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Saddam Hussein may be hanged within hours, senior Iraqi officials and the ousted president's defence team said on Friday. One senior Iraqi source told Reuters key legal issues had been resolved and he could go to the gallows shortly. Another official said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was meeting key figures, including the Justice Minister, to agree the details.

The Iraqi government has told U.S. officials that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein could be executed within the next few days, a senior Bush administration official said on Thursday. "I've heard that it's going to be a couple more days, probably," the official said while Bush took a holiday break at his Texas ranch. He said he had heard from U.S. officials in Baghdad that the execution would not be Thursday U.S. time or Friday Baghdad time. "It's going to be maybe another day or so," the official said. He said the government of Iraq would most likely inform U.S....

Ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) leader and reluctant war crimes indictee Vojislav Seselj, "holds the key to his life and health," said a spokesman for the United Nations' Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at the Hague, where Seselj is in his fourth week of a hunger strike. Most of Seselj's demands have been met, Refik Hodzic on Wednesday told journalists. Tribunal president Fausto Pocar has called on Seselj to end his fast and to take an active part in the legal process which has been interrupted due to his health.

The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission was created by Congress to inform the public about the impact Abraham Lincoln had on the development of our nation, and to find the best possible ways to honor his accomplishments. The President, the Senate and the House of Representatives appointed a fifteen-member commission to commemorate the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln and to emphasize the contribution of his thoughts and ideals to America and the world. The official public Bicentennial Commemoration launches February 2008 and closes February 2010, with the climax of the Commemoration taking place on February 12, 2009, the 200th anniversary of...

A defiant Saddam Hussein shrugged off a possible death sentence, saying he would die without fear and the US occupiers of his country would leave humiliated like they did in Vietnam, his lawyers said on Saturday. They said a jovial and highly spirited Saddam chatted with them for more than three hours about the violence in Iraq and mounting US losses just hours before an expected death sentence on Sunday in his trial for crimes against humanity.

Saddam Hussein is to be denied his final wish of an "honourable" death by military firing squad after court officials ruled he should face the gallows as a common criminal if found guilty. The former Iraqi dictator, who is expected to be given the death sentence today when a verdict is delivered in his first war crimes trial, has been demanding execution by the gun rather than the rope, on the basis that he was head of the country's armed forces. But the Iraqi war crimes court in Baghdad has dismissed his request, noting that Saddam failed the entry exam...

A man convicted of atrocities in the Balkans has been living peacefully in Carshalton for years ::nobreak::TO HIS neighbours, Milan Spanovic was an unassuming father of three. Though he had lived among them for 15 years, the best description they could come up with was that he was “remarkably quiet”. Equally, the officers who arrested him for shoplifting found nothing untoward about him. After he protested his innocence, they set about completing the paperwork and prepared to release him with no more than a formal caution. So when a desk officer typed his name into a database as a matter...

SARAJEVO, Oct 6 (Reuters) - Bosnian state prosecutors have launched an investigation of Bosnian Muslim wartime general Atif Dudakovic for suspected war crimes against Bosnian Serbs in 1995, Chief Prosecutor Marinko Jurcevic said on Friday. Serb Republic Prime Minister Milorad Dodik and President Dragan Cavic requested an investigation after local broadcasters aired footage apparently showing Dudakovic, a wartime hero for Muslims, giving orders to burn Serb villages. "We have officially opened the investigation against Atif Dudakovic and other persons based on the grounds of suspicion they committed some criminal acts regarded as war crimes," Jurcevic told reporters. "The investigation is...

The American Council for Kosovo Protests Washington Visit of Terrorist and War Criminal Agim Ceku –Kosovo Serb spokesman: Ceku should be standing trial, “not being received with honors in the capital of any civilized democracy.” The American Council for Kosovo protests the official visit to Washington, DC, of Agim Ceku, an indicted war criminal and former commander of the jihad terrorist organization, the so-called “Kosovo Liberation Army.” According to the Associated Press, Mr. Ceku is scheduled to meet today with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and with officials at the White House, before proceeding to New York for a...

The chief judge presiding over Saddam Hussein's war crimes trial shouted down the former Iraqi leader Monday, reminding Saddam he no longer had supreme power. "You are a defendant now, not a president," Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman told Saddam as the defence stage of the trial began. The altercation came after Abdel-Rahman threw a defence lawyer out of the heavily guarded Baghdad courtroom. Bushra Khalil had just returned to the proceedings after being ejected in early April. The judge ejected her again Monday for disregarding his orders by trying to make a statement. As guards took hold of the Lebanese-born lawyer...

