Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party and the key opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) agreed Thursday to lift a ban on women wearing headscarves in universities and public offices. The agreement is in response to recent calls from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the government to lift the ban immediately and not wait [...]

The Japanese National Police Agency (NPA) on Thursday issued guidelines for police behavior during suspect interrogations. The Japanese police have frequently been accused of forcing confessions from suspects using questionable or overly aggressive tactics; in one case, police pressured an innocent man into admitting to committing a rape, a confession that ultimately earned him two [...]

The UN Human Rights Council Thursday adopted a resolution criticizing Israel for recent military attacks and a week-long blockade against the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip that the Council says amount to human rights violations. The resolution, passed by a 30-1 vote with 15 Western states abstaining, calls the military attacks on Palestinian areas "grave violations of [...]

UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on Thursday unveiled the Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008 , which among other proposals to strengthen the country's terrorism laws includes a provision increasing the number of days a terror suspect can be detained without charge to 42 days, up from the current limit of 28. The Home Office described the bill [...]

US Marine 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson will face court-martial in May on charges of making false official statements and obstruction of justice in connection to the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha in November 2005. During Grayson's Wednesday arraignment at Camp Pendleton, a military judge set a trial date of May 28. Grayson did [...]

Lead contractor Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff has agreed to a $458 million settlement to end an inquiry stemming from a July 10, 2006 ceiling panel collapse in Boston's $15 billion Big Dig tunnel project that killed one person, officials said Wednesday. In July 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the ceiling collapse was most likely [...]

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the state of Missouri cannot deny an anti-abortion group's application for a specialty license plate with an anti-abortion message, holding that the Missouri law that allowed the denial was unconstitutionally vague. Choose Life of Missouri had applied to get specialty license plates with the message "Choose Life," but its [...]

US President George W. Bush issued an executive order Wednesday "reforming how the United States reviews national security concerns that may arise from foreign investments." The executive order is designed to implement the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007 , which expands the investigative scope of the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment [...]

The Canadian government ceased transferring Afghan detainees from Canadian to Afghan custody in November after Canadian monitors in Afghanistan discovered evidence of torture, according to a Canadian Justice Department letter sent this week to two advocacy groups suing the government to halt further transfers. In the letter, made public Wednesday, a Justice Department official wrote: [...]

The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) on Wednesday called the European Union and United Nations' practice of blacklisting terror suspects from interstate travel "completely arbitrary" and urged member states of both organizations to amend their blacklisting practice to "preserve the credibility of the international fight against terrorism." Rapporteur Dick Marty reported that the lists [...]