New York Times researcher Zhao Yan is appealing the three-year prison sentence he received last week from a Beijing court that convicted him of fraud. Zhao was charged with accepting $2,500 from an official, and his appeal maintains that he was acting as a reporter when the incident took place. Zhao lawyer Guan Anping also [...]

Danish police Tuesday charged seven men with planning a terror attack in the country after arresting them and two others in a raid on an Odense suburb populated largely by immigrants. Justice Minister Lene Espersen told AP that "the clues police found indicate that they were very likely planning an attack somewhere in Denmark." Danish [...]

US Bankruptcy Judge Adlai Hardin Tuesday approved a request by Delta Airlines to end its pension plan for pilots. Delta reached a settlement with a group of retired pilots on Monday, agreeing to pay $500,000 for fees and expenses if the group ceased its opposition to Delta's proposal to terminate the plan. In order to [...]

A lawsuit by former Australian Guantanamo detainee Mamdouh Habib against the Australian government could become the first court challenge to new security secrecy laws passed in 2004 . Australian prosecutors say that some of the evidence used in any trial of Habib's case may be secret, but Justice Rodney Madgwick noted in a preliminary hearing [...]

Two owners of a Louisiana nursing home who were charged last year with negligent homicide for the deaths of 34 people in flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina have sued a number of state and local government officials claiming that they did not evacuate residents at the home before the storm landed, the attorney for the [...]

Leading Tuesday's international brief, Rwandan Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama has confirmed that the Rwandan Parliament would be presented a bill in December aimed at abolishing capital punishment in the African nation. The legislation, immensely unpopular with the majority of Rwandan citizens, is necessary to qualify Rwanda as a legally permitted partner in extradition proceedings with [...]

An Indonesian court on Tuesday handed down the first sentence in connection to the 2005 Bali bombings of three restaurants, which killed two dozen people and injured 200 others. Abdul Aziz, convicted of harboring Noordin Mohammed Top , a suspected terrorist linked to other bombings, was sentenced to eight years in prison. Prosecutors are also [...]

Mexico's Federal Electoral Tribunal on Tuesday certified Felipe Calderon as the winner of Mexico's disputed July 2 presidential election . Calderon's opponent, leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador , who argued before the court that preliminary results giving Calderon a victory by just 0.6 percent of the vote were marred by fraud , has already [...]

The Iraqi National Assembly voted on Tuesday to renew the country's state of emergency, in place since November 2004 , for an additional 30 days. The emergency measures are applicable throughout the country, except for the northern autonomous Kurdish region. After a month long summer recess, 180 out of the 275-member parliament voted 161-19 to [...]

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament approved a report Monday taking Turkey to task for slow progress on a variety of legal and other reforms agreed to by Ankara as part of its bid for membership in the European Union . Among other things, Turkey was criticized for its “persistent shortcomings in areas [...]