Why Bahrain is Trying Civilians Before a Military Court

The seven men who will go on trial in Bahrain on Thursday will make history as the country’s first-ever civilians to be tried before a military court. Facing the death penalty, they’ve been sequestered in an unknown location for weeks and accused of murdering two policemen by running them over with a car.

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Humanitarian Intervention: Whom to Protect, Whom to Abandon

Death and taxes are always with us, and so are arguments about whether nations ever have the right or duty to intervene in the affairs of others. The case for “humanitarian intervention,” under a variety of names, has been asserted at least since the great powers threw their weight behind Greece’s struggle for independence in the 1820s, but in its modern form was developed during the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, when it appeared to many that armed force was the only way to end terrible atrocities.

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A Brief History of Assisted Suicide

Mention the term “euthanasia,” and the first thing most people think of is the epic assisted suicide battle of the 1990s starring Jack “Doctor Death” Kevorkian. But the issue of whether human beings — and more pointedly, doctors — have the right to help others die has been in the public discourse since before the birth of Christ.

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With HIV/AIDS Deaths on Rise, China Struggles to Improve Outreach

It’s hard to fight an epidemic when no one wants to talk about the cause. In China, a country whose last decade has been defined by economic growth and social opening, silence still enshrouds many aspects of the nations’ sex life, and not, health experts say, without consequences

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Study: States can’t afford death penalty

At 678, California has the nation’s largest death row population, yet the state has not executed anyone in four years. But it spends more than $130 million a year on its capital punishment system — housing and prosecuting inmates and coping with an appellate system that has kept some convicted killers waiting for an execution date since the late 1970s.

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