Leading Wednesday's international brief, the leading opposition party in Zimbabwe , the Movement for Democratic Change has announced its intention to boycott the opening of the Zimbabwean Parliament Thursday morning by Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe . The MDC, which challenged the recent national elections as unfair and fraudulent , has 41 members in the Parliament, [...]

South African businessman Schabir Shaik was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years in jail after being found guilty of two counts of corruption and one count of fraud, ending a high-profile case that many in South Africa had followed over its seven-month duration. Shaik has close ties to Zulu leader and South African Deputy President Jacob [...]

An 80-year-old man reputed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan will stand trial starting Monday for the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers. Edgar Ray Killen is charged with murdering three men who came to Mississippi to help blacks register to vote. The killings were the focus of the 1988 movie [...]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague Wednesday dismissed two charges against former Bosnian commander Naser Oric . The court ruled that charges that Oric's soldiers took weapons and food from Serbs were necessities of war or insignificant to the court. Oric still faces charges of murder and cruel treatment of [...]

A leading Sunni Muslim group in Iraq announced Wednesday that it would not participate in writing the new Iraqi constitution unless Sunnis were given a fair number of seats on the drafting committee. The parliamentary committee in charge and the US government both want increased Sunni involvement, but the Shiite majority is unsettled by calls [...]

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has upheld the drug conviction of a passenger found with cocaine during an airport security check. Sergio Ramon Marquez was randomly selected from a line of passengers in October 2002 to be searched with a hand-held scanner. An object that security gurads thought could have [...]

The British government Wednesday announced proposals to stop the manufacture, import, and sale of the majority of replica guns available in the UK. The plan is part of the new Violent Crime Reduction Bill , legislation that also seeks to raise the age at which a person can purchase a knife from 16 to 18 [...]

Palestinian detainees at Israel's Megiddo prison began a hunger strike on Wednesday as Israeli officials denied reports that prison guards there had abused the Koran, echoing similar stories from Guantanamo Bay . Prisoners complained that the book was desecrated by guards during a search. The Israel Prisons Service says the books were only routinely flipped [...]

The British government announced Wednesday that it has agreed to extradite Algerian Rachid Ramda , held on a French arrest warrant for the past eight years in connection with a Paris bomb attack in 1995 that took the lives of eight people. UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke agreed to the extradition in April but the [...]

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner has called Tuesday's acquittal of 10 Libyan police officers charged with torturing six foreign medics – five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor – into confessions in an AIDS tainted blood scandal , "a matter for serious concern." Ferrero-Waldner noted that human rights lawyers had been denied visas to [...]