US President Bush on Wednesday presented the Military Commissions Act of 2006 , proposed legislation that would authorize military commissions for terror detainees and enemy combatants. The Bush administration agreed to work with Congress to authorize military commissions for terror detainees after the US Supreme Court ruled in June in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military [...]

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Leading Wednesday's international brief, a spokesperson for the International Criminal Court (ICC) has told the Ugandan paper Daily Monitor that the ICC would make no move to cooperate with demands by Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels wanting a cancellation of ICC indictments in exchange for surrendering to authorities. Since the demands on Tuesday, the ICC [...]

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The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance presented a draft plan for dictating the division of Iraq into autonomous regions to the Iraq National Assembly on Wednesday. The draft law reportedly provides for autonomy for the Shiite-majority south and recognizes the existing autonomy of the three northern Kurdish provinces. This arrangement possibly leaves the Sunni Arabs, who [...]

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The highest court in the Netherlands, the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden , on Tuesday affirmed the use of intelligence information in terror prosecutions by sustaining the convictions of three defendants charged with terrorist activity. The court also said that intelligence information could be used as a basis for an investigation, search and arrest. Although such [...]

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A Danish court on Wednesday ordered the detention of two men arrested during a police raid on an Odense suburb on Tuesday morning. The court determined that there was enough evidence to hold the two for four weeks while the investigation into an alleged terror plot continues, but ruled that the five others arrested must [...]

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US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Tuesday identified increasing financial costs in the war on terrorism as the reason that additional federal funding for local and state law enforcement is not forthcoming. Mayors and police chiefs for several US cities have criticized the lack of federal spending on law enforcement at the state and local level, [...]

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US President Bush on Wednesday acknowledged that the US Central Intelligence Agency has operated secret prisons outside the US where high-value terror suspects were detained, and said that 14 of those suspects have now been transferred to the Defense Department's military prison at Guantanamo Bay where they will face trial. The suspects transferred to Guantanamo [...]

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A new US Army Field Manual on intelligence interrogations released Wednesday specifies that the Geneva Conventions apply to all detainees and eliminates separate standards for the questioning of prisoners of war and enemy combatants . The new manual also abandons plans to keep specific interrogation techniques classified . Military officials said in June that the [...]

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A federal judge in Argentina Tuesday ruled unconstitutional a presidential pardon extended to Jorge Rafael Videla , who prosecutors say led Argentina's military junta during the worst periods of the so-called "Dirty War" crackdown on dissidents between 1976 and 1983 that resulted in an official "missing" count of 13,000 people. Videla was tried and convicted [...]

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The Court of Appeals of Virginia , the state's second-highest court, upheld the nation's first felony conviction for computer spamming on Tuesday, ruling that Virginia's anti-spamming statute does not violate the First Amendment or the so-called Dormant Commerce Clause, and is not unconstitutionally vague. On appeal, admitted spammer Jeremy Jaynes argued that the Virginia statute [...]

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