Nearly 6250 candidates have registered for Iraq's national assembly election next month, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) has reported. Once in place, Iraq's 275-member assembly will draft a constitution and appoint a new government to oversee the...

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych refused to accept apparent defeat at the country's polls Monday, declaring that he would "never recognise such a defeat, because the constitution and human rights were violated" and that his campaign team had reports...

A Sri Lanka government official said Monday that his government had set aside ordinary legal formalities to facilitate rapid burial of the thousands of victims of Sunday's tsunami that killed more than 10,000 in Sri Lanka alone, according to...

A Jordanian military court has acquitted 13 Muslim militants of conspiring to commit terrorist attacks against US interests in Jordan, including the US Embassy in Amman and Jordanian military bases where US troops were believed to be stationed. The...

With more than 98% of Sunday's vote counted, Ukrainian election officials have announced that opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko has an undefeatable lead of 52% in the country's third presidential election since October 31. Yushchenko thanked his supporters and called...

In a gesture of goodwill to the new Palestinian leadership, Israel Monday released 159 Palestinian prisoners. Interim Palestinian leader and presidential frontrunner Mahmoud Abbas (official website here; BBC profile here) has campaigned on the prisoner release issue and has...

The Washington Post reported Sunday that claims of abuse and torture made by 10 former Guantanamo detainees and described in documents filed in federal court now appear to be substantiated by FBI documents recently obtained by the ACLU under...

Ukraine's Supreme Court has voided as unconstitutional part of the electoral reform package approved earlier this month by the Ukrainian parliament, just one day before the country re-runs its presidential election, the results of which were voided by the...

In a major course-reversal, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (official website here), now a candidate for state governor in 2006, has said that he is ready to turn high-profile investigations of wrongdoing by investment banks, mutual funds and...

The French newspaper Liberation said Friday that an unpublished UN report it has obtained catalogues a plethora of major rights abuses in the conflict-wracked African state of Cote d'Ivoire over the past two years, including mass execution, torture and...