In a White House press conference Tuesday US President George W. Bush slammed a report from rights group Amnesty International as "absurd" after the organization referred to US detention facilities abroad as an international "gulag." Bush stressed that the US "promotes freedom around the world" and that every instance of abuse – involving a very [...]

The Sudanese government Tuesday arrested the Darfur coordinator for the Dutch branch of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) , the second arrest of an MSF aid worker in two days. Vince Hoedt was detained over a March 2005 report alleging mass rape in the Darfur region. The Dutch head of MSF Paul Foreman was arrested earlier [...]

Government officials in the Netherlands are making a final plea to Dutch voters in an effort to persuade them to support the European constitution in a June 1 referendum, an uphill battle after voters in France rejected the charter earlier this week. Unlike the French vote however, the Dutch poll is not binding on the [...]

Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could face trial for war crimes within two months according to comments made Tuesday by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in a CNN interview. Talabani said that the Iraqi people were "starting to ask for executing Saddam Hussein" but Hussein's lawyer expressed surprise that the trial, which Iraqi prosecutors and their [...]

Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel has said US officials may not be welcome to visit Venezuela after the president of the Venezuelan Supreme Court Omar Mora had his tourist visa to the United States cancelled by US immigration officials. The statement was made Monday after Mora criticized the visa cancellation as an offense against [...]

Wire services are reporting that a former FBI official is claiming to be "Deep Throat", the Washington insider who leaked secrets about the Watergate coverup to the Washington Post that eventually led to President Richard Nixon's 1974 resignation, according to an article to appear in the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine. W. Mark Felt, [...]

Pope Benedict XVI stepped into an ongoing political fray Monday by backing calls for Italian voters to abstain from a June referendum on embryo research, artificial insemination, and egg and sperm donation. At issue in the referendum is Law No. 40, passed in 2004, which bans embryo research and restricts the number of eggs that [...]

The US Supreme Court Tuesday overturned the conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm for destroying documents related to the Enron collapse, citing faulty jury instructions. According to the Court, the instructions failed to convey properly the elements of a "corrup persuas" conviction; specifically, the instructions did not convey the requisite state of consciousness. Read [...]

US military officials have acknowledged that the arrest Monday of Sunni leader Mohsen Abdel Hamid , head of the Iraqi Islamic Party , was a mistake, and that US forces had confused Hamid with someone else. According to Hamid, American soldiers attacked his Baghdad home, seized him, his three sons and four guards and blindfolded [...]

The Illinois House and Senate sent a bill to Governor Rod Blagojevich early Tuesday seeking to lower doctors' medical malpractice insurance rates by capping medical malpractice damage awards. SB 475 passed the House 68-46 and the Senate 36-22 and would limits victims' pain and suffering damages to $500,000 from individual doctors and $1 million from [...]