US District Judge Karen Schreier Thursday granted a preliminary injunction blocking a controversial South Dakota law passed in March requiring abortion doctors to tell women that abortion ends the lives of "human beings", or face 30 days of jail time and a $200 fine. According to the judge, plaintiffs Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota [...]

AP is reporting that Sandra Day O'Connor , first woman justice on the US Supreme Court, has announced her plans to retire . Read the text of Justice O'Connor's letter of resignation addressed to President Bush. The Washington Post has more. Read this retrospective from 2001 on Justice O'Connor's Supreme Court career on the occasion [...]

Ukrainian authorities said Thursday that they have discovered who was behind the assassination attempt by poisoning directed at President Viktor Yushchenko and have traced the substance used in the plot to a facility housing banned chemical weapons. Yushchenko, who won the disputed presidential election in Ukraine last year which put hundreds of thousands in the [...]

Three more people were reported dead Thursday as a result of "Operation Drive Out Trash" or "Operation Restore Order", Zimbabwe's controversial 6-week government demolition and squatter resettlement plan, when police swept through an illegal settlement west of the capital Harare. According to the Director of Amnesty International's Africa Program Kolawole Olaniyan, Porta Farm , an [...]

Of the 15 Sunni Muslims joining members of the committee to construct Iraq's new constitution , two are accused of being former senior members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party while two others have indicated that they supported it, according to a report in Friday's New York Times. The new constitution, which, by law, the committee [...]

The European Commission on Thursday published a proposal to create a European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights . The proposal comes in the wake of an Amnesty International report urging Great Britain's incoming EU Presidency to make fundamental rights a key issue in the EU agenda in the second half of 2005. The independent agency, [...]

Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir announced in a national broadcast Thursday a plan to end the country's 16-year state of emergency by July 9. According to el-Brashir, the adoption of a new constitution and transitional government, following the January adoption of a peace treaty ending the 21-year civil war in southern Sudan, will end the state [...]

In a White House interview with Danish television that aired Thursday, US President George W. Bush said that agreeing to the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change would have "wrecked" the US economy. Bush noted that other "big polluters" like India and China have also refused to accept the treaty's terms. AP has [...]

France applied the controversial doctrine of "universal jurisdiction" that allows states to claim criminal jurisdiction over persons accused of committing crimes abroad for the first time Thursday in the trial of a Mauritanian military officer. Ely Ould Dah is accused of torturing black Mauritanian army personnel in Jreida prison in 1990 and 1991. He was [...]

Nigeria's Supreme Court Friday turned back a challenge to the legitimacy of the 2003 election victory of President Olusegun Obasanjo , affirming a lower court ruling and putting an end to a lawsuit over alleged vote rigging. The legal challenge was spearheaded by former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari who claimed that at least 16 of [...]