Leading Monday's international brief, the Nepal Supreme Court has handed down an historic decision holding that the Royal Commission for Corruption Control (RCCC) , created by King Gyanendra following his dismissal of the elected government , is unconstitutional and ordering the body to cease and desist all investigations and prosecutions. The RCCC, which had been [...]

Saddam Hussein returned to court in Baghdad Monday, though he claimed in several outbursts that his appearance was forced. The former Iraqi dictator called the court trying him for crimes against humanity a "game" because it was formed during the US occupation of Iraq and demanded that the presiding judge sentence him in absentia since [...]

Lawyers representing a group of hurricane victims in New Orleans have asked a US federal judge to grant a temporary restraining order preventing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from evicting 12,000 families still left homeless from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. FEMA announced on Saturday that it would begin to evict the families Monday [...]

Islamic leaders in Britain have demanded a speedy prosecution of British soldiers shown beating young Iraqi detainees and defiling an Iraqi corpse in video images that were published in the tabloid News of the World Sunday. The leaders expressed concerns that the 2004 video would cause further outrage among UK Muslims, already provoked over the [...]

Two members of Haiti's nine-member Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) supervising the country's presidential election claimed late Sunday that the vote was being manipulated after discrepancies appeared on the election website. Figures reported on the site showed leading candidate and former president Rene Preval holding only 49.1% of the vote, too low to avoid a runoff [...]

Montenegro has set April 30th as the date for a nationwide referendum for independence from Serbia. Serbia and Montenegro are the only two surviving republics of the former Yugoslavia, which broke apart in the 1990s during the regime of former president Slobodan Milosevic . Since then, the nations have become a loose union and Montenegro [...]

German officials are in talks with their US counterparts for the release of a German-born man who has been held in Guantanamo Bay for almost four years. Murat Kurnaz , a Turkish national, was detained in Pakistan in 2001 on suspicion of terrorism and later handed over to US forces, arriving at Guantanamo in 2002. [...]

China Sunday issued it first guidelines on HIV/AIDS , banning discrimination against those infected by the virus and providing for free treatment. The new guidelines were promulgated in response to the already-large number of people with HIV/AIDS in the country – currently estimated by the government at 650,000 – and warnings by international experts that [...]

Insisting his was a country where freedom prevailed, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Saturday expressly condemned a new ruling by Turkey's high administrative court that a teacher should be refused promotion because of her decision to wear a religious headscarf outside of her classes. Religious dress has been a controversial issue in Turkey, with [...]

The government of Yemen has announced it will prosecute the editors of three privately owned Yemeni newspapers, the Yemen Observer , al-Ra'i el-Am and al-Huriya, for offending Islam after the newspapers reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have prompted worldwide Muslim protests. The newspapers' licenses have also been suspended . The Yemen Observer reports [...]