A federal judge met with Justice Department lawyer Terry Henry Thursday to discuss why the US has not yet released two Chinese Uighur Muslims still held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp after the government determined they posed no threat to the US as enemy combatants . Henry met with US District Judge James Robertson [...]

AP is reporting that the speaker of the Iraqi parliament has announced a one-day extension for talks on the draft Iraqi constitution , originally scheduled to be voted on Thursday after being postponed for three days on Monday following a seven-day extension on the original August 15 deadline set down in the country's Transitional Administrative [...]

California's Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Thursday that the state is suing 39 pharmaceutical companies for concealing the actual costs of their drugs in an attempt to artificially inflate payments from California's Medicaid program. Lockyer said he added new drug companies including GlaxoSmithKline and Amgen to the state's prior complaint which named Abbott Laboratories and [...]

Iran said Thursday that it is working on a new proposal to negotiate with the West regarding its nuclear program, expressing an interest in negotiating with countries other than Great Britain, France and Germany. The three core negotiating countries cancelled a meeting with Iran scheduled for August 31 after the country resumed its uranium enrichment [...]

The chief observer of the European Union Election Observation Mission to Ethiopia 2005 (EU EOM) said Thursday that the country's May 15 parliamentary elections did not meet international voting standards. In the first EU report released since the vote, Ana Gomes said that intimidation tactics of witnesses and arrests of opposition members rose to the [...]

Two media rights groups called for US Middle East military commander General John Abizaid to release a Reuters journalist being held at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq unless the military can provide a valid explanation for his detention. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists have accused US [...]

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has denied the request of former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers' request to serve his 25-year prison sentence in a low-security facility near his Mississippi home, placing him instead in a medium-security prison in Louisiana. Ebbers was convicted earlier this year on nine counts of fraud, conspiracy and filing false statements [...]

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) ruled Thursday by a seven to one margin that Germany's early parliamentary election scheduled for next month can go ahead. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder purposefully lost a vote of confidence in the federal parliament in July, prompting the scheduling of the vote one year earlier than the original date. Two [...]

UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke Wednesday denounced a statement issued by the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak urging the UK to refrain from deporting Islamic radicals for fear that they will face torture by their home countries. In an interview with Great Britain's ITV News, Clarke said, "The human rights of those people [...]

The US has proposed over 750 amendments to the United Nations draft agreement that 175 countries are expected to sign during a UN General Assembly summit on poverty and global security scheduled for next month. US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton wrote a confidential letter Wednesday to certain UN envoys calling on the [...]