The house arrest order against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been lifted, Pakistani police said Thursday. Bhutto was placed under house arrest for seven days early Tuesday in an effort to block her from leading a planned 160-mile march from Lahore to Islamabad protesting President Pervez Musharraf's imposition of emergency rule . Police [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada declined on Thursday to hear the appeals of two US military deserters who sought refugee status within the country. Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, both soldiers in the US Army, fled to Canada in 2004 to avoid deployment in Iraq and applied for asylum before the Canadian Immigration and Refugee [...]

The Parliament of the Georgian Republic approved a presidential decree on Thursday bringing an end to the country's national state of emergency effective Friday. Chairwoman of the Parliament Nino Burjanadze announced the decision following calls by both the US and EU to end emergency rule. US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack welcomed the Georgian parliament's [...]

The Constitutional Council of France Thursday approved a controversial amendment to an immigration law that would allow voluntary DNA testing to establish family ties between recent immigrants and relatives already living in France. The Council also rejected an amendment that would have allowed for the collection of ethnic data to promote diversity. The French Parliament [...]

An official with Russia's Union of Right Forces (SPS) told a news conference Thursday that the opposition political party had filed a lawsuit with the country's Supreme Court requesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin not be allowed to run as a candidate in the country's upcoming parliamentary elections. Putin currently appears at the top of [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit threw out planned federal fuel economy standards for light trucks and SUVs Thursday, ruling that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) did not adequately consider the environmental impact of the proposed standards. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by several states and environmental groups, [...]

The Tianhe District Court in China convicted lawyer and dissident writer Yang Maodong of conducting "illegal business activity" and sentenced him to serve five years in prison and pay more than $5,000 in fines, according to his lawyer. Yang's trial began in July on charges stemming from his publication of a book concerning a political [...]

The US Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the execution of Florida death row inmate Mark Dean Schwab "pending the timely filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari." Schwab was scheduled to be executed at 6 PM ET on Thursday. The stay will terminate automatically if Schwab's petition for certiorari is denied. [...]

UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Paulo Sergio Pinheiro told reporters at the end of a five-day visit to Myanmar Thursday that he was able to meet with a number of prominent political prisoners, but that his request to meet with opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was denied by the ruling [...]

A British court ruled Thursday that the radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri can be extradited to the United States on charges of supporting terrorism. Abu Hamza, who is currently serving a seven-year sentence in the UK for urging his followers to kill Jews and other non-Muslims, faces US charges of attempting to establish terrorist [...]