Australian police have arrested a 33-year-old man for using text messages to incite rioting a week after race riots broke out in Sydney involving 5,000 people, mostly white men and youths, attacking Muslim residents on local beaches....

Nearly 700 same-sex couples in Britain took part in civil partnership ceremonies Wednesday, the first day of eligibility under Britain's Civil Partnership Act , which was enacted in 2004. Registration for civil partnerships began earlier this month,...

The US Senate voted Wednesday to repeal the Byrd Amendment in October 2007, following a similar vote in the US House of Representatives last month. Officially known as the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act , the...

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his traditional year-end press conference Wednesday that he wanted to dedicate his final year in the position to encouraging peace and UN reform [JURIST news...

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales requested that the German government not release Mohammed Ali Hamadi, a convicted hijacker accused of killing a US Navy diver, but Germany refused, the Bush administration...

Colombian prosecutors plan to file charges against former justice minister Alberto Santofimio Botero in connection with the 1989 assassination of Liberal party presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan , the attorney general's office announced Wednesday. Santofimio will...

Saddam Hussein on Thursday denounced US denials of his claims that he has been tortured while held by US forces and argued that the US had also lied about Iraq's possession of weapons of...

A lawyer for Tariq Aziz , Iraq's deputy prime minister during Saddam Hussein's regime, said Wednesday that US troops are protecting "high-value" former Iraqi officials released from custody earlier this week. Badee Izzat Aref said that...

Afghan journalist Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, the editor of the magazine Hoqooq-i-Zan, (translated as Women's Rights) who was convicted of blasphemy for publishing anti-Islamic articles, has been freed from jail , a senior Afghan judge said...

Russia's Duma , the lower house of parliament, approved on Wednesday a much-criticized bill restricting NGO activity by 376-10 on its second reading. The bill would create a government agency with broad power to monitor and...