Kuwait's highest court granted women the right to obtain a passport without their husband's approval, the case's lawyer said Wednesday, in the latest stride for women's rights in this small oil-rich emirate.

Unlike with highly conservative neighbors like Saudi Arabia, women in Kuwait can vote, serve in parliament and drive — and now can obtain their own passports.

In many countries in the region, women cannot travel or obtain a passport without the consent of their male guardian.

Attorney Adel Qurban, whose case the court was ruling on, said the landmark decision "freed" Kuwaiti women from the 1962 law requiring their husband's signature to obtain a passport.

His client, Fatima al-Baghli, is one of thousands of women who have been petitioning courts for this right.

The court found the article in the decades-old law "unconstitutional" because it goes against the principal of equal rights for men and women.

A former British spy is asking Britain's Supreme Court to overturn a decision by domestic intelligence agency MI5 to block him from publishing a book about his career.

Lawyers for the former MI5 officer, who is not named in court documents, told a hearing Monday that he is seeking a judicial review of the decision.

Britain's government says publishing the book could threaten national security.

In a famous case in 1998, Britain's government lost a three-year campaign to ban publication of "Spycatcher," a memoir by ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright.

Former MI5 chief Stella Rimmington published an autobiography in 2001, after the government censored some sections and said it regretted and disapproved of her decision to write the book.

A top suspect accused of forming secret death squads and orchestrating the killings of thousands during Rwanda's 1994 genocide pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to war crimes charges.

Idelphonse Nizeyimana, Rwanda's former deputy intelligence chief, entered his plea at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda after being captured in Uganda earlier this month.

"I am not guilty," Nizeyimana, 46, said each time the four counts of war crimes charges was read out to him. A trial date will be set later.

Nizeyimana is accused of ordering the killing of children, hospital patients, priests and even an elderly and revered African queen.

More than 500,000 members of the Tutsi ethnic minority and moderates from the Hutu majority were slaughtered during the 100-day Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Until his capture, Nizeyimana had been on the run for 15 years with a bounty on his head. He was believed to have hidden in the jungles of eastern Congo, where he belonged to a Rwandan Hutu militia called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda that continues to commit atrocities.

A court in China's far western Xinjiang region has sentenced six men to death for murder and other crimes committed during ethnic riots that killed nearly 200 people. A seventh man was given life imprisonment.

The sentences Monday were the first for any of the scores of suspects arrested in the July rioting between Muslim Uighurs and members of the Han Chinese majority in the regional capital of Urumqi. It was China's worst communal violence in decades.

The names of the convicted men seemed to identify them as Uighurs. The verdicts appeared aimed at placating Han Chinese who have rallied in Urumqi calling for swift justice. An overseas Uighur activist, however, said they were only likely to exacerbate the ethnic tensions.

Xinjiang has been under heavy security since the strife, and state TV showed paramilitary troops in riot gear surrounding the courthouse Monday.

The official Xinhua News Agency said seven people were convicted of murder, and some also convicted of arson and robbery. Six received the death penalty: Abdukerim Abduwayit, Gheni Yusup, Abdulla Mettohti, Adil Rozi, Nureli Wuxiu'er, and Alim Metyusup.

Germany's highest court says it has received an appeal from John Demjanjuk's lawyer seeking to block the 89-year-old's trial.

However, the Federal Constitutional Court did not say Monday when it might rule on the request to halt the trial, which is scheduled to open in Munich on Nov. 30.

Prosecutors have charged the retired auto worker with being an accessory to the murder of thousands at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Lawyer Ulrich Busch said last week he would seek to halt the trial. He has cited health concerns among other issues.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was deported from the United States in May. He maintains that he was a Red Army soldier who was held as a prisoner of war and never hurt anyone.

The EU was entitled to cap roaming rates in 2007 as network operators pocketed huge profits but resisted less drastic ways to cut the sky-high costs of using mobile phones in Europe, the EU advocate general said Thursday.

The opinion by Advocate General Miguel Poiares Maduro now goes to the European Court of Justice, which often follows that advice.

The opinion is a setback for mobile phone operators Vodafone, Telefonica O2, T-Mobile and Orange. They had challenged the validity of the EU roaming law in a British court, which referred the case to the European court.

But it is boost for the European Commission, which cites the roaming law as an example of how the European Union works to help consumers from the Azores to Lapland.

Poiares Maduro said the EU was entitled to set maximum roaming rates for a three-year period to ensure uniform prices and conditions across the 27 EU nations.

He noted that if pricing been left to the bloc's 27 national regulators it would have taken a very long time for Europeans to see roaming rates decline. Poiares Maduro said the European Commission failed repeatedly to get network operators to lower their rates, which varied widely and earned them profits of up to 400 percent.