Mohammed al-Qahtani, the so-called "20th hijacker" from the Sept. 11 attacks, has disclaimed information he provided about 30 Guantanamo Bay detainees, alleging that the statements were coerced by torture, TIME magazine reported Friday. Qahtani was refused entry into the US in August 2001 and was later captured in Afghanistan; he has since been held at [...]

Prosecutor Douglas Gansler of the Montgomery County State's Attorneys Office in Maryland said Thursday that he will not seek the death penalty for DC sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad , who is charged with six counts of first degree murder related to the three-week series of shootings in the Washington, DC area in October 2002. [...]

The Iraqi government placed Baghdad under a daytime vehicular curfew on Friday in an attempt to quell the sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites that has wracked the country since the bombing of the Askariya shrine on February 22. Similar to the three-day curfew that was lifted on Monday , the traffic ban prohibits Iraqis [...]

Ivory Coast President Lauren Gbagbo has signed an extradition order authorizing Youssef Fofana to be transferred to France where he is wanted in connection with the kidnapping, torture and killing of a Jewish man outside Paris. Ivory Coast Justice Minister Mamadou Kone said Friday that Gbagbo signed the document after a court approved the extradition [...]

Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Friday lifted a state of emergency , which Arroyo initially put in place last week after discovering a coup threat. Arroyo kept the state of emergency in effect for a week despite urging that she lift the order , and said Friday that she was now lifting the emergency [...]

Leading Friday's international brief, Kenyan police have conducted a night-time raid on the Standard Group, Kenya's second largest journalistic company, during which they confiscated television and radio broadcast equipment and destroyed several printing presses while allegedly searching for evidence of a specific journalistic investigation. Internal Security Minister John Michuki told a press meeting that the [...]

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that he is "chagrined" about the US opposition to a draft resolution that would create a new UN Human Rights Council to replace the widely criticized Commission on Human Rights . Annan told reporters Thursday that the hoped the US would be able to "find some way of associating [...]

At a hearing in Washington Thursday US District Judge Gladys Kessler questioned the treatment of Mohammed Bawazir, a former hunger striker at Guantanamo Bay eventually force-fed in treatment his lawyers say was torture contrary to the terms of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) . Bawazir, from Yemen, claims that he gave up his hunger strike [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Todd Peppers of Roanoke College, author of the forthcoming book Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of Supreme Court Law Clerks (Stanford University Press, 2006) says that although Justice Samuel Alito's recent hiring of former John Ashcroft aide and Time Warner VP Adam G. Ciongoli as a law [...]

Russian civil aviation pilots have drafted an address to President Vladimir Putin expressing concern over a provision in a new anti-terrorism bill allowing for the shooting-down of hijacked planes. The bill was passed last month by the Russian Duma and approved earlier this week by the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. [...]