Fiji Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase said Wednesday that he plans to change controversial legislation that would grant amnesty to many involved in the 2000 racially-motivated coup . The Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity bill has been the subject of many protests and has even caused military commander Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama to threaten to remove the government [...]

A US District Court judge has struck down a part of California's financial privacy law that places restrictions on banks' ability to sell their customers' private information to their associates. The provision was struck down because a federal law, the Fair Credit Reporting Act , already restricted their ability to sell information to affiliates. The [...]

The Takamatsu High Court in Japan Wednesday upheld a lower court decision to dismiss a lawsuit against Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi over his visits to the Yasukuni shrine . The shrine was founded in 1869 and serves as a monument to Japan's war dead, including war criminals, a source of diplomatic friction between China [...]

A Spanish court convicted a former Guantanamo Bay detainee Wednesday and sentenced him to six years in Spanish jail for his involvement in the al Qaeda terror organization. Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed, who hails from the Spanish region of Ceuta in north Africa, was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and held at Guantanamo Bay for two [...]

Amid efforts to pass legislation that would impose restrictions on the detention and interrogation of terror suspects, more allegations have been made of detainee mistreatment at US facilities in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. Army Capt. James Yee , former Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay has written a new book chronicling his time at the detention [...]

In an interview Tuesday with CNN's Lou Dobbs, New York Times reporter Judith Miller called the 85 days she spent in Virginia's Alexandria Detention Facility demeaning and lonely, and defended her decision to refuse to reveal her source to federal investigators, despite reports that the source gave consent. Responding to allegations that her refusal to [...]

French President Jacques Chirac said Tuesday at a Paris news conference that Turkey would need to make deep reforms in order to conform to fundamental European cultural standards – what he called "the totality of our values, our principles" – before entering the European Union . Chirac said that France would hold a referendum on [...]

US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has resurrected proposed legislation that would impose restrictions on the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects. McCain's proposal, to be added as an amendment to the military spending bill up for a vote in the Senate by Friday, would ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or [...]

A Bosnian government panel said Tuesday that over 19,000 Bosnian Serbs, including policemen, army officials and civilians, participated in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre . The report is based on information gained from the Serb Republic's Interior and Defense Ministries, army headquarters and state security agency and says that participants in the massacre helped with [...]

Britain's Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) made the first compensation payments to victims of July 7 London bombings Tuesday. CICA has so far sent out two checks and offered interim payments totaling £400,000 ($700,000 US) to bereaved relatives and to injured survivors. According to the CICA compensation scheme , families of those killed will be [...]