Afghanistan's parliament on Wednesday demanded that government officials block Abdul Rahman , the Afghan man who faced the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity, from seeking asylum in another country. Parliamentary speaker Yunus Qanooni told reporters that a letter was sent to the Interior Ministry on behalf of the entire parliament demanding Rahman [...]

Fugitive war crimes indictee Charles Taylor , who disappeared from his villa in the south of Nigeria where he had been living in exile since 2003, has been recaptured, according to a Nigerian police spokesman. The Liberian ex-president was reportedly detained while going through immigration at Gamboru-Ngala, a town near Nigeria's border with Cameroon. The [...]

Five federal judges experienced with surveillance requests appeared Tuesday before the US Senate Judiciary Committee in support of committee chairman Arlen Specter's proposal to require the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret panel established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) , to conduct regular reviews of the National Security Administration's warrantless surveillance program . [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced Tuesday that the US Department of Defense (DOD) has dropped its appeal of a September District Court order requiring it to publicly release more photographs showing detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, pursuant to an ACLU request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) . A supposedly-full [...]

Court-appointed lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui rested the case of their headstrong and sometimes fractious client in federal court Tuesday by reading recorded statements from five al Qaeda leaders to show that contrary to Moussaoui's own testimony , he was not in fact slated to participate in the Sept. 11 attacks . Instead, the attorneys sought [...]

The Miami federal judge presiding over the trial of terror suspect Jose Padilla Tuesday placed tight restrictions on disclosure of evidence containing classified material. US District Judge Marcia Cooke's order under the Classified Information Procedures Act is primarily intended to prevent the public from gaining access to US national security secrets – including interrogations evidence, [...]

A three-judge panel of the US DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) violated s. 2511 of US Code Title 18 by disclosing an illegally obtained tape to reporters in 1996. The majority found that McDermott violated the rights of Representative John Boehner (R-OH) who was heard on the taped [...]

Leading Tuesday's environmental law news, Judge Saundra Armstrong of the US District Court for the Northern District of California has ruled that the US Bureau of Reclamation must leave more water in the Klamath River basin to ensure survival of the threatened Coho salmon . The river runs from northern California to the Oregon coast [...]

Most of the eight US Supreme Court justices hearing oral arguments Tuesday in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld appeared skeptical of the Bush administration's contention that special military tribunals established by the President not adhering to either standard US military procedure or the Geneva Convention can be used to prosecute suspected terrorists as war criminals. Salim Hamdan [...]

A delegation of Algerian officials made the country's first visit to the US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in mid-March to evaluate the conditions of 26 Algerian citizens being held there, according to a report published Tuesday in Algeria's El Watan newspaper. Representatives of the Algerian ministries of defense, foreign affairs and justice made [...]