Jacques Bernard, head of Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council , has fled the country in fear of his life two weeks after heavily disputed elections returned President Rene Preval to office. Preval opponents threatened Bernard's life and burned down and looted his farmhouse over the weekend. Bernard is reported to have left the country on Sunday, [...]

MSNBC is reporting that the US Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case concerning the constitutionality of the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act . The Bush administration in September appealed to the Supreme Court a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The appeals court ruling upheld a Nebraska [...]

New York Gov. George Pataki and Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich have threatened to take legal steps to block an Arab company's takeover of operations in several major US ports. The governors cite security concerns associated with the acquisition that will leave Dubai Ports World in control of port operations in Baltimore, Miami, New Jersey, New [...]

Leading Tuesday's international brief, Sudan has issued a formal protest to the UN Envoy to Sudan Jan Pronk over his lobbying for a UN peacekeeping force in the Darfur region , and has rejected the growing call for the African Union to hand over control of the current peacekeeping mission to a fully international force. [...]

The execution of Michael Angelo Morales , scheduled to take place just after midnight Tuesday morning, was delayed after the two anesthesiologists on hand to ensure that Morales would not suffer excessive pain during the process refused to participate due to ethical concerns. Morales, convicted in 1983 of murdering a 17 year old girl, had [...]

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is set to sign an agreement with the Italian Culture Ministry in Rome Tuesday under which the museum will return several pieces of looted Hellenistic art in exchange for Italy loaning it other works of "equal beauty and importance." Under a 1939 Italian law, all archaeological property excavated [...]

Lawyers asked the UK law lords on Monday to allow anti-war activists convicted on trespassing charges related to protests of the Iraq war to argue in their defense that the war was illegal. Fourteen Greenpeace protesters were convicted of aggravated trespass in 2004 for attempting to stop or delay a shipment of military equipment to [...]

Echoing views expressed by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last week, US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and one-time top Bush aide Karen Hughes Monday defended US practices at Guantanamo Bay and rejected the United Nations call for the US to shut down its military detention facility. Interviewed by Arab [...]

An Argentine official said Monday that Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Milan Lukic has been handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and is now headed to The Hague for trial. Lukic , who was arrested in Buenos Aires in August, is one of the 10 most-wanted Bosnian Serbs and had [...]

The Danish ambassador to Saudi Arabia has said that Denmark will take steps to ban religious slander in accordance with Danish and European laws, according to reports Monday. As a result of the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad , Ambassador Hanz Kingburgh met with Muslim World League General Secretary Abdullah al-Turki Monday and [...]