The Sarajevo cantonal court in Bosnia-Herzegovina sentenced Serb Goran Vasic to six years in prison on Wednesday for his role in the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners at a detention camp near Sarajevo in 1992. Vasic was acquitted of an assassination charge due to lack of evidence. He had been tried and convicted three [...]

A Senate committee approved the nomination of Lester Crawford as the new head of the US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday, sending the issue to the full Senate for a final vote. A number of Democrats on the committee had criticized Crawford, currently acting FDA Commissioner, for not having made a determination on allowing [...]

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday that a dozen former Guantanamo detainees have gone back to fighting against the US since their release, as evidenced by their recapture or confirmed death. Gonzales' statement echos similar reports from Pentagon and highly-placed Congressional sources last year , when reference was made to 5 released Afghans who [...]

Canadian Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier announced Wednesday that Inuit hunters in the North plan to file a petition accusing the US government of human rights violations by continually fuelling global warming. Troubled by the melting of Arctic ice caps, the Inuit hope the petition will put pressure on the US to reduce industrial emissions of [...]

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing , a former French president and architect of the embattled European Constitution , has blamed current French President Jacques Chirac for the rejection of the document by French voters . In a New York Times interview published Wednesday d'Estaing complained that French voters rejected the charter not because they disagreed with it, [...]

German authorities announced Tuesday that they have detained three men who allegedly spent thousands of dollars to fund the Ansar Al-Islam terror network in its terrorist attacks in Iraq. On Tuesday more that 150 German police officers raided two dozen properties in Germany and one in Switzerland in a search for evidence that Ansar was [...]

A new memo may contradict previous denials by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that he played no role in the awarding of an oil contract in Iraq to a company his son worked for. Annan was cleared of any wrongdoing in March and rejected any possibility of resigning over that allegation or any other arising out [...]

The Pakistani government said Wednesday that gang-rape victim Mukhtar Mai has been removed from a no-travel list and is free to go abroad. In a case that has received international attention, Mai was gang-raped on orders from a traditional village council. Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sharpao announced that the decision to allow Mai to [...]

US House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI) said Tuesday that while he thinks that many of the temporary provisions of the Patriot Act should be made permanent, federal investigators should not be given the power to issue their own subpoenas for records, a power recently endorsed by a Senate committee . "Administrative subpoenas" [...]

Despite earlier reports to the contrary, Sudan refused on Wednesday to drop charges against two members of Medecins Sans Frontieres . The two had been arrested and investigated for allegedly "spying, publishing false information, and destabilizing Sudanese society" in connection with an MSF report about hundreds of rapes in Darfur . The UN expected that [...]