A Turkish appeals court on Friday ordered Mehmet Ali Agca , the man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, to return to prison and Agca was subsequently taken into custody in Istanbul. Agca was serving a 36-year sentence for murdering Turkish journalist Abdi Ipekci when he escaped from prison and shot the Pope [...]

Japanese Prime Minister and Liberal Democratic Party leader Junichiro Koizumi pledged to introduce a bill to reform the 1947 Imperial Household Law , allowing women to ascend to the country's imperial throne during his annual keynote speech to parliament Friday. Under current law, a male must ascend to the throne, but no male has been [...]

Former Serb commander Dragan Vasiljkovic was arrested in Australia Thursday at the request of the Croatian government, who want to prosecute Vasiljkovic for war crimes committed during Croatia's 1991-1995 independence war. Vasiljkovic, now a citizen of Australia, is accused of torturing and killing Croat soldiers, civilians and prisoners of war and of involvement in the [...]

Lawyers across the country filed motions Thursday asking immigration judges to reconsider sending illegal immigrants back to Haiti. The motions are in response to the decision of the Department of Homeland Security to continue deporting Haitian immigrants, despite the presence of widespread violence and human rights violations in the country. The United Nations and the [...]

A group of retired military leaders have sent a letter to President Bush seeking clarification on the president's plans to enforce a recently passed ban on the use of torture against terror detainees. Last month, when signing the 2006 defense spending bill , which contains the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 , President Bush issued [...]

The father of John Walker Lindh , the American caught fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, called on President Bush Thursday to grant his son clemency and commute his 20 year sentence in a speech to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. Lindh, who was 20-years-old when captured in Afghanistan, pleaded guilty in 2002 to [...]

US Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday defended the Bush administration's authorization of domestic surveillance in the weeks following Sept. 11, saying the program is a crucial tool in monitoring terrorist organizations. In a speech at the Manhattan Institute, Cheney objected to the characterization of the program as "domestic", stressing that the National Security Agency [...]

The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance won 128 of 275 seats in the Iraqi parliament, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) said Friday when it released final results from the December 15 parliamentary elections . Results had been delayed pending the outcome of an investigation into alleged voting fraud , which culminated with the release [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a motion in federal court seeking to compel Internet search giant Google to comply with a subpoena issued last summer. The subpoena requests that Google provide a "multi-stage random sample of one million URLs" and the text of search strings entered into Google databases over a one [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Henning of Wayne State University Law School says that while lawmakers in Washington are floating new ethics regulations in the wake of the Abramoff lobbying scandal, they might do better to apply existing laws and work on developing a political culture that puts the burden on elected representatives and their staffs [...]