Election officials in Montenegro said Monday that over 55 percent of voters in Sunday's referendum endorsed seceding from Serbia and forming an independent nation. Montenegro's State Electoral Commission said that 55.4 percent of voters supported independence in a majority vote that required 55 percent to win. Some Montenegrin leaders had criticized the 55 percent threshold, [...]

Chief Justice John Roberts wants greater consensus between justices on the US Supreme Court and hopes to decide issues on very narrow grounds in order to avoid unnecessary controversy. In a commencement address to Georgetown Law Center graduates on Sunday, Roberts said: If it is not necessary to decide more to a case, then in [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday ruled that police can enter a home without a warrant when they have not knocked or announced their presence if they have an objectively reasonable basis to believe that someone inside the home has been seriously injured or there is an imminent threat of injury. In Brigham County v. [...]

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Sunday that the US does not need to make English the "national language" and that a Senate move to add English language amendments to an immigration reform proposal was symbolic. In an interview on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Gonzales said that the Senate's amended version of the immigration bill [...]

The US prison and jail population added prisoners from mid-2004 to mid-2005 at a rate of 2.6 percent and more than 1,000 new inmates a week, reaching a total of 2,186,230 inmates behind bars according to a Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics report released Sunday. Prisons received 1.4 million of the new prisoners, while [...]

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that the government has authority to prosecute journalists for publishing classified material under several "statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility." In an appearance on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Gonzales said that journalists' obligations to national [...]

FBI agents videotaped US Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) last August accepting $100,000 in cash as a bribe from wealthy businesswoman Lori Mody for a Nigerian official, according to an FBI affidavit made public Sunday. Mody was actually working as an FBI informant and FBI agents later found $90,000 of the cash in Jefferson's freezer. The [...]

Raouf Abdel-Rahman , the judge presiding over the Saddam Hussein trial , on Monday threw defense lawyer Bushra Khalil out of the courtroom for apparently arguing with the chief judge. Khalil, the only female defense lawyer in the trial, was removed from a session in April when she objected to a video of Hussein introduced [...]

A group of former Guantanamo Bay detainees were found not guilty by a Kuwaiti court Sunday of belonging to al Qaeda and fighting a friendly state. The five detainees, arrested in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, were released from Guantanamo in November and put on trial in Kuwait after they were returned home. During trial, the [...]

The number of women incarcerated in the United States for periods longer than a year grew 757 percent between 1977 and 2004, with Oklahoma and Mississippi showing the greatest increases, according to a report released Sunday from the Women's Prison Association . In Oklahoma, 129 women per 100,000 are behind bars and Mississippi has the [...]