Israel is willing to release many Palestinian prisoners , even long-term detainees, if Palestinian militants agree to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit , Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday. Shalit was captured in Gaza on June 25, and his detention helped spark the latest round of violence in the region over the summer. As [...]
China's State Council is considering a draft resolution that would establish a national agency to regulate organ transplants in the wake of international criticism over Chinese organ transplant practices. Chinese health officials have admitted that the majority of organs for transplant come from executed prisoners, and while China formally requires informed consent from the prisoners [...]
Thailand's military leaders decided Monday to lift martial law in 40 of the country's 76 provinces, pending the approval of Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont . Thailand has been under a state of martial law since the Thai military seized power from civilian prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a bloodless coup in September. The Council [...]
Saddam Hussein's genocide trial resumed Monday with testimony from witnesses describing how Hussein's soldiers executed civilians during the "Anfal" campaigns against ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq from 1987 to 1988. All seven defendants appeared in court, though several were represented by court-appointed lawyers while members of the defense team continue their boycott of the proceedings. [...]
Serbian war crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj failed to appear in court Monday as his trial began at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) . The court subsequently stripped Seselj of his right to represent himself and summoned court-appointed defense lawyers to represent him. Seselj, who has been on hunger strike for two [...]
Many of the efforts to soften the corporate accountability reforms of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act are being pushed by the same corporations that employed questionable accounting and business practices before the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, New York state attorney general and governor-elect Eliot Spitzer said in an interview with the Financial Times published Monday. Last week, US [...]
An Australian government commission investigating Australian participation in the now-defunct UN oil-for-food program in Iraq has recommended that criminal charges be brought against 12 business executives for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's former regime . In a report formally submitted to Parliament Monday, the Cole Commission confirmed earlier UN reports that the Australian Wheat Board [...]
French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said Sunday that the issuance of arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan government officials relating to the 1994 plane crash of President Juvenal Habyariman was simply a judicial act by anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere and was not a political act endorsed by the French government. In a radio interview Douste-Blazy [...]
The chief prosecutor in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial said Sunday that audio tapes and documentation proving that Hussein personally ordered the 1988 gassing of Kurdish villagers will be submitted to the court hearing his case. Munqith al-Faroon told Reuters that he possesses tapes of meetings between Saddam and senior Baathist officials revealing that Hussein had [...]
Israel's High Court ruled Sunday that a proposed portion of Israel's Security Fence running north of Jerusalem is legal despite its segregation of five villages and about 1,500 Palestinians from the rest of Israel. Many of the villagers hold Israeli identification cards. Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote: e accept the State's position that there is [...]
