Swoan Parker / Reuters

Former Haitian Dictator Jean Claude "Baby-Doc" Duvalier, center, listens as charges against him are announced during an appeals court hearing in Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Duvalier appeared in court on Thursday for the first time to face charges he was responsible for corruption and serious human rights violations during his 15-year rule.

Individual government officials "had their own authority," the 61-year-old Duvalier said when asked about his role as head of state from 1971 to 1986. "Under my authority, children could go to school, there was no insecurity."

Duvalier, who had boycotted three previous court hearings, struck a mostly defiant tone during a four-hour grilling by a panel of three judges in a packed and sweltering courtroom.

Duvalier, dressed in a navy-blue suit and tie, slipped into the courthouse unescorted early on Thursday, arriving in his own car several hours before the hearing started accompanied by his longtime companion Veronique Roy. 

'Long live Duvalier'
Hundreds of Duvalier supporters gathered outside the courthouse soon after his arrival, some dancing and chanting "Long live Duvalier."

The pretrial Appeal Court hearing was held to determine what charges Duvalier may have to face. It is the first time he has personally been required to address crimes allegedly committed during his rule. 

International human rights observers are closely watching the case and consider it an important test of Haiti's weak justice system after decades of dictatorship, military rule and economic mayhem.

"Whatever happens next, Haitians will remember the image of their former dictator having to answer questions about the repression carried out under his rule," said Reed Brody, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch. 

During the hearing Duvalier was asked by the judges about more than a dozen of the most notorious cases involving alleged extra-judicial killings and detention of political prisoners.

'Calm, almost indifferent'
"He was asked tough questions and his answers were mostly evasive," said Amanda Klasing, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who attended the hearing.

"He was very calm, almost indifferent. His facial expression didn't change at all," she said.

Several alleged victims were in court and expressed satisfaction that he had finally appeared.

"He will have to face history in court, just like other dictators around the world are facing," said Alix Fils-Aime, who was imprisoned by Duvalier's government.

The hearing was adjourned in the afternoon and is set to resume next Thursday.

Reynold Georges, who heads Duvalier's legal team, had argued unsuccessfully at a hearing last week that his client's presence in court was not required.

Duvalier was briefly detained on charges of corruption, theft and misappropriation of funds after returning to the impoverished Caribbean nation in January 2011 following a 25-year exile in France. Those charges are still pending.

Separate charges of crimes against humanity filed by alleged victims of wrongful imprisonment, forced disappearances and torture under Duvalier, were set aside by a judge last year because the statute of limitations had run out. 

But the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, has warned Haitian authorities that there is no statute of limitations under international law for serious violations of human rights.

Return from exile
Critics say prosecutors have been too lenient in Duvalier's case. President Michel Martelly's government recently renewed Duvalier's diplomatic passport, saying he was entitled to it as a former head of state.

Duvalier, who inherited the title "President For Life" at the age of 19, is alleged to have fled Haiti with more than $100 million stashed in European bank accounts in 1986 after street demonstrations and riots broke out in a number of cities. 

His departure ended nearly three decades of dictatorship begun by his father, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, in 1957. 

The Duvaliers enforced their rule with the aid of a feared militia, the National Security Volunteers, better known as the "Tonton Macoutes," who were blamed for hundreds of deaths and disappearances. 

Soon after he returned to Haiti in 2011, taking up residence in a villa in a posh suburb in the hills above the capital Port-au-Prince, Duvalier issued a brief apology "to those countrymen who rightly feel they were victims of my government," the first public recognition of abuses under his rule. 

While in exile, Duvalier acknowledged privately that killers in his government went unpunished, according to Bernard Diederich, a New Zealand-born journalist and author of several books on Haiti, including a biography of the younger Duvalier. 

"He always passed the blame to others," said Diederich, who conducted four long interviews with Duvalier in the late 1990s.

CAIRO — Protests by Islamists allied to President Mohammed Morsi forced Egypt's highest court to adjourn its work indefinitely on Sunday, intensifying a conflict between some of the country's top judges and the head of state.

The Supreme Constitutional Court said it would not convene until its judges could operate without "psychological and material pressure," saying protesters had stopped the judges from reaching the building.

Several hundred Islamists had protested outside the court building ahead of a session in which it was due to examine cases against the legality of the upper house of parliament and the assembly that drafted the new constitution, both bodies dominated by Islamists.

The cases added uncertainty to the crisis ignited by a Nov. 22 decree that temporarily expanded  Morsi's powers, triggering countrywide protests and violence that has deepened the rift between newly empowered Islamists and their opponents. 

