A military group in Mauritania overthrew the president on Wednesday, with a junta taking temporary control of the West African nation. Mauritanian President Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Taya , who has allied with the US in the war on terror and severely cracked down on extremists , was out of the country when soldiers took control. He [...]

The Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political movement of former rebel leader turned vice president John Garang , called Wednesday for an international investigation into the helicopter crash that caused his death and ignited deadly clashes in Sudan. According to the newspaper Sudan Vision , a leading member of the SPLM has urged the [...]

Benyam Mohammed , a 27-year-old Ethiopian man held at Guantanamo, claims he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan before arriving in Cuba. While there is no independent verification for Mohammed's claims, it is not the first allegation of US-facilitated abuse in foreign countries utilized in order to get around US laws against torture. Mohammed [...]

Government officials from Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province defended their controversial morals law before the Supreme Court of Pakistan on Wednesday. Earlier this week, the government argued that the law was unconsitutionally vague and would be abused , with some observers comparing it to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Islamists in charge of the province today [...]

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco has overturned a lower court ruling and struck down a Hawaiian school's policy of only admitting native Hawaiians as students, even though the school receives no federal money. The court found that the Kamehameha Schools policy violated 42 USC [...]

Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler is under pressure to deny a US request to extradite Canadian marijuana activist Marc Emery in a case that is likely to spark debate over the countries' diverging drug policies. Emery is a founder of the BC Marijuana Party and his arrest in Nova Scotia last week by Canadian authorities [...]

A New York City councilman and state assemblyman have announced support for racial profiling in terrorism searches to protect the New York transit system from attacks like the recent London bombings. Assemblyman Dov Hikind , a Democrat from Brooklyn, said "They all look a certain way. It's all very nice to be politically correct here, [...]

The US has strongly criticized a new UN draft of proposed UN reforms, complaining that the document is too long, poorly put together, and not responsive to American concerns. While the draft is far from being voted on, the US criticisms could predict areas of future dispute. US Deputy Ambassador Anne Patterson criticized the document [...]

Media giant Time Warner Inc. announced Wednesday it is setting aside $3 billion in reserves to settle a lawsuit filed by shareholders who claimed they lost money when the company's shares declined following a merger with AOL . The company also said it had authorized a program to buy back $5 billion of its own [...]

Zambian authorities said on Wednesday that a suspect in the July 7 London bombings will be deported to Britain. Haroon Rashid Aswat , a British man being held by Zambian police , is under investigation for 20 phone calls he allegedly made to some of the bombers from his cell phone. He is also alleged [...]