Morocco has prevented UN officials from visiting African migrants detained in the country despite repeated requests for access, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported Wednesday. The agency has said it fears that Morocco has forced many of the migrants to return to their home countries in the face of persecution and despite valid asylum [...]

Iraqi police on Wednesday arrested a nephew of Saddam Hussein in Tikrit on charges that he has served as a leading financier of the country's insurgency, Iraqi security officials reported. Yasir Sabhawi Ibrahim is the son of Saddam's half brother Sabhawi Ibrahim Hasan, who was captured earlier this year in Syria. Ibrahim reportedly was hiding [...]

The US Senate moved Wednesday to cut federal funding for projects that seize peoples' homes for private development, continuing a backlash to a recent controversial ruling by the US Supreme Court . The amendment to HR 3058 , the Transportation-Treasury Appropriations Bill, offered by Sen. Kit Bond and approved Wednesday by a voice vote, cuts [...]

Spanish High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz on Wednesday issued an international arrest warrant for three US soldiers from the 3rd Infantry, Sgt. Thomas Gibson, Capt. Philip Wolford and Lt. Col. Philip de Camp, over the death of a Spanish cameraman during the war in Iraq. Pedraz ordered the arrest of the soldiers with the plan [...]

A Texas court on Wednesday issued an arrest warrant for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) for his indictment on charges of money laundering and criminal conspiracy . The warrant, described by DeLay’s attorney Dick Guerin as a "matter of routine," orders DeLay to appear for booking at the Fort Bend County jail, where [...]

New York Times reporter Judith Miller and US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg on Wednesday offered differing takes on the need for federal legislation to protect confidentiality of journalists' sources during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing . Miller, who was jailed for 85 days after refusing to reveal a source for a grand jury investigating the leak [...]

Leading Wednesday's environmental law news, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that the US Bureau of Reclamation must come up with a new plan to use water from the Klamath River. The river, which runs from northern California to the Oregon coast, has been source of controversy between farmers who [...]

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights said Wednesday that declassified notes, taken by a lawyer during interviews with inmate clients participating in the ongoing hunger strike , describe "brutal treatment" of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay military camp in Cuba. The notes, written by Julia Tarver, detail allegations of force-feeding without anesthesia or sedatives [...]

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali , a Virginia man charged with joining al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President Bush, testified Wednesday that he had been beaten and tortured after being arrested in Saudi Arabia. The testimony was offered during a pre-trial hearing to determine whether a confession he made in 2003 was coerced. Abu Ali, [...]

The Supreme Court of Chile on Wednesday stripped former president Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution for charges of tax fraud connected to $27 million he holds in offshore accounts. The ruling comes a day after Judge Sergio Munoz petitioned the Santiago Court of Appeals to strip Pinochet's immunity for charges of embezzlement also related [...]