Free Republic

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a New York Times interview published Monday that state attorneys general aren’t required to defend laws they consider discriminatory, including bans on same-sex marriage. Holder said that state attorneys general should carefully analyze laws that raise major constitutional issues before deciding whether to defend them. “Engaging in that process and making that determination is something that’s appropriate for an attorney general to do,” Holder told the Times. To make his case, Holder said that if he were an attorney general “in Kansas in 1953,” he “would not have defended a Kansas statute that...

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the days before the disputed presidential election, Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites, where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here. The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai came from each...

TEHRAN — Locked in a continuing bitter contest Monday with Iranians who say the presidential elections were rigged, the authorities here acknowledged that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, state television reported following assertions by the country’s supreme leader that the ballot was fair. But the authorities insisted that discrepancies, which could affect three million votes, did not violate Iranian law and the country’s influential Guardian Council said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the election result.

Supporters of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi called off a planned protest rally in Tehran on Monday after the Interior Ministry declared it would be illegal and treated as sedition. A Mousavi website said the gathering had been delayed after the Interior Ministry refused to authorize it. Protests have erupted in the capital and elsewhere since Saturday when the ministry announced a landslide victory for hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Friday's election. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who previously urged Iranians to support Mr. Ahmadinejad, has told Mr. Mousavi to pursue his election complaints “calmly and legally“, state television...

The US, Britain and Canada have voiced concern about reports of irrigularities following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim of a landslide re-election victory in Iran. Thousands of protesters roamed through Tehran on Saturday, waging hit-and-run clashes with police and setting trash bins and tires ablaze and accusing Ahmadinejad of stealing an election from Mir Hossein Mousavi, his reformist rival. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the US secretary of state, said she hoped the outcome reflected the "genuine will and desire" of Iranian voters, responding to claims by supporters of Mousavi that allege that the outcome was rigged to give Ahmadinejad a decisive victory....

Hundreds of supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and moderate challenger Mirhossein Mousavi clashed in Tehran on Saturday after a landslide victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad in a presidential election, a Reuters witness said. Police using batons moved to disperse the demonstrators who were staging a sit-in to protest against Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory. They were chasing and arresting some of the protesters. The witness saw two men being carried away from the scene at Vanak square in the Iranian capital. Some people were having fistfights. The violence broke out as Iran's Interior Minister announced that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won Friday's election, gaining...