Seven years after she rallied crowds in Kiev during Ukraine's Orange Revolution, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko appeared in court Wednesday on charges of abuse of power. The blond-braided firebrand says President Viktor Yanukovych — the loser of the peaceful uprising who scored a shock comeback in 2010 — is trying to crush political opposition using trumped-up charges; Yanukovych says the charges have nothing to do with politics. But some worry that the trial is yet another ...

Between 2003 and 2004, Marion Le, a Canberra-based lawyer, made regular trips to the remote island of Nauru in the South Pacific. But she wasn't going for a beach holiday. At the time, Nauru was part of the so-called Pacific Solution, Australia's policy of processing and detaining asylum seekers arriving by boat in offshore detention facilities. From 2001 to 2007, thousands of asylum seekers were in offshore detention centers while Australian immigration officials decided their fate. Le, who ...

Wars look better after 40 years, when the old men who were soldiers forget how frightened they were. Perhaps it is merely that survival itself takes on a golden haze: we were being shot at, but we were young, and the bullets missed. Even so, it seems strange that anyone would look back fondly at time spent as prisoner or guard in a military prison. "Why would they do this for us?" wondered Gerhardt Clauss, 61, a former German infantryman ...

No, Al Gore did not invent the Internet, but the former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner has always has a hand in high-tech, even as he warned the world about global warming. Those two interests are intersecting with the release of a new iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch app version of his recent climate and energy book Our Choice. The app is one of the first truly multimedia e-books, with interactive graphics, video, photos with ...

A difference between an addict and a recovering addict is that one hides his behavior, while the other can't stop talking about it. Self-revelation is an important part of recovery, but it can lead to awkward moments when you meet a person who identifies as a sex addict. For instance, within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 ...

The latest U.S. nuclear showdown doesn't involve a foreign enemy. Instead it pits President Barack Obama against his Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, and concerns the question of whether America needs a new generation of nuclear warheads. While serving under former President George W. Bush, Gates had repeatedly called for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program to be put into operation, because the nation's current nukes — mostly produced in the 1970s and '80s — are growing so old that ...

Three years ago, Dr Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege in Belgium, examined a comatose 43-year-old Belgian patient, Rom Houben, who for the past 23 years had been assumed by medical professionals to be brain dead. Laureys, who runs a coma study group specializing in such cases, performed sensitive clinical and imaging tests on Houben and made a startling discovery: the former engineering student who suffered a brain injury in a car accident in 1983 was ...

Former French President Jacques Chirac must stand trial on corruption charges, French public radio reported Friday.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has successfully brought dozens of war criminals to justice, but a "truth commission" is still necessary if the region's ethnic factions are ever to achieve lasting reconciliation, according to a former legal adviser to the court.

While several high-profile actors and directors have rallied around Roman Polanski, not everyone in Hollywood believes he should be freed and forgiven. In the face of a petition signed by notables such as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and John Landis calling for the immediate release of Polanski following his detainment in Switzerland, a backlash is building against such support. "I can't believe that Hollywood has separated itself so completely from American morality," said Paul Petersen, a former child actor ...