Egyptians fear decades of Muslim Brotherhood rule, warn Morsi is no friend to US

The judges said that they had been intimidated when they tried to get to the court on Sunday morning. 

"As they approached the building there was a crowd of people surrounding the court from each side, as well as the road leading to the entrance gates, and on top of the walls, chanting slogans denouncing the court’s judges, and inciting people against them," according to a statement.

The statement added:

"The Supreme Constitutional Court now have no choice but to declare to the great people of Egypt that they cannot immediately work on their holy task under this charged atmosphere of rancor and hatred and the desire for revenge and the fabrication of fictitious conflicts. And we declare the suspension of hearings until we are able to continue our mission and continue in proceedings before the court without any psychological and physical pressures to which we are subjected."

The protest reflected the deep suspicion harbored by Egypt's Islamists towards a court they see as a vestige of the dictator Hosni Mubarak era. The same court ruled in June to dissolve the Muslim Brotherhood-led lower house of parliament.

"It is now a power struggle unconstrained by legal means," Gamal Abdul Gawad, a political science professor at the American University of Cairo, told NBC News.

Christians, liberals left out as Islamists back Egypt's draft constitution

"Parties are using physical force to obtain political goals," he added. "They used an act of violence, of physical power to prevent judges from entering the court. It is a turning point in our political development."

According to NBC News' Charlene Gubash, tanks were parked at Cairo's main entrances, indicating that the military was on high alert. 

Protests
Hundreds of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which propelled Morsi to power in a June election, gathered outside the court through the night. "Yes to the constitution," declared a banner held aloft by one pro-Morsi protester. Chants demanded the "purging of the judiciary." 

Egypt's Morsi announces vote on draft constitution

The court earlier postponed a session set to examine cases that could further complicate the country's political crisis. 

Three people have been killed and hundreds injured in recent protests. The wave of street demonstrations continued through Sunday with a protest by at least 200,000 Morsi supporters at Cairo University. Morsi opponents are staging an open-ended sit-in in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the cradle of the uprising that toppled Mubarak. 

Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood hope to end the crisis by passing the new constitution that that was wrapped up on Friday. Morsi received the constitution on Saturday and immediately called a Dec. 15 referendum, urging all Egyptians to go out and vote. 

"The Muslim Brotherhood is determined to go ahead with its own plans regardless of everybody else. There is no compromise on the horizon," said Hassan Nafaa, a professor of political science at Cairo University. 

The constitution, he said, would likely be approved by a slim majority. "But in this case, how can you run a country with a disputed constitution — a constitution not adopted by consensus?" he said. 

Reuters and NBC News' Charlene Gubash and Taha Belal contributed to this story.

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Maurizio Degl'innocenti / EPA, file

More than 300 people died after a quake in L'Aquila, Italy on April 6, 2009. The city was strewn with rubble and thousands left homeless.

A court in the Italian city of L’Aquila on Monday convicted six scientists and one government official of manslaughter for failing to give sufficient warning of a fatal earthquake that hit in 2009.

The judge sentenced each man to six years in jail and ordered them to pay compensation and legal fees.

The prosecution case had centered on a meeting the seven defendants, members of a commission on natural disasters, held in L’Aquila on March 31 2009, in which they told residents there was no cause for concern after a series of minor shocks had rocked the city in the preceding six months.

Less than a week later, in the early hours of April 6, a 6.3-magnitude quake reduced much of the medieval city to rubble, leaving 309 people dead and more than 60,000 homeless, according to news reports at the time.

In a  memo issued after the March 31 meeting, the experts concluded that it was "improbable" that there would be a major quake, although they stopped short of entirely excluding the possibility.

The public prosecutor, Fabio Picuti, had accused the defendants of giving "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" about whether the smaller tremors should have constituted grounds for an official quake warning.

Picuti acknowledged that predicting where, when and with what force a quake would strike is scientifically impossible, but said the risk of a big temblor was not taken seriously enough. He argued the commission’s discussions were too generic and completely failed to address the risk at hand.

“The key word in this trial is the word analysis. How do you proceed with an analysis of risk, or an analysis of seismic risk? Do you proceed in a manner that the defendants have shown us?” Picuti said in comments to the court on Monday. 

Defense lawyer Franco Coppi told the court it would indeed be a problem if the risk had been foreseen and inevitable.

