The UN Security Council passed a resolution 12-0 Tuesday imposing sanctions on four individuals for acts or abuses committed in the troubled Darfur region of Sudan and calling for the conclusion of a peace agreement for the area by the end of the month. China, the Russian Federation and Qatar all abstained from the vote [...]
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday considered whether a criminal defendant must prove a duress defense by a preponderance of the evidence or, instead, if the government must prove absence of duress beyond a reasonable doubt. In Dixon v. United States , Dixon was charged with firearms offenses and at trial raised battered woman's syndrome [...]
AP is reporting that a federal jury in California has found Hamid Hayat guilty of providing material support to terrorists by attending an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. Hayat was also found guilty of lying to investigators and faces a maximum sentence of 31 years in prison. Earlier Tuesday, US District Judge Garland E. [...]
Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said Tuesday that Denmark intended to turn down a request to take custody of former Liberian President Charles Taylor should he be convicted of war crimes charges by the Special Court for Sierra Leone . The court has asked to use International Criminal Court facilities at The Hague in [...]
Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross , said Tuesday that ICRC recommendations to US officials have resulted in considerable improvements in detention conditions at Guantanamo Bay . Kellenberger told Swiss newspaper Tribune de Geneve, however, that problems remain with the terms of detention at Guantanamo, referring to ICRC's disagreement with [...]
Prosecutors in Serbia on Tuesday charged eight policemen for the killing of 48 Kosovar Albanians in the first weeks of the 1999 war in Kosovo . According to the indictment, the police officers are accused of shooting the 48 Albanians in the town of Suva Reka and then shipping the bodies to a mass grave [...]
A US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) spokesman said Tuesday that the agency would introduce new rules to speed up the immigration process and prevent serious delays, apparently sidestepping a threat of mass lawsuits from Arab rights advocates. Although the spokesperson conceded that delays did occur in the naturalization process, he contended that only 1 [...]
The Intelligence Authorization Bill for Fiscal Year 2007 , up for a vote in the US House this week, contains several provisions which would expand the authority of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency to crack down on unauthorized leaks of classified information. Sections 423 and 432 of the bill would authorize CIA [...]
As part of a larger response to record high gasoline prices, President George W. Bush on Tuesday announced that the US Environmental Protection Agency would suspend certain rules governing the refining of gasoline. By avoiding additive requirements originally imposed to meet clean air requirements, the move will supposedly make it easier for gasoline producers to [...]
Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who was in charge of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, will face charges in connection to the prison abuse scandal, a lawyer for Jordan said Tuesday. The lawyer, Samuel Spitzberg, said he had been informed that the US Army plans to charge [...]
