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 [...]

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari Wednesday promised to continue fighting corruption in Iraq's new government. He said "administrative corruption" was one of many challenges Iraq must face, and that the government has "rolled up its sleeves and taken measures" to prevent it, including establishing a telephone hotline for reports. Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the head [...]

A British court Wednesday began a retrial of suspected Afghan warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad in what may be the first instance of a country prosecuting an alleged torturer for crimes committed abroad. Zardad is believed to have controlled key road checkpoints in the mid-1990s on the main route from Pakistan to Kabul where the alleged [...]

The US House Appropriations Committee Tuesday continued to press the FBI to adopt recommended reforms in hearings on the the FBI's new budget . On Monday, members of the 9/11 Commission also expressed concern that the Bureau hasn't made enough progress in restructuring and reorganizing since the 9/11 attacks. The battle over reforming the FBI [...]

After rejecting the proposed European Constitution , a poll of French citizens released Wednesday says 61 percent want the constitution renegotiated, while 35 percent say it should not be changed. 74 percent believed France could get "significant and positive" changes to the proposal. The proposed constitution's defeat in France and the Netherlands has European leaders [...]

Lawyers for the US Department of Justice Tuesday asked for less than one-tenth of the expected penalty in a civil racketeering case against major tocacco companies. At the conclusion of closing arguments , government lawyer Stephen D. Brody asked for just $10 billion of the original $130 billion dollar penalty calculated for what the US [...]