John Demjanjuk's attorney filed a motion Wednesday calling for the Nazi death-camp case against his client to be closed, saying the charges against him violate German legal precedent.

Attorney Ulrich Busch said in a filing faxed to the Munich state court that even if it could be proved that Demjanjuk trained as a death camp guard at the SS's Trawniki camp and served at Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland, he shouldn't have been charged.

Busch argued that previous German courts have ruled that others in similar situations could not be held criminally responsible, because they risked serious punishment if they did not follow orders. The filing was provided to The Associated Press by Demjanjuk's son.

This is a city conspicuously unfriendly to pedestrians. Six-lane ring highways cut through old neighborhoods, making places that are rather close as the crow flies very far apart if you walk, since you’ve often got to navigate long cloverleaf intersections and widely spaced overpasses simply to cross the street.

And that’s one of the things, in a city far more oriented toward the car than shoe leather, that makes the recent opening of a big pedestrian-only network of streets in the historic heart of Beijing so noteworthy. It’s in the area called Dashalar, which, during the Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty, was the ethnic Chinese part of this city, the warren of streets and avenues that lay just outside the imposing city wall.

Now, the only parts left of the wall — torn down at the order of Mao Zedong despite the entreaties of China’s leading architectural historian to preserve it — are two immense gates. The more famous of them is known as the Qianmen, for Front Gate, and beyond it, running in an arrow-straight line due south, is Dashalar’s main street, Qianmen Dajie, or Front Gate Big Street, where cars are now banned.

Over the last decade or so, most of the old Dashalar neighborhood has been razed. Tens of thousands of residents, whose single-story courtyard homes were often models of dilapidation and obsolescence, were required, with payment of various amounts of compensation, to move out. This process is vividly recounted in a book published a year ago, “The Last of Old Beijing” by Michael Meyer.

But while most of the old residential areas of Beijing that have been demolished were transformed into zones of high-rise hotels, shopping centers and office buildings, Dashalar has been converted, perhaps ironically, back into what it once was — or, more accurately, into an idealized, postcard version of what it once was, a shopping street lined by three-story traditional Chinese buildings, with balconies above the first floor, latticed balustrades, red columns, bright gold-leaf Chinese signs against backgrounds of black wood.

Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course...

...Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.

India has abandoned plans to reopen a World War Two road that could connect its remote north-eastern states to China's Yunnan province through Burma.

Lawmakers from India's Assam state have been informed of the Indian decision by its ministry for the development of the north-eastern region.

This comes days after the 13th round of talks between India and China to resolve their border dispute.

The 1,079-mile-long Stillwell Road was built by American general Joe "Vinegar" Stillwell to supply Kuomintang forces in the war against Japan.

A man accused of planning the massacre of Rwandans during the 1994 genocide has been arrested in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials say.

A government statement named the suspect as Gregoire Ndahimana, who is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

He was detained by Congolese soldiers in the eastern province of North Kivu.

According to his ICTR indictment, Mr Ndahimana is responsible for the deaths of at least 2,000 Tutsis, most of whom were killed when a church in which they had sought refuge was bulldozed.