A second witness in the Donovan probe is murdered In most ways it was a rather standard gangland slaying. The victim was driving his 1977 Lincoln Continental through The Bronx in New York City one evening last week when a passenger in the car suddenly placed a .38-cal. pistol to the back of his head and fired a single shot. The Continental swung out of control and smashed into a parked car. The assassin jumped out and climbed into a ...

In southern Italy, the Mafia wars are heating up. On Monday, Italy will deploy an expected 80 soldiers into the city of Reggio Calabria, on the toe of Italy's boot, to provide security for anti-Mafia prosecutors who have been repeatedly threatened by the powerful 'Ndrangheta criminal organization. The ramped-up precautions come after a campaign of escalating intimidation of public officials, which has included death threats, envelopes with bullets in them, a homemade bomb that blew up in ...

Lawyers in Italy have now fired their best shots at Amanda Knox, the Seattle exchange student accused of killing her British roommate, explaining the murder of Meredith Kercher in terms of saint vs. sinner. In final arguments, Perugia's public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini said the American slit her roommate's throat on the night of Nov. 1, 2007, driven by sexual desire and alpha-female competitiveness. Asking for a life sentence with nine months' isolation, Mignini said "La Knox" wanted a sex ...

Residents of the New Jersey town where a priest was found dead in the kitchen of his church's rectory Friday morning should exercise caution, Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi said. Due to the nature of the wounds, the death of the Rev. Ed Hinds, 61, of St. Patrick's Church "in all likelihood was in fact a homicide," Bianchi told reporters at a news conference Friday afternoon. He said investigators believe Hinds was killed sometime between 11 p.m. Thursday and 8 ...

A Zimbabwean court ordered a senior opposition politician back to jail Wednesday to await his trial, set to begin next week. "I commit the accused to prison," Magistrate Lucy Mungwari said as she announced the ruling in Roy Bennett's case to a packed courtroom in Mutare, about 185 miles southeast of the capital, Harare. Bennett, a Movement for Democratic Change politician and an ardent critic of President Robert Mugabe's policies, was arrested on February 13 -- just before he was ...

Disgraced former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori pleaded guilty to charges of illegal wiretapping and embezzling government money to bribe politicians and journalists to support his 2000 re-election campaign, the official Andina news agency reported. Monday's criminal trial was the fourth and final that Fujimori faced since being extradited to Peru from Chile in 2007. The government prosecutor, Jose Antonio Pelaez Bardales, has asked the court for an eight-year prison sentence and a fine of 5 million new soles (U.S. $1.7 ...

Former Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards talked a campaign aide into claiming he fathered a child born to Edwards' onetime mistress, sources familiar with the issue said Monday. Edwards admitted to his affair with Rielle Hunter in August 2008 after months of denials, but said he could not have been the father of Hunter's daughter, who was born the previous February. Former Edwards staffer Andrew Young has said he was the girl's father -- but has recanted and says he ...

Serbian authorities have put up wanted posters for war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic at police stations across the country in their search for the highest-ranking figure from the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict to remain at large, according to Serbian media reports. Mladic faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the killing of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. The posters remind people ...

A huge cargo ship which disappeared mysteriously for more than two weeks this summer was not secretly carrying advanced Russian missiles, the country's foreign minister said Tuesday. "As for the alleged presence of S-300 systems onboard the dry cargo carrier Arctic Sea, this is an absolute lie," Sergei Lavrov told reporters. The journalists had asked him about media reports that the ship was secretly ferrying the anti-aircraft missiles to perhaps Iran or Syria. Lavrov's comments were reported ...

The attorney for Nancy Garrido, charged in the Jaycee Lee Dugard abduction case, expressed concern Wednesday that intense media coverage may prejudice his client's ability to get a fair trial. "There have been some misstatements made in the media, and possibly very innocent misstatements like, you know, 'She's charged with 29 counts, she was there, therefore she must be culpable,' " Gilbert Maines told CNN's "American Morning" on Wednesday. "That's good speculation, but any good prosecutor will tell you that ...