The office of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced Friday that it does not expect to pursue state criminal charges against Maurice "Hank" Greenberg , former AIG chairman and CEO. Spitzer originally filed suit against AIG, Greenberg and its former CFO in May, alleging that the defendants engaged in fraudulent transactions to prop up [...]

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Russian President Valdimir Putin has said he will consider amendments to a bill overwhelmingly approved by the lower house of the Russian parliament Wednesday that would greatly increase state control over non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by requiring them to register with a state commission and imposing financial oversight on their operations. He told an NGO representative [...]

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Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said Thursday that media reports that US CIA planes had made secret illegal stops in Spain while carrying terror suspects were unjustified as the US stopovers were legal, but promised to check aircraft more closely in the future. Spain has already been investigating allegations of the secret landings in [...]

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Former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was formally charged with human rights violations Thursday and placed under house arrest on the heels of an unrelated indictment on corruption charges filed Wednesday on which he was granted bail. This time Pinochet has been charged in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of six dissidents in 1974 [...]

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A Senegal appeals court ruled Friday that it was "not competent" to extradite former Chad president Hissene Habre to Belgium to face charges of crimes against humanity – including some alleged 40,000 executions and the torture of over 200,000 people – committed during his 1982-90 rule of the African country. Habre has been living is [...]

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Next Wednesday Robin Lovitt , 41, is slated to become the 1,000th person to be executed since the 10 year moratorium on capital punishment in the United States was lifted in 1977. He is convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a pool hall robbery in Virginia in 1998. Convicted killer Gary Gilmore [...]

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French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy , widely seen as a leading candidate to replace President Jacques Chirac in 2007, is calling for new crime prevention legislation and affirmative action policies in the wake of widespread rioting by immigrant youths earlier this months that prompted the French government to declare a state of emergency . The [...]

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