Amir was a salesman before being arrested and taken to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. During his time there, he says, he was forced to lay down in urine and feces, stay naked in his cell for days, and "howl like dogs do" while being pulled by a dog leash. According to his accounts, he was also sodomized with a broomstick and had his genitals stepped on. After his release from Abu Ghraib in November 2004 ...

A Belgian city has decided to go "veggie" for a day in an effort to highlight the environmental and health costs of eating meat. The city authorities in Ghent, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Brussels, have declared Thursdays "Veggie Day," (Veggiedag) and are asking residents to get involved and opt for vegetarian meals at least one day a week. It says Ghent is the first city in Europe to try such a scheme. According to the city's campaign ...

Polar bears have become the universal symbol of global warming, not so much because they're cute or cuddly , but because it is eminently clear that climate change is killing them. Polar bears depend on solid sea ice for survival; it's where they do their hunting. But when the ice begins to melt — as it has in recent years, thanks largely to warming — the bears can starve and die. A 2007 study by the U.S. Geological Survey ...

New IBO light-welterweight world champion, Manny Pacquiao, is planning a career in politics, the 30-year-old told CNN on his return to his native Phillipines. Though "Pacman" will concentrate on boxing until next year, the man dubbed the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world suggested he could retire the following year to run for congress. "I want to be a Congressman so I can help the people," Pacquiao told CNN's Andrew Stevens. But when asked if becoming the Filipino president ...

A Hindu man in Britain lost his court battle Friday for the legal right to be cremated in a traditional Hindu open-air funeral pyre. Davender Ghai, 70, a world-renowned charity advocate in Britain, argued the practice is already legal under British law, but he sought clarification in order to hold such cremations in the future. Ghai tested the law in 2006 when he lit the funeral pyre of a man in the northern English county of Northumberland. He was never ...

These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities. And the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian — in short, less demographically Republican. ...

Prince Charles of Britain is meeting the pope Monday for the first time since his 1996 divorce from Princess Diana, representatives for both sides said. The heir to the United Kingdom throne will be accompanied by his second wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. Prince Charles's accession to the throne is likely to be an unspoken subtext of the meeting, an expert on the prince told CNN. "The biggest thing on Prince Charles's agenda is the preparation for his coronation," ...

Britain's Prince Charles will follow in the footsteps of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore with an upcoming book and film documentary on the environment, the prince's publisher said. The book and film project, titled "Harmony," will be released in 2010, publisher HarperCollins said this week. Like Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," it is expected to generate as much controversy as it will profit, the publisher said. "I believe that true sustainability depends fundamentally upon us shifting our perception and widening ...

The next time you go to throw away your old mobile phone, Gert-Jan van Breugel hopes you bury it in a garden instead tossing it in a garbage can. That is of course if the cellphone you're using is the biodegradable bamboo handset he's designed with bamboo seeds implanted in its case that should start to sprout when the mobile disintegrates in the ground. The phone is also energy independent -- a three minute turn of the crank ...

President Obama marked Earth Day Wednesday by announcing a new initiative to lease federal waters for the purpose of generating electricity from wind and ocean currents. The president announced the initiative, to be administered by the Interior Department, while reiterating his pledge to push for a comprehensive energy plan that encourages the development of alternative fuel sources, cuts dependence on foreign oil, addresses climate change, and creates new jobs. Wind power can generate 20 percent of the country's electricity by ...