Former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison. US District Court Judge Barbara Jones handed down the sentence three years after WorldCom collapsed in an $11 billion accounting fraud, losing billions for investors. In March 2005 Ebbers was found guilty of fraud, conspiracy, and filing false documents with regulators. Reuters [...]

Iraq has accepted an offer from the Arab League to lend expertise and support to the committee established to draft the Iraqi constitution . Meanwhile the drafting and consultation process continues as the August 15 deadline for approval approaches. A document that is supposedly a draft of a proposed Bill of Rights has been leaked; [...]

US President George Bush said Wednesday that he will not comment on top aide Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame until a federal criminal investigation into the controversy is complete. Bush called it a "serious investigation" and said he would "not prejudge the investigation based on media reports." The [...]

Raed Juhi, a senior judge on the Iraqi Special Tribunal , said Wednesday that the Tribunal's investigations of the case against Saddam Hussein are "more than 80 percent complete". He said the court's investigating judges are not the ones to set a trial date, but according to a source a five-judge panel will set a [...]

Argentine newspaper La Nacion reported Wednesday that Argentina has taken formal responsibility for its failure to discover who was behind the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 86 people and that Argentine President Nestor Kirchner has admitted that previous administrations tried to downplay the failures in the investigation. Kirchner added [...]

Texas District Judge Robert Perkins Tuesday reaffirmed an indictment for violations of a state law regarding corporate campaign contributions against an ally of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX). John Colyandro, executive director of Texans for a Republican Majority , was indicted last September on charges of illegally collecting campaign money. The court rejected defense [...]

Italian police executed 200 search warrants across the country Wednesday, searching for illegal arms and explosives, the public security department for the Italian Interior Ministry announced. The raids did not lead to any immediate arrests but police are investigating a range of crimes from falsifying documents to terrorism, primarily in Milan, Rome, Turin and Naples. [...]

The pro-hunting Countryside Alliance Wednesday challenged Britain's recent ban on fox hunting with dogs in the House of Lords Wednesday by questioning the Parliament Act , the law that allowed the lower house of parliament, the House of Commons, to pass the legislation over the objection of the upper chamber. "The challenge to the Parliament [...]

Police in the Netherlands announced Wednesday the arrest of a 17-year-old boy as part of an investigation into the Hofstad terrorist group that killed filmmaker Theo van Gogh . Police found a homemade bomb in the boy's room. Although he was investigated for publishing extremist Muslim texts on the Internet, they doubt he is a [...]

Parliamentary members of Zimbabwe's ruling African National Union-Patriotic Front party Tuesday defeated an opposition proposal that would have ended the government's controversial home demolition program . "Operation Restore Order" has resulted in 30,000 arrests of illegal squatters and merchants, and left anywhere from 300,000 to 1 million people homeless. The government has defended the plan [...]