iran's supreme leader on Saturday appointed a new judiciary chief, Iranian media reported. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tapped Sadeq Larijani -- brother of Iran's powerful parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani -- to replace Hashemi Shahroudi, a vocal hardliner against the opposition movement, who finished his 10-year term, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported. Another brother, Mohammad Javad Larijani, is the secretary-general of the judiciary's human ...