A Spanish judge Tuesday ordered an Argentine pilot to be kept in prison in Madrid, Spain, until a decision is made about whether he should be extradited to his home country on charges that he participated in "death flights." Former Argentine Navy Lt. Julio Alberto Poch is one of two pilots arrested recently for allegedly piloting "death flights" in which more than 1,000 prisoners were thrown alive out of planes during Argentina's "dirty war" in the 1970s and '80s, officials ...

An extradition hearing is expected in Spain this week for one of two pilots arrested recently on charges they participated in "death flights" in which more than 1,000 prisoners were thrown out of planes during Argentina's "dirty war" in the 1970s and 1980s, officials said. Former Navy Lt. Julio Alberto Poch, who has been held in Spain without bail since his arrest in Valencia in late September, will have a hearing before a high court in Madrid, a judge in ...

The oldest-known hominid skeleton was a 4-foot-tall female who walked upright more than 4 million years ago and offers new clues to how humans may have evolved, scientists say. Scientists believe that the fossilized remains, which were discovered in 1994 in Ethiopia and studied for years by an international team of researchers, support beliefs that humans and chimpanzees evolved separately from a common ancestor. "This is not an ordinary fossil. It's not a chimp. It's not a human. It shows ...

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do turn up are sometimes hard to place. Every so often, though, fossil hunters stumble upon a discovery that fills in a big chunk of the puzzle all at once — and simultaneously reshapes the very picture they thought they were building. The path of just such a discovery ...

The death of a 14-year-old girl in England after she received a vaccination for Human Papilloma virus (HPV) has prompted a widespread freeze on the country's national vaccination program. More than 1.4 million girls have received the vaccination in England since the National Health Service (NHS) started administering it in September 2008. Natalie Morton's sudden death Monday occurred within hours after she received a shot of the vaccine Cervarix at the NHS at her school in Coventry. ...

Angry workers beat to death a human resources vice president after he laid off 42 employees at an auto-parts manufacturing company in southern India, police said Wednesday.

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission issued a finding of probable cause Tuesday that racism was involved in the decision last June by a suburban Philadelphia swim club to revoke privileges of a largely minority day care center. The commission ordered monetary damages for humiliation and embarrassment and a civil penalty of not more than $50,000. The decision noted that none of the club's 155 paid members this year was African-American. Last year, according to the decision, there were "179 paid ...

Sarah Palin touched on a host of topics -- including Reaganomics, China and human rights, Tibet, the Asian and U.S. economies, family and moose in Alaska -- as she delivered a speech to investors Wednesday in Hong Kong, according to audience members. The former Republican vice presidential candidate was the keynote speaker at the 16th CLSA Investors' Forum, in what was billed as her first speech outside North America. She recently stepped down as Alaska's governor. Her 90-minute address, which ...

What was believed to be the sixth human foot to wash up on the shores of British Columbia in recent months proved to be a fake, authorities said Thursday. A "skeletonized animal paw" had been placed in a sock and athletic shoe that was packed with dried seaweed, the British Columbia Coroners Service announced. The hoax was uncovered as the coroner's office began DNA and other forensic tests on the supposed foot in an attempt to identify the person ...

For years, much of the debate over Zimbabwe has been preoccupied with how much, and how publicly, to criticize its despotic longtime leader Robert Mugabe. In the past, the West routinely harangued the ailing 85-year-old dictator, a former liberation hero who has ruled for 29 years. Western capitals and human rights groups have urged Africa to do the same, believing that the continent needed to recognize its own problems and sort them out. A few African leaders, like those ...