Human rights

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on Thursday welcomed the election of the United States to the top United Nations rights forum and urged it to prosecute those accused of torture and other abuses.

Militants and hate groups increasingly use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube as propaganda tools to recruit new members, according to a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The United States won election to the U.N. Human Rights Council for the first time on Tuesday, joining 17 other nations picked for the body, after the Obama administration ended a U.S. policy of boycotting it.

International human rights experts examining alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip said on Friday they planned to visit soon, and renewed a call for Israel to support their investigation.

If you’re over 40, it’s natural to worry about age discrimination - after all, that’s the age at which you start to be protected against discrimination by Federal law and even if you don’t look your age, you might be starting to feel it now and then. (Maybe you’ve noticed you can’t stay up as late as you used to, or maybe you caught yourself making that noise your dad makes when he up from the c...

Human rights groups said on Friday the United States and the European Union should take part in next week's U.N. conference on racism now that diplomats have removed the most contentious sections of the conference declaration.

Diplomats reached agreement on Friday on a declaration for next week's politically charged United Nations conference on racism, adding to the pressure on Washington and Brussels to decide whether to attend.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will attend next week's United Nations conference on racism in Geneva, a U.N. spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

China has promised its citizens stronger legal protection, improved incomes and expanded channels to complain as part of its first human rights action plan, which casts the Communist Party government as guardian of rights.

China denounced on Thursday U.S. criticism of its human rights record in an annual tit-for-tat exchange, saying the United States should put its own house in order first.

The European Union's data privacy regulators contradicted Google Inc. views on IP addresses and said they should be regarded as personal information, according to reports Monday.

Improving access to medicine could save 10 million lives a year globally, a U.N. health envoy said on Thursday, recommending that drugmakers support research for neglected diseases and cut prices in poor countries.

From excessive force by their security guards to helping support corrupt regimes, oil companies have long faced accusations of helping trigger human rights abuses in the far-flung countries where they operate.

AOL is being sued for its inadvertent leak of member search data this summer, accused of violating privacy as well as deceptive business practices.

Technological changes and personal privacy have been at odds ever since modern notions of privacy emerged more than a century ago. Numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the housetops', wrote two Boston lawyers in 1890 in a seminal paper that articulated the modern right to be left alone that is the basis of U.S. privacy law.