Guinea’s President-elect Alpha Conde announced Saturday that he will create a truth and reconciliation commission to address decades of ethnic and political violence. Conde said on state television that reconciliation was essential to rebuild the volatile country. The commission will be modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission created by Nelson Mandela after the [...]

Chinese officials allegedly orchestrated the hacking of Google , which caused the Internet company to briefly pull out of China earlier this year, according to a Saturday New York Times report citing a series of documents released last week by Wikileaks . Many cables display China’s obsession with the threat of the Internet, the government’s [...]

The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on Friday heard conflicting testimony from top military leaders on the services’ readiness to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) . Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Amos urged the Committee to delay the policy’s repeal, arguing that ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would complicate the integration [...]

US tobacco companies including Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds , along with an industry trade group, filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn a $271.5 million class action settlement. The settlement was awarded by the Louisiana Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in order to establish a fund meant [...]

Threats against witnesses will not prevent the prosecution of six individuals responsible for Kenya’s 2007 post-election violence , International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said Friday. According to the statement, the prosecutor will obtain arrest warrants for the individuals behind these threats if they persist. Within the next two weeks, Moreno-Ocampo plans to [...]

Nigerian prosecutors announced Thursday that they are instituting bribery charges against former US vice president Dick Cheney in connection in with a contract that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) obtained to build a natural gas project in the Niger Delta area. Bribes amounting to USD $180 million were allegedly given to Nigerian government [...]

The Supreme Court of Guinea on Friday declared Alpha Conde the winner of November’s presidential run-off election, validating the provisional results of the electoral commission and throwing out claims of electoral fraud. In light of escalating post-election violence, the Guinean government declared a state of emergency last month, just three days after Conde was provisionally [...]

The New Mexico Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the same-sex partner of an adoptive mother has no standing to seek custody of the couple’s child as a non-parent, but may request visitation. The court held that New Mexico’s current child custody law provides no legal right for a non-parent to assert custody over a [...]

Deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Fatou Bensouda on Thursday urged those in the Ivory Coast to refrain from further violence after unrest following presidential elections. In the first presidential elections in a decade, presidential challenger Alassane Ouattara was named the victor , but incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo has called the results fraudulent, [...]

Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Thursday denied a motion to recuse himself from the three-judge panel that will hear arguments on Proposition 8 , California’s same-sex marriage ban. Proposition 8 supporters had sought Reinhardt’s disqualification because of his wife’s role as executive director of the American [...]