The US State Department said Tuesday that Iraqi prisons are only “nominally” under control of the elected government in Baghdad, acknowledging that they are in practice run by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry , which has not yet relinquished control of them. The central government, with help from US forces, is trying to take charge of [...]

The US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) substantively modified 179 Bush administration wiretap requests made after 2001, after declining to modify a single request in 20 of the 21 years between 1979 and 1999, according to an analysis of Justice Department statistics reported Tuesday by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The FISC also rejected or modified at [...]

Turkish prosecutors launched an inquiry Tuesday into whether slander charges should be brought against a European Union lawmaker who made disparaging remarks about the Turkish army, an act criminalized by the revised Turkish penal code . Dutch legislator Joost Lagendijk , a senior member of the European Parliament and chairman of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary [...]

A Serbian security official said Tuesday that Serb police had intercepted a cell phone conversation involving Bosnian Serb general and indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic , the strongest lead police have thusfar developed in the search for the fugitive. Earlier reports of negotiations between Mladic and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia were [...]

Saddam Hussein has authorized three more lawyers to work with the four already representing him at his Baghdad trial for the 1982 massacre at Dujail that left as many as 143 Shiite Muslims dead. The defense team additions are: Saleh Armouti, president of the Jordanian Bar Association, one of 500 Jordanians who volunteered their services; [...]

The Federation Council , Russia's upper house of parliament, voted 152-1 Tuesday for a bill first approved by the lower house last month that greatly increases state control over non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by implementing strict registration requirements, imposing financial oversight on their operations, and providing for dissolution if an organization participates in activities deemed to [...]

Officials in the Austrian city of Graz have removed all references to Arnold Schwarzenegger from the city's website in the wake of controversy over the California Governor's decision earlier this month to deny clemency to Crips gang co-founder and convicted murder Stanley "Tookie" Williams . In an apparent attempt to head off censure by the [...]

Over 10,000 Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad Tuesday to protest alleged fraud in the December 15 parliamentary elections in Iraq . Complaints of fraud surfaced almost immediately after the polls closed , with the majority of allegations coming from a group that lead Tuesday's demonstrations, the Maram (in Arabic, "goal") alliance, a coalition [...]

A Kuwaiti court Tuesday sentenced six Islamist militants to death for their involvement in a January 2005 clash with police that left several people dead. All the men were members of the Peninsula Lions Brigades, a fundamentalist group linked to al Qaeda and on the country's terror watch list for plotting to carry out terrorist [...]

A Chinese court Tuesday sentenced former minister of land and natural resources Tian Fengshan to life in prison after finding him guilty of accepting over $500,000 in bribes during his time in office. The Beijing Number Two Intermediate People's Court found that Fengshan, charged late last month , "took advantage of his position" for personal [...]