Statistics from a new US Department of Justice report, Suicide and Homicide in State Prisons and Local Jails , reveal that prisoner death rates for homicide, suicide and AIDS have declined substantially in corrections facilities since 1980. Homicide rates in state prisons dropped by more than 90 percent, from 54 per 100,000 in 1980 to [...]

As Israeli forces work Monday to wrap-up the Gaza pullout , Israeli police commander Hagai Dotan announced the arrest of three young extremists who had come to Netzarim, one of Gaza's first settlements, to disrupt the evacuation. The three were detained after being found with metal spikes, oil, barbed wire and paint. Though the forcible [...]

A Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry official announced Monday that Kyrgyzstan will not return refugees who fled Uzbekistan after an uprising in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan in May. Zafar Hakimov, director of the Foreign Ministry's migration service department, said that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has granted asylum status to 439 of the 455 [...]

US officials have dropped their objections to Islam playing a role in Iraq's legal system, according to members of Iraq's constitutional committee . Shiite and Kurdish negotiators have said that US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has proposed that the Iraqi constitution name Islam as "a primary source" of law, which would give clerics authority [...]

With just a few hours remaining before Monday's midnight deadline , drafters of the Iraqi constitution have settled some crucial issues, but are still struggling with the role that Islam should play in the nation's law, as well aa with questions of Shiite autonomy. A meeting of the Iraqi National Assembly is scheduled for Monday [...]

According to a report published Sunday in the Dallas Morning News , eligible black jurors were being excluded from Dallas County juries by prosecutors more than twice as frequently as whites were turned away as recently as 2002. Earlier this year the US Supreme Court overturned the 1986 murder conviction of a black man accused [...]

The US military announced Sunday that following a preliminary inquiry, the US Naval Criminal Investigations Service has been asked to launch a formal probe into the killing by US Marines of a relative of Iraq's UN ambassador during a June house raid. Engineering student Mohammed al-Sumaida'ie, the 21-year-old son of the first cousin of Ambassador [...]

In a letter written by Saddam Hussein to a Jordanian and delivered through the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross the former Iraqi president, facing trial this fall and possible execution, says that he will be "sacrificed for our precious Palestine and our beloved, patient and suffering Iraq." The letter, censored by [...]

An influential son of Libyan leader Colonel Muhamar Gaddaffi has said that the Libyan government will soon free 131 political prisoners, and will also provide compensation to citizens who had their assets, properties or homes confiscated in the 1970s at the time of Gaddaffi's so-called "Green Revolution." The reform-minded, UK-educated second-eldest of seven Gaddaffi sons, [...]

Indicted former Rwandan government official Michel Bagaragaza has been transferred from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to The Hague due to security concerns. Earlier this week, Bagaragaza pleaded not guilty to genocide charges after surrendering himself to the UN-backed tribunal in Tanzania. Bagaragaza has been indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit genocide, genocide [...]