Defense lawyers in the trial of Saddam Hussein on Wednesday officially severed contact with the Iraqi Special Tribunal in response to the Tuesday murder of defense team member Adil al-Zubeidi . Lead counsel Khalil al-Dulaimi described the second day of hearings scheduled for November 28 as "cancelled and illegitimate" and renewed demands that the UN [...]

The Australian government is pushing forward with controversial anti-terror proposals despite criticism that arrests made earlier this week during a counter-terrorism swoop indicate the legislation is unnecessary. Although Parliament hastily approved an amendment last week at the urging of Prime Minister John Howard to allow for the prosecution of suspects without identifying a specific terrorist [...]

The BBC is reporting that the UK government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has lost a House of Commons vote on a key provision of its proposed Terrorism Bill that would have authorized detention of terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. 12:25 PM ET – AP is reporting that MPs in the [...]

French police and Interior Ministry officials said Wednesday that newly-authorized state of emergency powers were helping to subdue violence in the 13th day of rioting around the country. The government on Tuesday issued a decree giving local officials permission to use emergency powers authorized by a 1955 law , which had previously been used in [...]

Callixte Kalimanzira, Rwanda's acting interior minister during the 1994 genocide , has surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda , the court announced Tuesday. According to the tribunal, Kalimanzira is "charged with genocide, in the alternative complicity in genocide, and with direct and public incitement to commit genocide" for allegedly helping to coordinate the [...]

The Bank of New York has agreed to pay $38 million in fines in order to avoid prosecution on fraud and money laundering charges, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday. The federal investigation into the bank, the oldest in the US, began after the financial institution took part in a scheme involving $7 billion in illicit transfers [...]

Nageh Ibrahim and Fouad el-Dawalibi, founding members of militant Egyptian Islamic movement al-Gamma al-Islamiyya , have been released after more than two decades in prison in connection with the killing of President Anwar Sadat during a military parade in Cairo on Oct. 6, 1981. The men were convicted for their connections to Sadat's assassination and [...]

In a victory for intelligent design advocates, the Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday approved by a vote of 6-4 revised science standards that require students to understand not only evolution , but also recent challenges to the theory, such as that suggesting that life is too complex to have evolved without help from a [...]

The US Department of Justice is considering a request from the Central Intelligence Agency to open a criminal investigation into the leak of possibly classified information on the existence of secret CIA detention centers for suspected terrorists to the Washington Post. There have also been calls for a congressional investigation into the leaked information. Senate [...]

California voters Tuesday rejected a hotly-contested initiative that would have prevented lawmakers from drawing political voting districts . The initiative was allowed on the ballot after an appeal to the California Supreme Court ; a lower court had said the measure could not be part of the November election because petitions circulated to collect the [...]