New Zealand yesterday legalised same-sex marriage, with a surge in marriage applications, according to New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs. New Zealand is now the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to legalise same-sex marriage, and the fourteenth country to do so worldwide. After passing a bill in April of this year, the New Zealand […]

Irish budget airline Ryanair have added newspaper publishers Associated Newspapers and Mirror Group to their legal targets in a High Court defamation action filed yesterday in Dublin that also targets Channel 4. The move confirms the carrier’s expression of intent to sue Channel 4 after the UK broadcaster screened Secrets of the Cockpit, a documentary […]

South African President Jacob Zuma announced yesterday that the health of former President and anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela was showing a “slow but steady improvement”. The 95-year-old was admitted to hospital on June 8 with a lung infection. Zuma’s statement mirrors that of Mandela’s youngest daughter Zindzi who told the state-owned television company SABC on Friaday that Mandela “now manages to sit […]

As of Monday, over 200 New York City area bars and restaurants had committed to boycotting Russian vodka in response to anti-homosexuality related laws passed by the country’s government. The boycott follows another event that took place on Monday, where bottles of vodka were poured onto the streets of the city, as part of a […]

This past Sunday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill known as “Rocky’s Law” that requires Illinois high schools, through the local school district, to buy catastrophic injury insurance up to $3 millionUS or medical costs for up to five years, whichever one comes first, that covers student athletes. The insurance must cover […]

A jury awarded Julie Miller of Marion County, Oregon $18.6 million last Friday in a federal lawsuit against Equifax. The lawsuit claimed she spent two years trying to get Equifax Information Services to fix major mistakes on her credit report which cost her the opportunities to get new credit. Miller said she had contacted ...

The RCMP Federal Serious Organized Crime (FSOC) partnered with the California Division of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in an international money laundering investigation to collect evidence for charges in Canada.   FSOC, DEA and IRS-CI investigated a Vietnamese Organized Crime (VOC) group allegedly involved in the […]

Scientists have successfully created a Lithium ion micro-battery the size of a grain of sand. A team of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Illinois were able to create the tiny battery using 3D printing technology. In order to achieve this feat, the separate parts of the battery were printed layer-by-layer using materials […]

A recently uncovered government document confirms that Ottawa has delivered millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority in a bid to advance Israel’s interests. The internal memorandum also sheds light on Canada’s efforts to build a security apparatus to protect the Palestinian Authority from popular disgust over its compliance in the face of […]

On Monday, the United Kingdom‘s House of Lords passed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill at Third Reading, the last major step in changing the law to allow marriages between same-sex partners in England and Wales. The bill is to become law this week and same-sex marriage ceremonies are likely to start in 2014. During […]