Carrying out his May threat to take over the California prison health care system , US District Judge Thelton Henderson said Thursday he will appoint an independent overseer for the medical facilities. The appointment is expected to take...

US District Judge Karen Schreier Thursday granted a preliminary injunction blocking a controversial South Dakota law passed in March requiring abortion doctors to tell women that abortion ends the lives of "human beings", or face 30...

AP is reporting that Sandra Day O'Connor , first woman justice on the US Supreme Court, has announced her plans to retire . Read the text of Justice O'Connor's letter of resignation addressed to President...

Ukrainian authorities said Thursday that they have discovered who was behind the assassination attempt by poisoning directed at President Viktor Yushchenko and have traced the substance used in the plot to a facility housing...

Three more people were reported dead Thursday as a result of "Operation Drive Out Trash" or "Operation Restore Order", Zimbabwe's controversial 6-week government demolition and squatter resettlement plan, when police swept through an illegal settlement west of...

Of the 15 Sunni Muslims joining members of the committee to construct Iraq's new constitution , two are accused of being former senior members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party while two others have indicated that...

The European Commission on Thursday published a proposal to create a European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights . The proposal comes in the wake of an Amnesty International report urging Great Britain's incoming EU...

Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir announced in a national broadcast Thursday a plan to end the country's 16-year state of emergency by July 9. According to el-Brashir, the adoption of a new constitution and transitional government, following the...

In a White House interview with Danish television that aired Thursday, US President George W. Bush said that agreeing to the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change would have "wrecked" the US...

France applied the controversial doctrine of "universal jurisdiction" that allows states to claim criminal jurisdiction over persons accused of committing crimes abroad for the first time Thursday in the trial of a Mauritanian military officer. Ely Ould...