Croatia on Friday arrested 10 people suspected of committing war crimes against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s. The arrests were made in eastern Croatia, an area with a large ethnic Serb population and where several former members of the Serb paramilitary group Scorpions live; they follow Monday's Croat detention of Scorpion member Slobodan Davidovic following [...]

To head off a revolt among members of his government over what are increasingly seen as unduly-harsh immigration laws, Australian Prime Minister John Howard has loosened rules for mandatory detention of immigrants who enter the country without visas. Families with children will now be hosted by the community rather than held in detention centers. The [...]

A private contractor for Zapata Engineering Peter Ginter – himself an ex-Marine with eight years service – has claimed he was abused by US military personnel while detained for three days. Gintner is the second to speak out among 19 US and Iraqi security contractors who were taken into custody by Marines on May 28 [...]

Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad , whose 22 years in office until 2003 made him one of Asia's longest-serving political leaders, Friday urged transparency and fairness in the trial of Saddam Hussein while announcing the launch of the so-called Emergency Committee for Iraq, co-chaired by himself, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark , former [...]

Detroit high school student Andrew Osantowski has been convicted under a post 9/11 Michigan state anti-terror law of two counts of threatening terrorism against fellow students at his Chippewa Valley High School . The case could be the first application in the US of terror laws to prosecute threatened school violence, and is the first [...]

The US Army Thursday charged staff sergeant Alberto B. Martinez of the New York National Guard 42nd Infantry with the murders of his two commanding officers at an army base near Baghdad. An initial military investigation concluded that the officers were killed by a mortar round, but it was later ruled that the "blast pattern" [...]

Sweden, Finland and Portugal have joined Britain, Denmark, Ireland and the Czech Republic in postponing their ratifications of the EU constitution after European heads of governent Thursday agreed to extend the ratification deadline into 2007. Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said Friday in a Swedish radio interview that if France and the Netherlands were not [...]

In a rare federal case involving gay marriage, a US District Court judge on Thursday ruled that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act passed by Congress does not violate the Constitution. Judge Gary Taylor declined to rule on whether California's ban on same-sex marriage violates the civil rights of a gay couple from Orange County [...]

Senate Democrats refused a Republican compromise over the nomination of John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN Thursday, demanding more information than GOP leadership offered on his pre-Iraq war assessments of several countries' weapons programs. Democrats want materials from preparations for Bolton's Congressional testimony on Syria's weapons and classified National Security Agency intercepts, basing [...]

Prominent humanitarian aid groups are meeting Friday with International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, currently investigating war crimes in Darfur . The unusual meeting was called by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in New York and talks are expected to include "opportunities. . . for cooperation" between the prosecutor and represented aid [...]