On a visit to Sydney, Australia to attend the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit , US President George W. Bush said Wednesday that it was "inexcusable" for the recently-concluded constitutional convention in Myanmar to have excluded opposition party National League for Democracy . US State Department spokesman Tom Casey said earlier that the constitutional [...]

A Bulgarian special panel investigating the country's communist-era police records said Tuesday that current Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov and 19 other lawmakers collaborated with the country's communist-era secret service . The panel, created under legislation declassifying communist-era files , has published a list of 138 people who collaborated with the secret service. Parvanov insists that [...]

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the state of Arizona claiming that the Legal Arizona Workers Act is unconstitutional and could lead to discrimination against minorities, especially Latinos. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Chicanos Por La Causa and Somos [...]

UK Lord Justice Stephen Sedley said Wednesday that all UK citizens and visitors should have their DNA included in the national DNA database because the current repository is insufficient. Sedley said that the UK DNA database, the world's largest at 4 million samples, has a disproportionate amount of samples from ethnic minorities and typically includes [...]

Iranian-American journalist Parnaz Azima has been granted permission to leave Iran after months of being held in the country due to security-related charges against her, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) said Tuesday. Azima, employed by a Persian service of RFE/RL, originally traveled to Iran in January to visit her sick mother, and upon arrival Iranian [...]

EU Justice, Freedom, and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said Wednesday that the European Union will move forward with plans to establish an EU-wide airline passenger data recording system despite privacy concerns because the threat posed by terror attacks remains high. Frattini's comments came on the same day that German authorities announced the arrests of three [...]

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is investigating whether to move the war crimes trial of Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) , ICC judge Adrian Fulford said Tuesday. The announcement was made at pretrial hearings held at the ICC at The Hague, and comes more than a month after [...]

A Malaysian judge has ruled that a five-year marriage between two local citizens is void, after finding that the husband is actually a woman, according to a local report on Tuesday. The judge made his ruling after a physician conducted an examination on the husband, concluding that she was in fact a woman. The couple [...]

Russia has appointed a new lead prosecutor to investigate the October 2006 killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya , according to a statement from the Prosecutor General's office Tuesday. Control over the investigation was handed to Sergei Ivanov in a move that Politkovskaya's former colleagues at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta say is evidence of political [...]

Washington DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and DC Attorney General Linda Singer Tuesday formally appealed a March federal court ruling invalidating the District of Columbia's handgun ban to the US Supreme Court, setting the stage for the biggest Second Amendment challenge in almost 70 years. In March, the US Court of Appeals for the DC [...]