Netherlands

China will oppose serving the Goldstone report to the United Nations Security Council and to the International Court in The Hague, according to Chines...

TOKYO — An American father was arrested in Japan after snatching his children from his ex-wife, who had taken the kids to her native country without telling him.

The back-and-forth exposes a simmering diplomatic dispute over Japan's traditional favoritism toward mothers in custody battles. While the father was apprehended by Japanese authorities, a U.S. court has issued an arrest warrant for the mother.

Christopher Savoie grabbed his two children – an 8-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl – while they were walking to school on Monday, forcing them into a car and driving away, Akira Naraki, a police spokesman in the southern city of Fukuoka, said Wednesday.

His former wife, Noriko, then called the police. Savoie, a 38-year-old technology executive from Franklin, Tennessee, was arrested just as he was about to enter the U.S. Consulate in Fukuoka with his children, said Tracy Taylor, a spokeswoman at the consulate.

Savoie is chief executive officer of Franklin-based Tazzle Inc. Tazzle makes data sharing devices for BlackBerry mobile phones and has an office in Tokyo that looks after manufacturing in Asia, according to the company's Web site.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday said that allowing the International Criminal Court in the Hague try the war crimes alleged in the rece...

Chevron Corp. on Wednesday filed suit against the government of Ecuador for trade violations, an effort to protect against a potentially negative ruling in a separate $27 billion suit over environmental damage.

Chevron accuses Ecuador of "exploitation" for its pursuit of an ongoing lawsuit over environmental damage the plaintiffs allege Texaco caused in the Amazon rain forest between 1972 and 1990. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, acquired Texaco in 2001.

Chevron claims Texaco already paid millions to clean up the region as part of a 1998 agreement with the government and is not liable for further damages. Company officials also have said Texaco's former partner, state oil company Petroecuador, continued to pollute the region after Texaco departed.

Chevron's complaint against Ecuador was filed with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands. It effectively seeks international arbitration of the environmental dispute, which would be legally binding.

In the filing, Chevron says Ecuador is trying to shift its own share of liability for any remaining environmental damage to Chevron, as well as liability for Petroecuador's own oil operations since 1992 and damage caused by "government-sanctioned colonization and agricultural and industrial exploitation of the Amazonian region." It says the nation's conduct has violated investment agreements and Ecuador-U.S. trade agreements.

A U.N. war crimes court convicted two Bosnian Serb cousins Monday for a 1992 killing spree that included locking scores of Muslims in two houses and burning them alive.

Yugoslav war crimes tribunal judge Patrick Robinson said burning at least 119 Muslims to death in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad "exemplified the worst acts of inhumanity that one person may inflict on others."

He sentenced Milan Lukic to life in prison and Sredoje Lukic to 30 years.

Robinson said Milan Lukic was the ringleader in both incidents, helping herd victims into the houses, setting the fires and shooting those who fled the flames. The judgment said his cousin Sredoje Lukic aided and abetted in one of the blazes

Witnesses "vividly remembered the terrible screams of the people in the house," Robinson said, adding that Milan Lukic used the butt of his rifle to herd people into the house, saying, "Come on, let's get as many people inside as possible."

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor issued a challenge at his war crimes trial Monday to find any bank account owned by him holding illicit funds or "blood diamonds" from the civil war in Sierra Leone.

In his second week of testimony in his defense, Taylor denied any role in forming the guerrilla force that invaded Sierra Leone in 1991, that he helped plan the rebel incursion, that he trained the rebel forces or that he commanded their operations.

"I was never involved. It's a lie," he told the U.N-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone sitting in The Hague.

Taylor is charged with 11 counts of murder, torture and recruiting child soldiers for supporting rebels in Sierra Leone's 1991-2002 civil war, whose signature crime was to amputate civilians' limbs, ears and noses to intimidate the population into submission.

He is the first African head of state to be brought before an international court for war crimes.

A key heritage site commemorating one of the most famous campaigns fought by British soldiers during the Second World War has become a battleground ...