A proposed amendment to the Russian Constitution that would have allowed President Vladimir Putin to serve a third term fell far short of approval by the State Duma on Wednesday. Only 32 members of Russia's lower house voted for it, with 99 voting against. The measure needed 226 votes to pass. Putin's term expires in [...]

Two US citizens pleaded not guilty to terror-related charges against them in federal court on Tuesday. Tarik Shah, 42, of New York, and Rafik Abdus Sabir, 50, of Boca Raton, Florida, each face a single count of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida . Prosecutors say Shah agreed to teach hand-to-hand combat and that [...]

Former Deputy President of South Africa Jacob Zuma was released on $150 bail Wednesday after prosecution lawyers asked for more time to prepare a corruption case against him and trial was postponed until October 2005. Bail was granted on condition that witnesses "not…be interfered with directly or indirectly". South Africa President Thabo Mbeki fired Zuma [...]

A Serbian court Wednesday sentenced 10 former members of the Slobodan Milosevic regime to jail for their roles in 1999 assassination attempt on then-Yugoslav opposition leader Vuk Draskovic . Draskovic is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Serbia-Montenegro. Six individuals were sentenced to 15 years for orchestrating a highway crash intended to kill Draskovic, [...]

The Irish Public Prosecution Service has dropped charges against Anthony Joseph Donegan, suspected of providing the car used in the Omagh car bombing in 1998. A spokesman for the PPS said Wednesday that the "test for prosecution was not met." Twenty-nine people were killed and 220 were injured when a car bomb set by the [...]

A Kuwait court Wednesday cleared Nasser al-Mutairi of committing an act of aggression against a foreign nation. Mutairi, the first Kuwait to be freed from Guantanamo Bay in January, had been charged with endangering Kuwait's foreign relations by taking up arms against a foreign nation. He had been captured by the US in the wake [...]

Al-Quds al-Arabi , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, reported Wednesday that Saddam Hussein turned down an offer from US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to take the death penalty off the table in his upcoming trial if Hussein would call for insurgents to lay down their arms. The report also says Saddam has refused to meet [...]

The US-led Combined Review and Release Board created in August 2004 to expedite the screening process for detainees taken into custody in Iraq by US and Iraqi forces has so far approved the outright release of more than 2,700 detainees, released another 5,300 to guarantors, and denied the release of 6,500, a spokesman for detention [...]

The intergovernmental Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has urged US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to drop subpoenas against two journalists demanding that they name their sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's name. The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the reporters' case . While there [...]

The son of late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau , the architect of Canada's civil rights charter, denounced the Canadian government's controversial use of security certificates to indefinitely detain uncharged terror suspects in a court hearing Tuesday. Alexandre "Sasha" Trudeau took the witness stand in Federal Court on behalf of Hassan Almrei , a Syrian [...]