“But if an event cannot be foreseen, and more importantly if it is unavoidable,” Coppi said. “It is impossible to speak about how a risk has not been foreseen."

Italy's long earthquake history hidden in ancient records

The decision to prosecute the seven, who are among leading figures in Italian seismology, had caused alarm among the scientific community.

In a report commissioned by the Italian government in the immediate aftermath of the L’Aquila disaster, the International Commission of Earthquake Forecasting for Civil Protection (ICEF) highlighted the many difficulties of making accurate time-sensitive predictions, within timescales usually calculated in decades, not weeks or months. 

But the ICEF report’s findings also called for better public communication, not just of day-to-day temblor hazards but also by setting alert levels that take into account the advantage of being psychologically prepared for when a quake hits.

Scientists on trial for failing to predict Italian quake

An open letter to Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, signed by more than 5,000 members of the international scientific community, criticized the proceedings.

In a separate letter to the Italian president, the American Association for the Advancement of Science called the charges "unfair and naïve," saying, "There is no accepted scientific method for earthquake prediction that can be reliably used to warn citizens of an impending disaster."

Despite the protests, the trial opened in September 2011.

The seven convicted of manslaughter were:

Enzo Boschi, then-president of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Rome;

Franco Barberi, at the University of 'Rome Tre';

Mauro Dolce, head of the seismic-risk office at the national Department of Civil Protection in Rome;

Claudio Eva, from the University of Genova;

Giulio Selvaggi, director of the INGV’s National Earthquake Centre in Rome;

Gian Michele Calvi, president of the European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering in Pavia;

and a government official, Bernardo De Bernardinis, then vice director of the Department of Civil Protection.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Reuters, file

U.S. citizen Rachel Corrie, 23, speaks through a megaphone to an Israeli army bulldozer on the day she was killed in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003.

HAIFA, Israel -- An Israeli court rejected on Tuesday accusations that Israel was at fault over the death of American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by an army bulldozer during a 2003 pro-Palestinian demonstration in Gaza.

Corrie's family had accused Israel of intentionally and unlawfully killing their 23-year-old daughter, launching a civil case in the northern Israeli city of Haifa after a military investigation had cleared the army of wrongdoing.

In a ruling read out to the court, judge Oded Gershon called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident," but said the state was not responsible because the incident had occurred during what he termed a war-time situation.

At the time of her death, during a Palestinian uprising, Corrie was protesting against Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"I reject the suit," the judge said. "There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages."

He added that the soldiers had done their utmost to keep people away from the site. "She (Corrie) did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done."

Oliver Weiken / EPA

Rachel Corrie's parents Craig and Cindy and her sister Sarah, left, are seen prior to the announcement of the verdict at the Haifa district court on Tuesday.

Mom: 'I am hurt'
Corrie's death made her a symbol of the uprising, and while her family battled through the courts to establish who was responsible for her killing, her story was dramatized on stage in a dozen countries and told in the book "Let Me Stand Alone."

"I am hurt," Corrie's mother, Cindy, told reporters after the verdict was read.

Corrie's mother Cindy told a news conference after the court's decision that the bulldozer personnel had the "ability" and also an "obligation" to have seen that her daughter was in its path.

NBC station KING5: 'Rachel Corrie' aid ship boarded by Israelis

She said she hoped the lawsuit would help change Israel's policies regarding the demolition of Palestinian houses.

Cindy Corrie said that previously a senior Israeli soldier had said there were "no civilians in war."

"Rachel was in Gaza because there were and are civilians there, those who have rights and deserve protection," she added. "Rachel's right to life and dignity were violated by the actions of the Israeli military."

She said her daughter was a "rich thinker and a beautiful person" from "Olympia, Washington, USA," her voice breaking as she spoke.

The family's attorney, Hussein Abu Hussein, said that the court's decision was so close to the Israeli government's position that the state's lawyers could have written it themselves, according to The Jerusalem Post.

The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper reported that Corrie was with a group of international activists acting as human shields against the demolition of Palestinian houses.

"She was standing on top of a pile of earth," fellow activist and eyewitness Richard Purssell, from Brighton, U.K., said at the time, according to the Guardian. "The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again."

Few Israelis showed much sympathy for Corrie's death, which took place at the height of the uprising in which thousands of Palestinians were killed and hundreds of Israelis died in suicide bombings.

Getty Images / Getty Images, file

Rachel Corrie speaks during an interview with MBC Saudi Arabia television on March 14, 2003 in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza strip.

Corrie was from Olympia, Washington, and was a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement.

