In a goodwill gesture that was requested by the Iraqi government for Muslim holy month Ramadan , the US military Monday freed 500 detainees from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and the military has said that an additional 500 detainees will be freed later this week. The released detainees are those deemed to not have committed [...]

AP is reporting that a Spanish court has convicted a suspected al Qaeda cell leader of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the September 11 attacks in the US. 8:11 AM ET – Immad Yarkas, the accused leader of al Qaeda's presence in Spain , received a 27 year jail sentence. Two other al [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Marsha N. Cohen, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law, says governments have a responsibility to protect individuals' freedom by requiring health care businesses to fully meet health care needs, even over the objection of individual pharmacists… In the battle about pharmacists who demand to “follow their [...]

Reports of violent crime in the US in 2004 were at their lowest level since the US Department of Justice began compiling statistics 32 years ago, according to a report released Sunday. The Bureau of Justice Statistics study mirrors an FBI report earlier this year which suggested that murder and violent crime rates were down. [...]

In a briefing Sunday to military task force officials participating in Hurricane Rita relief efforts, President Bush suggested that the Pentagon, rather than state and local agencies, should be in charge of the response to future substantial disasters. Bush called for "greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces," saying the military [...]

The Israeli cabinet Sunday approved the provision of legal aid and support services to any Israeli military officer past or present who is charged outside of the country with war crimes. Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni proposed the undertaking after it was disclosed that former Israeli Maj. Gen. Doron Almog, once commander of Israeli forces [...]

Acting in the aftermath of the London bombings , the French government has finalized a new draft anti-terror law that would bolster the country’s video, telephone and Internet surveillance as well as tighten travel controls into “countries at risk”. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said in a speech in Paris Friday that the 16-article draft [...]

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki Sunday called Saturday's International Atomic Energy Agency resolution declaring Iran in "non-compliance" with safeguards under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) a "politically and illegally motivated decision" made to a "US pre-planned scenario", but told reporters that Iran had not ruled out further negotiations with Germany, France and Britain, the so-called [...]

A conference in Turkey on the alleged genocide of 1.5 Armenians in the then-Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917 went ahead on Saturday despite a court ban that prompted protests from EU representatives who saw it as casting a continuing shadow over Turkey's human rights record as it seeks EU membership. The court ruling was [...]

A California judge ruled Friday that credit card companies Visa and MasterCard do not have to notify individual consumers whose account data was stolen by an as-yet-unknown hacker in a mass cybertheft disclosed by MasterCard earlier this year. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer denied the contention of plaintiffs in a class action suit [...]