Arlan found a stable job working for a construction company. Noriko grew up Japanese, attending school and never learning her parents’ native language. Noriko, like many Tokyo girls her age, loves hip-hop and hopes to be a dancer or a teacher at a dance school someday. But her future in the only country she’s ever known went into limbo when Japanese immigration authorities arrested her mother in 2006.
Japan’s Immigration Bureau in a statement to CNN said the couple’s illegal presence in the country as an “extremely malicious” violation that “shakes the foundation of Japan’s immigration control.” But when it came to 13 year old Noriko, the government gave the girl a choice: Her country or her parents. “Japan is my homeland,” says Noriko, when asked why she is choosing to stay behind. She will move in with an aunt, allowed to stay in Japan under a visa that the government will reassess yearly. Her life, say her parents, will be better in Japan. She’ll have schooling and the dreams a big city like Tokyo can offer her, versus the impoverished farm community her parents will move back to in the Philippines.

However heart-breaking the story, this is not a story that happens rarely. Such scenes are repeated in Japan and many other countries on a regular basis. Some countries are more liberal, allowing people to see a path for becoming citizens when they have been in the country for a long time; in other cases, it is equally traumatic when the child gets automatic citizenship due to having been born there, while the parents get no such benefit and are deported back to their original countries.
One slight twist happens in some such cases when the families do not retain any papers of their original country’s citizenship, and their original country refuses to take them, asking for proof that these people were indeed their citizens in the first place.

Three teenage girls have been buried alive by their tribe in a remote part of Pakistan to punish them for attempting to choose their own husbands, in an “honour” killing case. After news of the deaths emerged, male politicians from their province, Baluchistan, defended the killings in parliament, claiming the practice was part of “our tribal custom”.
The girls, thought to have been aged between 16 and 18, were kidnapped by a group of men from their Umrani tribe. They were driven to a rural area and then injured by being shot. Then, while still alive, they were dragged bleeding to a pit, where they were covered with earth and stones, according to the findings of Human Rights Watch, the international campaigning group. Officials, speaking off the record, confirmed the killings. Some reports said that two older relatives of the girls had tried to intervene, but they too were shot and buried with the girls while still alive.

This is an absolutely despicable act, and the fact that the Government refuses to take any action on this even 6 weeks after this cold-blooded murder (in Baba Kot, a remote village in Jafferabad) makes it even more horrible. The Pakistani Government as well as the Government of Baluchistan are both run by the Pakistan People’s Party, the party that was run by Benazir Bhutto for the last 2 decades before her assassination, and the refusal to get the people involved arrested (for fear of antagonizing the tribes involved) is a political act. Even Musharraf was better than this, since in a major honor case (where a girl was raped as a means of punishment), he had got the people involved arrested and tried. In this case, what the girls wanted to do was to get married in a civil court, and this was enough to get them killed.
Unfortunately, this sort of custom (should one dignify this sort of act by calling it a custom?) happens in other countries in the region as well to varying degrees – the denial of many rights such as being able to select their own partners, being arrested for meeting people of the other sex, harassed and arrested for not wearing a full length gown, and in the more extreme cases, being ordered to be killed by tribal / caste gatherings that assume the power of life and death. These need to be combated through more education, bringing in more development; at the same time, they need to be accompanied by swift and merciless punishment for the people involved.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s unprecedented ruling that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense in their homes will immediately shift the legal battle over gun rights to California, the state with some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation. Gun rights advocates, led by the National Rifle Association, plan to file suit in federal court today challenging a San Francisco law that bans handguns in public housing, pouncing quickly on Thursday’s decision striking down Washington, D.C.’s broader ban on the same weapons.

The Supreme Court revived the nation’s gun control debate by directly assessing, for the first time in history, the meaning of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices placed limits on modern society’s efforts to deal with gun violence if they violate a constitutional right established two centuries ago to allow citizens to take up their muskets against government control. In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia stressed that the ruling does not preclude all regulation of firearms, citing restrictions in schools and government buildings and laws against felons possessing guns. The court left intact D.C.’s requirement that guns be licensed but struck down its requirements that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled.

This is probably for the first time that the Court has actually ruled on the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to individual citizens or was meant to apply to the militia (that were thought necessary at that time since there was no army, and the conception was that militias would be important for ensuring the security of the state). What is going to happen now is that there are a number of cases where existing cases and regulations are going to get challenged at the instigation of the NRA (National Rifle Association). Also, the worries about the changes to the Supreme Court due to the pushing of conservative justices seem to be coming true even more.
This ruling is going to cause a nightmare for administrators trying to control the spread of gun control and crime prevention, especially with regard to handguns (that are the most easily concealed of weapons); expect many more cases and litigation over this. Lower courts, especially in places such as New York, Washington, and California are going to have a much harder time deciphering this ruling and coming out with is permissible and what is not.

Zimbabwe’s opposition party on Tuesday formally withdrew its presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, from Friday’s run-off, a spokesman told CNN. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) hand-delivered a letter signed by Tsvangirai to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, saying it will not participate in the runoff with President Robert Mugabe, spokesman Nelson Chamisa said.

Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, he said “This is total war and we cannot be part of that war. “This is not an election because the conditions are just horrendous.” He added, “I’ve been arrested, I’ve been brutalized — this is not exaggeration. This is reality here.” Tsvangirai announced Sunday that he was dropping out of the runoff, citing what he called an ongoing campaign of political harassment, intimidation and arrests by Mugabe’s government and the ruling Zanu-PF party.

This decision will just complicate things in Zimbabwe. Mugabe is now sure to win a runoff that is bound to come under incredible criticism from the international community (and mostly be deemed as invalid). Mugabe really does not care too much for the international community, but the country has really suffered in the past few years, and is likely to continue doing so.

“Having heard that Miss Campbell had been affected by the baggage difficulties, he [Captain Sutherland] took the unusual decision to come and speak with her and explain the situation and make his apologies.” The court was told Ms Campbell became upset and demanded to know where her bag was. Ms Campbell swore at the captain and said she wanted him to get off the plane and get her bag.
The court heard BA staff asked Ms Campbell to leave the plane but she continued to shout and swear and talk into her mobile phone, so the police were called. The prosecution said Ms Campbell kicked one of the officers in the thigh. She kicked another officer in the shin, wedged herself in her seat and spat at the officers, the court was told.

Now, a lot of people were affected by the luggage problem, but why does a celebrity feel that the celebrity can show outrageous behavior and get away ? If more people do this, this would have caused serious problems overall. She should be handed a sentence, and adding community service to any sentence would be just.

However, now the state is going to file a petition in the Texas Supreme Court asking for this decision to be over-turned:

Texas authorities asked the state Supreme Court on Friday to overturn a ruling that found child welfare officials had no right to take more than 400 children from a gated polygamist compound. Lawyers for the Department of Family and Protective Services also requested that the high court allow the state to keep the children in foster homes until their fate is decided. Otherwise, they said, Texas would be forced within days to return more than 120 boys and girls to sect members who have not proved they are the biological parents.
Texas authorities raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch in West Texas on April 3, after a caller claimed she was a 16-year-old bride suffering abuse at the hands of her husband, a call that since has been shown to probably be a hoax. Inside the secluded compound, child welfare officials have said, they found numerous pregnant teenagers and child brides living in a communal setting with older men, bound in “spiritual marriages.”

No matter what happens, this is likely to remain controversial. It is pretty much known that the Church’s compound had a continuing practise of polygamy (which remains illegal), and in earlier depositions, women who have escaped from the Church have claimed that they have been forced into marriage and sex.