Senior U.S. officials criticized the original military investigation into the case, saying it had been neither thorough nor credible. But the judge said the inquiry had been appropriate and pinned no blame on the army.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Odd Andersen / AFP - Getty Images, file

Paul Watson, Canadian founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has skipped bail in Germany, where he was facing possible extradition to Costa Rica on charges stemming from a high-seas confrontation over shark finning in 2002.

MAINZ, Germany -- Environmental activist Paul Watson has skipped bail in Germany, according to a court statement.

The Canadian founder of the Sea Shepherd marine conservation group was arrested at the Frankfurt airport in May on a Costa Rican warrant that claimed he had endangered the crew of a fishing vessel.

Watson was released days after his arrest on a $320,000 bail and ordered to report regularly to police. But he failed to check in with authorities and his attorney told the court that he had left the country for an undisclosed location.

"Watson has not reported to the police since July 22," a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt said. "We do not know where Watson is at the moment." 

Kill whales to help fishermen? That's South Korea's plan

The public prosecutor's office told NBC News that a nationwide search has been launched in case Watson is still in Germany. The prosecutor has also requested that the $320,000 bail be paid out to the German state.

Watson is known for waging aggressive campaigns to protect whales, dolphins and other marine animals. 

He had been awaiting possible extradition over the charges stemming from his campaign against shark fining, a practice that involves catching sharks, slicing off their fins and throwing them back into the sea, sometimes barely alive.

Sea turned red with blood as Faroe Islanders hunt pilot whales

After being freed on bail in May, Watson made a brief appearance in Berlin at a protest coinciding with a visit by Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

Chinchilla has promised Watson a fair trial if he is extradited to her country.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Ariel Schalit / Pool via AFP - Getty Images

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert speaks to the press at the District Court in Jerusalem on Tuesday after being found guilty on one count of corruption and acquitted on two other counts.

JERUSALEM - Ehud Olmert was found guilty on Tuesday of a corruption charge in the first criminal trial of a former Israeli prime minister, but acquitted on two other counts in what was widely seen as a significant victory for him.

Although Olmert was convicted of fraud and breach of trust, he was found not guilty on more serious charges that included allegations he received cash bribes from a U.S. businessman and double-billed Israeli charities for overseas fund-raising trips.

Olmert appeared claim and relieved as the verdict was delivered in the Jerusalem court.

It was not clear whether that verdict could send Olmert, 66, to jail. If the crime -- breach of trust -- does carry a prison term, he would become the first Israeli prime minister to serve time.

Olmert was accused of taking some $150,000 from the U.S. businessman, pocketing more than $92,000 by double-billing the charities and helping to advance the business interests of a long-time friend.

He denied any wrongdoing. The court convicted him only in connection with aiding his friend while serving as minister of trade and industry before becoming prime minister in 2006.

Israel's Haaretz newspaper described the verdict on its website as a "crushing defeat" for the prosecution. The popular Ynet news site, called the outcome a "legal earthquake," confounding widespread expectations of a triple conviction.

The former prime minister is also battling, in a separate case, charges over the construction of a hulking luxury apartment complex that dominates a Jerusalem hilltop.

Envelopes of cash
The U.S. businessman, Morris Talansky, testified that he gave Olmert envelopes containing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Olmert says the money was used for electioneering, denying he benefited personally in return for advancing the businessman's interests.

The court said prosecutors had failed to prove the payments were illegal.

Olmert resigned as prime minister in September 2008 after the accusations surfaced, saying he wanted to clear his name. But he stayed on as caretaker until March 2009 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government was sworn in.

Former Israeli PM Olmert joins chorus criticizing Netanyahu on Iran

Olmert claimed he had achieved significant progress in talks with the Palestinians aimed at securing a final Middle East peace deal, offering an Israeli withdrawal from much of the occupied West Bank.

But no agreement was reached and negotiations held under Netanyahu collapsed in 2010 in a dispute over Israeli settlement building on land Palestinians want for a state.

Prosecutors said millions of dollars in bribes were paid to Olmert, Jerusalem's mayor from 1993 to 2003, and other civil servants to ensure the approval of plans for the Holyland towers. Olmert has denied this.

Corruption trial begins for Israel's ex-leader

Israel has already witnessed a former head of state put behind bars.

Former president Moshe Katsav was convicted last year of raping an aide when he was a cabinet minister in the late 1990s and molesting or sexually harassing two other women who worked for him during his 2000-2007 term as president. He began serving a seven-year prison sentence in December.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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