The head of a humanitarian agency in Chechnya and her husband were found dead early Tuesday, their bodies stuffed in the trunk of their car, a prosecutor's spokeswoman said. "These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me,' " says Sherrlyn Borkgren, who spent a month in the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year. Borkgren, a wedding photographer and freelance journalist, traveled to ...

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travels to the epicenter of Africa's longest war Tuesday to try to help victims, especially those of sexual violence, of a regional conflict that's dragged on more than a decade. Taking a smaller U.N. plane on the 1,000-mile trip from Kinshasa to Goma, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was necessary because the U.S. plane being used on her seven-nation Africa trip is too big for the local ...

Authorities have fired and arrested the chief of an Iranian jail that was closed amid allegations of mistreatment of detainees held for protesting June's disputed election, Iranian media reported Sunday. "One security official at the prison, who was responsible for reporting irregularities at the prison, as well as the prison warden have been sacked and are under arrest," Gen. Esmaeel Ahmadi Moghadam, commander of Iran's security forces, told the semi-official Iran Student's News Agency. Iran's Press TV said the move ...

A member of Congress Friday called on the State Department to stop doing business with Xe, the North Carolina-based security company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois, asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whether the State Department had just signed a new $20 million dollar contract with Xe for Iraq, saying she is "very concerned" that the State Department may be signing new security contracts with Xe, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I urge you not to ...

There was an "alarming spike" in the number of Iranian executions between the disputed June 12 presidential election and Wednesday's inauguration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second term, Amnesty International reported Friday. "In just over 50 days, we recorded no less that 115 executions. That is an average of more than two each day," said Irene Khan, secretary-general of the human rights watchdog. "This represents a significant increase, even compared to the appallingly high rate of executions that has been ...

A friend of three American hikers arrested in Iran said he believes they had no knowledge they were nearing the Iranian border while hiking in Iraq, and made "a simple and regrettable mistake." Shon Meckfessel was with the three on a hiking trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, but had stayed behind at their hotel on July 31, the day the three went missing, because he had a cold. He issued a statement to media outlets on Thursday and confirmed its authenticity ...

President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser Thursday vowed the U.S. would defeat al Qaeda and declared the president has urged him to be more aggressive in destroying the terrorist organization. John Brennan, Obama's senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, projected an assertive stance toward the battle against al Qaeda -- which Brennan said "remains the most serious threat" the U.S. faces -- and al Qaeda's allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He made clear that predator drone attacks would continue, while ...

A month ago, Barack Obama made his first trip to Africa as President and, while in Ghana, delivered a message of support tinged with impatience with leaders who have not been held accountable for their misdeeds. His Kenyan ancestry and the continent's nearly universal adoration for a man it sees as an African son put him in the rare position of being able to say such things without being viewed as a neocolonial scold. Now U.S. Secretary of State ...

Iran's trial of more than 100 people who it has linked to post-election unrest is a "sign of weakness" and shows that the Islamic republic "is afraid of its own people," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CNN Thursday. "It is a show trial, there's no doubt about it," Clinton told CNN's Fareed Zakaria in a wide-ranging interview to be broadcast on his "GPS" program Sunday. "It demonstrates I think better than any of us could ever say that ...

Insurance companies have always been an effective villain in the health-care reform debate, but this year the industry thought things might be different. Recognizing the growing sentiment for some kind of change and fully aware that universal coverage would help bulk up their rolls as baby boomers age into the Medicare system, private insurers early on declared their support for President Obama's health reform effort. So when word came last month that the Democrats were drawing up a ...