The NAACP Saturday urged the US Department of Justice to block a Louisiana state election plan for New Orleans that will make it very difficult for displaced black voters to participate in the election. Though the election plan allows for changes in parish voting locations as well as the use of election personnel from outside [...]

The Democratic Republic of Congo officially adopted a new constitution on Saturday when President Joseph Kabila signed into law the charter that voters approved in a referendum late last year. The Constitution is designed to bring peace to the country after five years of war, and provides for national elections to be held by June [...]

Google, Inc. formally rejected a subpoena from the US Department of Justice for search data on Friday, arguing that the subpoena violated the privacy of Google customers and its own trade secrets. Google also asserted that the government’s demand to disclose Google’s web searches was impractical, as the searches change on a daily basis and [...]

US District Judge Leonie Brinkema Friday added a former member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the pool of potential jurors who will decide between the death penalty or life in prison for 9/11 suspect Zacarias Moussaoui . Prosecutor Rob Spencer sought to strike the former ACLU member as biased against the death [...]

The UN chief administrator of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal said Saturday that the trials of former Khmer Rouge members must begin as soon as possible if they are to happen while the former members of the regime are still alive. Michelle Lee made her comments after former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary was [...]

US Army Special Forces Sgt. Layne Morris and the family of Sgt. Christopher Speer were awarded $102.6 million in triple damages in a civil default judgment against Egyptian-Canadian Ahmed Said Khadr Friday based on a July 27, 2002 attack in Afghanistan that killed Speer and wounded Morris. Khadr, an alleged al-Qaida financier, is the father [...]

US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) said Friday that he would not allow any further floor debate on the controversial asbestos compensation bill unless 60 senators pledged their support for the legislation in order to head off a possible filibuster. On Tuesday Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) raised an objection to the proposed law, arguing [...]

The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) in Haiti acknowledged for the first time Friday that the country's February 7 presidential election was tainted by fraud, just one day after awarding the presidency to leading candidate Rene Preval after negotiations that ended early Thursday. Specifically the CEP said that between 85,000 and 90,000 out of 2.2 million [...]

US Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) , chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee , said in an interview with the New York Times reported Saturday that he wants to bring the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program within the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) . Roberts acknowledged that he was unclear on the mechanics [...]

The Russian Prosecutor General's Office announced Friday that it has begun an investigation of newspaper editor Anna Smirnova whose newspaper Nash Region reprinted controversial caricatures of Muhammad this week as the first Russian media outlet to do so. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the publications of the cartoons that have sparked protest worldwide since their [...]