Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva Tuesday approved a law permitting abortions during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The Portuguese parliament passed the law last month after a February referendum on the issue failed due to low voter turnout. Approximately 60 percent of those who voted in the referendum supported a reform of the former law, which only permitted abortion in cases of rape, fetal malformation, or risk to the mother’s health.

The law was passed despite staunch opposition from the Catholic Church, to which 90% of Portuguese belong. The new law imposes a three-day waiting period on women seeking abortions and requires that they receive information about adoption as an alternative. Portugal's reform leaves Ireland, Poland, and Malta as the only remaining EU member states that outlaw abortion.

Jordan demonstrated a poor human rights record in 2006, according to a report released Tuesday by the Arab Organization for Human Rights. The report singled out for particular criticism the country's controversial Terrorism Prevention Law, passed last year in response to the Amman hotel bombing that killed 57 people in 2005. The AOHR joined opposition parties and UN officials in characterizing its provisions as tantamount to martial law, saying it imposes harsh penalties beyond the scope of the criminal code.

The report also denounced the decision to extradite suspected terrorist Mohammad Zaki Amawi, a dual citizen, to the United States without providing him a prior trial in Jordan. It additionally condemned Jordan's agreement with the US not to deliver any US citizen to the International Criminal Court at The Hague without prior written approval from Washington. According to both the AOCHR report and the 2006 US Department of State Country Report for Jordan, Jordanian officials obtained confessions from detainees by using physical abuse or threats of torture.

North Korea has told a visiting US delegation that it will miss Saturday's deadline to begin shutting down its main nuclear reactor but could start within 30 days, NBC News reported today.

The US delegation believes it convinced the Pyongyang regime it would soon receive funds in a frozen Macau bank account, which had been an obstacle to North Korea's agreement to begin dismantling its nuclear weapons program, the US television network said.

The promise led North Korean nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-gwan to tell the US delegation that it could start closing the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and allow UN atomic inspectors back in within 30 days.

Former UN ambassador Bill Richardson, who led the US delegation in Pyongyang, will announce the agreement today in Seoul when he meets there with the US pointman on North Korea negotiations, Christopher Hill, NBC said.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said earlier that Macau's monetary authority had agreed to open the accounts to their owners.

In the first phase of a six-country agreement reached in February, Pyongyang had agreed to shut down the Yongbyon nuclear reactor by this Saturday in exchange for badly needed fuel oil.

The same poll found that a majority of Canadians - some 53 percent - think that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with its enumerated and judicially-enforced US-style guarantees of personal freedoms - has had a positive effect on the country since its adoption in 1982. US-style legal structures and procedures have gained increasingly popularity in Canada in the last 50 years, a trend that has arguably accelerated in the late 25, partly under the impetus of the Charter itself.

A new hunger strike is underway at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, The Boston Globe reported Monday.

According to the online edition of the newspaper, lawyers for the hunger-strikers were quoted as saying that their clients' actions are driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum-security complex at Guantanamo to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December 2006.

The 13 detainees now on hunger strike is the highest number to endure the force-feeding regime on an extended basis since early 2006, when the U.S. military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of strapping prisoners into "restraint chairs" while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through their nostrils.

Yet their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantanamo has continued even as the military has tightened its control.

"We don't have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights," one hunger-striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military physician, according to medical records released recently under a federal court order.

"If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting," he said.

Guantanamo spokesman Robert Durand played down the significance of the current hunger strike, describing the prisoners' complaints as "propaganda."

The United States opened the detention facility at its naval base in Guantanamo in January 2002 to hold terror suspects and Taliban members mainly captured during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

More than 390 detainees have been transferred abroad from Guantanamo, and currently about 385 prisoners are still being held there.

El Salvadorian President Elias Antonio Saca on Sunday hailed the U.S.- Brazil plan to set up an ethanol plant in El Salvador, despite criticism of the scheme in the region.

The plan was a piece of "excellent news" for El Salvador's national development and economy, the president said on his Sundayradio program in San Salvador.

The plan would consolidate El Salvador's regional status as "the best prepared one to develop biofuels and renewable energy," he said.

U.S. President George W. Bush and his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva last week announced the joint biofuel plan which will bring Haiti, the Dominican Republic, St. Kitts and Nevis and El Salvador into the biofuel cooperation program.

Under the plan, a plant will be established in El Salvador to produce biofuels from sugarcane.

On Wednesday, Saca said the government was working on a law to regulate the sugarcane harvesting for ethanol production and use.

Although the U.S.-Brazil plan will drastically increase the production of clean fuel, it has drawn harsh criticism from some South American countries as well as environmentalists.

Some critics said that Washington aims to use the plan against the influence of oil-rich Venezuela in the region, while others fear that enlarging plantations of sugarcane, a main ingredient for ethanol, would aggravate the shortage of food staples in the Caribbean countries.

Iran on Monday celebrated the one-year anniversary of the country‘s first success in enriching uranium, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepared to announce new progress in the key process that the United Nations has demanded Iran halt.

The U.N. has imposed limited sanctions on Iran until it suspends enrichment a key process that can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or the basis of a warhead. The United States and its allies accuse Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons, a claim the country denies.

Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, who is also deputy interior minister for security affairs, was quoted on the state TV Web site as saying that his six-day journey to Moscow, which ended Monday, showed "the ineffectiveness of the resolution."

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Krivtsov confirmed that Zolqadr visited Russia. He told The Associated Press that the resolution does not prohibit visits by the listed individuals, instead calling for heightened vigilance and attention, and that "this vigilance is directed first of all at people who are directly related to nuclear programs," suggesting that Zolqadr was not.

Tensions are also high between Iran and the West following the 13-day detention of 15 British sailors by Iran. The sailors, who were seized by Revolutionary Guards off the Iraqi coast, were released on Wednesday, but since then have said they were put under psychological pressure by their captors to force them to "confess" to being in Iranian waters when captured, angering many in Britain.

Diplomats from developing nations were attending Monday‘s celebrations at Natanz, but diplomats from European Union boycotted to protest Iran‘s refusal of the U.N. demands, said the Foreign Ministry in Germany, which currently holds the EU presidency.