US military judge Lt. Col. Paul McConnell Monday delayed the start of a court-martial trial for an army dog handler accused in an Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. The March 8 trial date for Sgt. Santos Cardona has been pushed back to May 22 to allow the defense more time to prepare. Cardona is charged [...]
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Prisoners in Kabul's Policharki Prison who rioted over the weekend agreed Monday to temporarily end their disturbance and allow injured inmates to be removed for medical care, according to the chief negotiator for the Afghan government. Sibghatullah Mojaddedi also reported an inmate request that the prison authorities help to bury the dead. In exchange for [...]
A federal judge blocked the Department of Defense Monday from enacting a merit pay system for its government employees. US District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said the proposed National Security Personnel System would make it unfairly difficult for employees to appeal unfavorable personnel decisions. A lawsuit challenging the system was filed in November by the [...]
Mexico's "scorched-earth" campaign in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in crimes against humanity, including genocide, torture, executions and disappearances, according to a draft report made public by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The report, commissioned by Mexican President Vicente Fox , was presented to special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto in December but [...]
In a letter sent to President Bush Monday, 17 Democrats from the US House of Representatives called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations that the National Security Agency conducted warrantless surveillance of US citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . The call for presidential [...]
Six law professors at Cambridge University have warned that an innocuous-sounding bill now going through Parliament would give UK government ministers the power to abolish jury trials, place citizens under house arrest, and rewrite the law on nationality and immigration, all without Parliamentary consent. In a letter published Sunday in the Times of London, the [...]
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has agreed to meet with opposition leaders to discuss constitutional reforms, after the parties threatened to boycott the April elections. Thaksin dissolved Parliament on February 24 in response to street protests calling for his removal and set general elections for April 2. One issue on the ballot will be whether [...]
A Serbian who may prove to be a key witness in the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in Madrid for the murder of a human rights leader in Kosovo, Spanish police said Monday. Veselin Vukotic and two other men allegedly shot and killed Enver Hadri, an ethnic Albanian and advocate of [...]
Public hearings on the merits of a case alleging state-sponsored genocide by Serbia and Montenegro opened Monday at the Hague-based International Court of Justice . Proceedings technically began in March 1993, when Bosnia filed a claim alleging violations of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide against the former Yugoslavia during the [...]
US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) has begun circulating a draft version of a bill that would require the federal government to obtain permission before conducting domestic surveillance . The bill, which Specter first mentioned earlier this month , would mandate that the attorney general get a warrant from the special court created [...]
