Assange attorney: Secret grand jury meeting in Virginia on WikiLeaks

A secret grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, is meeting to consider criminal charges in the WikiLeaks case, an attorney for the site's founder, Julian Assange, told the Al-Jazeera network in an interview."We have heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly empaneled grand jury in Alexandria ... they are currently investigating this," Mark Stephens told Al-Jazeera's Sir David Frost on Sunday, referring to WikiLeaks. The site, which facilitates the disclosure of secret information, has been slowly releasing a trove of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables since November 28.U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last week he had...

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Reports: Iranian president removes foreign minister

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has removed and replaced Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, state-run Iranian media reported Monday.Ahmadinejad appointed Ali Akbar Salehi, current nuclear chief and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, as the interim head of the Foreign Ministry, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.In a letter, the president thanked Mottaki for his service, according to Fars and the official Islamic Republic News Agency.Neither report said why the move was made.Mottaki has been one of the public faces in the international debate over Iran's nuclear program. Tehran maintains the program exists...

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Explosion in Pakistan kills school bus driver, injures 2 children

An explosion Monday near a school bus in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar killed the bus driver and injured two children, police said.Two suspects were detained at the blast site, said Ejaz Khan, a senior police official in Peshawar.Authorities do not believe the bus was the target of the bomb, which was planted in the road, said Salim Khan, another senior police official in Peshawar.The explosion occurred in the area of Bhana Marri, Khan sa...

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Sweden bomb went off early, authorities say

A bomber who apparently killed himself in central Stockholm on Saturday was probably on his way to a more crowded location, but his bomb went off prematurely, Swedish authorities said Monday.He sent a warning to a Swedish news agency from his phone shortly before the explosion, said chief prosecutor Thomas Lindstrand, in the first official confirmation of a link between the blast and the warning.The warning came from a man called Taimour Abdulwahab, the news agency that got the e-mail told CNN Monday.Lindstrand said authorities were almost certain that he was the bomber, but that authorities have not yet carried out DNA testing or spoken to his...

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