As many as 80 Guantanamo Bay detainees could face trial before military commissions, a US State Department legal adviser said Thursday. John Bellinger also said President Bush will sign Congress' recently-passed military commissions bill , on Tuesday, allowing military commission trials "finally to go forward." AP has more. In a related development, US military officials [...]

US Attorney Patrick Meehan filed an indictment Thursday against stockbrokers Anthony Postiglione, Jr. and William Lennon, co-founders of Foutainhead Fund LP, alleging that they defrauded investors out of almost $2 million. Both men are charged with eighteen counts of mail fraud and one court of securities fraud, and Postiglione is also charged with one count [...]

Daniel T. Griswold : "The 700-mile, $1.2-billion wall along the U.S.-Mexican border that Congress authorized before leaving town will not stem the flow of illegal immigrants to the United States. It will be an expensive, ugly band-aid. We built several miles of walls through urban areas in the 1990s, and it only succeeded in diverting [...]

Dhiren Barot, a British man accused of planning a series of bombs on US and British targets, pleaded guilty on Thursday to conspiracy to murder for his role in the Gas Limos Project bombing scheme and a separate plan to explode dirty bombs. Prosecutors alleged that Barot planned to use a radioactive "dirty bomb" in [...]

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett on Thursday called the "continuing detention without a fair trial" at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay "unacceptable in terms of human rights" and "ineffective in terms of counterterrorism." In announcing the release of Britain's 2006 Report on Human Rights , Beckett reiterated calls for the US to close [...]

The UK Court of Appeal Thursday upheld an earlier High Court ruling and denied a bid by the families of three Guantanamo Bay detainees who were UK residents prior to their detention to require the British government to lobby the US for their release. The High Court ruled in May that the three detainees – [...]

The French lower house of parliament, the National Assembly , approved an internationally-controversial bill Thursday that imposes monetary penalties and jail time on anyone who denies that there was an Armenian genocide early in the twentieth century. The bill, which passed 106-19, sets a one year prison term and 45,000 euro ($56,570) fine for those [...]

Turkey's most prominent writer, Orhan Pamuk , won the Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday for his work examining the role of Islam in society. Pamuk, a visiting professor at Columbia University, said he was honored to win the prize. His critics claimed Pamuk was awarded the prize "because of his Armenian genocide claims," rather than [...]

Five US states permit the use of dogs in prisons to control inmates, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Wednesday. Prison systems in Iowa, Connecticut, South Dakota, Utah and Delaware have policies that allow the use of dogs to control inmates in prisons and remove uncooperative prisoners from their cells. The procedures [...]

A prominent South Asian rights group has urged India and Pakistan to abolish the death penalty since it is a "violation of the right to life." South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) , headed by former Indian Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral , criticized the possibility of irreversible death penalty punishments and observed that South [...]