China's former minister of land and natural resources, Tian Fengshan , was charged Monday with accepting bribes of nearly 5 million yuan, or $619,000. Tian has been in custody since 2004 when he was removed from office after the former director of a provincial environmental protection bureau, Wang Shenyi, exposed the corruption. Wang has also [...]

Senators in the Parliament of Australia tabled a report Monday recommending changes to proposed anti-terror laws . The current proposal permits suspects to be detained up to 14 days without charge and imposes controls on suspects, including electronic shackles. The report from the Senate's Legal and Constitutional Committee follows hearings on the bill and calls [...]

Aung San Suu Kyi , the detained pro-democracy leader of Myanmar – formerly Burma – has had her house arrest extended for an unconfirmed time period by the country’s military government, according to a Monday statement from the National League for Democracy (NLD) , her political party. Her detention without trial for 10 of the [...]

Over 100 Ugandan lawyers went on strike Monday to show displeasure with the Ugandan Attorney General and his involvement in possible military attempts to influence the trial of opposition leader Kizza Besigye . The Ugandan Law Society staged the protest that paralyzed the country's High Court after men in black shirts with sub-machine guns surrounded [...]

Senegal's foreign minister said Sunday that former Chad dictator Hissene Habre , wanted in Belgium for alleged human rights abuses committed during his 1982-90 rule of the north-central African nation, will have his fate decided by the 53-member African Union . Habre is in legal limbo after a Senegalese appeals court Friday said it was [...]

Leading Monday's international brief, Kenyan Vice-President Moody Awori has announced that the Kenyan government is outlawing all rallies by the Orange Movement, the anti-constitution coalition that handed Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki a solid defeat in last week's referendum . Awori said that the ban reflected the government's position that the referendum was simply a vote [...]

Viveca Novak, a TIME magazine reporter who covered the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, has been asked to testify by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the leak investigation which is now going before a second grand jury . Novak has been asked to testify under oath about conversations she has had since [...]

The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed Monday, but was quickly adjourned until December 5 to allow two of Hussein's co-defendants, including former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, to find replacements for members of the defense team killed since the last trial session on October 19 . Defense lawyers had threatened to boycott the proceedings over [...]

In a bid to appeal to Sunni voters, former Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Allawi , a Shiite, said in an interview with the UK's Observer newspaper Sunday that human rights abuses by Iraqi Shiites are as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein's regime. Sunnis claim that they have been unjustly targeted by Shiite-led [...]

Citizens in the former Soviet republic of Armenia voted Sunday on constitutional amendments to impose stricter separation of powers between the judicial, executive and legislative branches. The amendments also remove a clause in the Armenian constitution barring Armenian citizens from obtaining dual citizenship. The US and EU support the constitutional amendments which will strengthen democracy, [...]