U.S. Lawmaker Blasts Yasukuni Visits MAY 15, 2006 03:10 by Young-A Soh (sya@donga.com) U.S. political leaders voiced strong concerns over the Japanese prime ministerfs paying respects at the Yasukuni Shrine. Thus, it is expected that the controversies over the Yasukuni Shrine will heat up in Japan with its election of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) president slated for this September. Stop Paying Visits to the Shrine If to Give an Address at the U.S. Congress – The Asahi Shimbun reported on May 13 that the U.S. House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (Republican, picture) demanded that Japanese Prime...

UN urges West to ignore Serbia's arrest warrant for Kosovo PM PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro-Kosovo's top U.N. official has urged Western powers to ignore an international arrest warrant issued by Serbia against the province's prime minister, in a letter obtained Wednesday. Soren Jessen-Petersen, the chief U.N. official in charge of running the province, said that his mission did not recognize the validity of the warrant issued in Serbia against Agim Ceku, a former rebel commander who became Kosovo's prime minister earlier this month. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Jessen-Petersen cited the U.N.'s sole legal jurisdiction over Kosovo and said...

"No one now disputes that stopping Slobodan Milosevic was the right thing to do,” wrote the Wall Street Journal this week, several days after the deposed Serbian strongman expired in his cell in The Hague. It’s an appealing sentiment, suggesting as it does that the man who presided over the deaths of 250,000 people in Yugoslavia in the 1990s died unsung and unmourned. In reality, however, even Slobodan Milosevic had his defenders. What is more, they are the same voices--largely on the far Left but also on the isolationist Right--who have now taken up the cause of Saddam Hussein. Many...

I was one of the last western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic. Having been called to The Hague as a potential witness, I spent an hour in his cell in January last year. Like most who met him, I found him polite and intelligent. "We will win," he told me. "Freedom is a universal value. They have no evidence against me." If the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were a proper court of law, the charges against him would have been dismissed long ago. Unfortunately, it is a highly politicised organ, created on the initiative of the very...

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - A Socialist Party aide of Slobodan Milosevic said Saturday that the ex-president was defiant just before his death. "He told me, 'Don't you worry: They will not destroy me or break me; I shall defeat them all,'" said Milorad Vucelic of the Socialist Party, recounting a phone conversation with Milosevic late Friday. "But it was obvious he was very ill." Milosevic, who was found dead Saturday in his cell at the Netherlands-based war crimes court near The Hague, was daily in contact with Socialist party officials in Belgrade as he carried out his own defense before the...

The U.N. war crimes tribunal hopes an autopsy on Slobodan Milosevic on Sunday will clear up the cause of his death in his cell only months before a verdict was due in his four-year-old trial. Milosevic, branded the "Butcher of the Balkans" for conflicts that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, was found dead on Saturday, prompting some world figures and relatives of war victims to say they had been robbed of justice. As questions were raised as to why the trial had dragged on for so long, a tribunal spokeswoman said there was no indication the 64-year-old former Yugoslav...

UN war crimes tribunal denies request for Milosevic autopsy in Moscow www.chinaview.cn 2006-03-12 05:50:15 BRUSSELS, March 11 (Xinhuanet) -- The U.N. war crimes tribunal said on Saturday it had denied a request by Slobodan Milosevic's lawyer to have the autopsy of the former Yugoslavia president conducted in Moscow instead of The Hague.A tribunal official also declined to comment on a claim by Milosevic's lawyer that he had been poisoned while in jail. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague on Saturday announced that Milosevic had been found dead on his bed in his cell at...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, the so-called "butcher of the Balkans" being tried for war crimes after orchestrating a decade of bloodshed during his country's breakup, was found dead Saturday in his prison cell. He was 64. Milosevic, who suffered chronic heart ailments and high blood pressure, apparently died of natural causes and was found in his bed, the U.N. tribunal said, without giving an exact time of death. He had been examined following frequent complaints of fatigue or ill health that delayed his trial, but the tribunal could not immediately say when his last medical checkup...

<p>Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who orchestrated the Balkan wars of the 1990s and was on trial for war crimes, was found dead in his prison cell at the U.N. detention center near The Hague, the U.N. tribunal said Saturday. He was 65.</p>

WASHINGTON — Most people in the United States want Saddam Hussein to hang if he's convicted at his trial, a view not shared by some longtime American allies. AP-Ipsos polling in eight other countries, where the death penalty mostly has been abolished, found that people there prefer that the former Iraqi leader spend the rest of his life in prison. The countries are Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, South Korea and Spain. Similar, but less dramatic, disparities were found when U.S. attitudes were compared with the eight countries on whether Saddam is getting a fair trial and whether Iraqis...