US District Judge Algenon Marbley granted a temporary restraining order Thursday blocking enforcement of Ohio's voter ID law as it applies to absentee ballots because Ohio's 88 counties are applying it inconsistently. The order was issued following a suit by the Service Employees International Union Local 1199 and the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless [...]

The Chilean office of the HSBC bank said Thursday that it has no accounts in the name of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and that bank documents detailing Pinochet's alleged $160 million gold fortune supposedly held in its Hong Kong branch are forgeries. HSBC released the information following an order by the Santiago Court of [...]

A Moroccan believed to have ties to two figures connected to the September 11 attacks was sentenced to nine years in prison Thursday after a French criminal court found him guilty of "associating with wrongdoers in connection with a terrorist undertaking," an offense that encompasses a number of criminal activates. Karim Mehdi was arrested in [...]

US special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent approximately three hours Thursday cross-examining the first witness presented by lawyers representing former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby . The witness, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus , was called to persuade US District Judge Reggie Walton to allow memory experts to help with Libby’s defense. While prosecutors claim that [...]

A US federal court in Atlanta Thursday rejected a government motion to seal unclassified files in the trial of two men with alleged terrorism ties. US citizens Syed Ahmed, 21, a Georgia Tech student, and Ehsanul Sadequee, 20, an employee of the Atlanta based non-profit South Asian advocacy group Raksha were arrested earlier this year [...]

Nicaraguan lawmakers voted Thursday to prohibit abortions for any reason in the country, including procedures to save the life of a pregnant woman. The measure eliminates a long-standing medical necessity exception to the country's anti-abortion laws. Nicaragua has a large Roman Catholic population and the church assisted in drafting the bill, which has been criticized [...]

Alexander Milinkevich , the defeated opposition candidate in Belarus' presidential elections in March, was awarded the Sakharov Prize on Thursday by the European Parliament , for his fight for democracy. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko won over Milinkevich by a landslide 80 percent of the popular vote in an election that has been widely condemned as [...]

Jack Martin : "At this point, the border fencing law signed by President Bush Thursday is largely symbolic, although important. The legislation sends the message abroad that we intend to defend our borders against illegal immigration. It is symbolic because little more than a start on the project can be made on the basis of [...]

Israel is breaching international humanitarian law and is violating the rights of Palestinians by placing severe restrictions on family visits with Palestinian prisoners, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B'Tselem) said in a new report released Thursday. The human rights group claims that Israel is breaching the Geneva Convention , [...]

President Bush Thursday reiterated his belief that "marriage is a union between a man and a woman" a day after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples in the state must be afforded the same rights as heterosexual couples. At a Republican fundraiser Bush spoke out against what he called the ruling of [...]