Blackwater indictments — The Justice Department on Thursday brought fresh charges against four former Blackwater Worldwide security contractors, resurrecting an internationally charged case over a deadly 2007 shooting on the streets of Baghdad. A new grand jury indictment charges the men, who were hired to guard U.S. diplomats, in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment abroad and heightened diplomatic sensitivities amid an ongoing war. The guards are accused of opening fire in busy Nisoor Square on Sept. 16, 2007. Seventeen Iraqi civilians died, including women and children. Prosecutors say the heavily armed Blackwater convoy launched an unprovoked attack using sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers.

Snowden documents — Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret NSA documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow. He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from China’s spies. “There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he said.

‘Stand your ground’ — A state appeals court in Seattle, in a ruling on the “stand your ground” debate over personal safety, said Thursday that a defendant who successfully uses a self-defense claim is entitled to reimbursement for lost wages and other costs, as well as legal fees. “The cost of a criminal defense often starts at arrest,” the court wrote in its decision, affirming a lower court’s award of nearly $49,000, including $10,000 in lost wages, to Tommy Villanueva. Villanueva, 53, was fired from his job in Spokane, Wash., after being arrested in 2010 and charged with assault, accused of stabbing two people in the neck at a party. He was acquitted in 2012.

Botched Iran hanging — Death penalty opponents pleaded with Iran on Thursday to spare a convicted drug felon who survived a hanging and was sent from the morgue to a hospital to recuperate so he could be re-hanged. It appeared to be the first time that the judicial authorities in Iran, one of the world’s top users of the death penalty, twice ordered a hanging carried out. Amnesty International said it was unconscionable that the condemned man, identified in the Iranian media as Alireza M., 37, should be subjected to such punishment, and said the judicial authorities should grant a stay of execution.

German coalition — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc and its Social Democratic rivals agreed Thursday to open formal negotiations next week on reviving the “grand coalition” that led Germany from 2005 to 2009 and that both sides suggested could now steer the biggest European economy into four more prosperous years. The chairman of the Social Democrats, Sigmar Gabriel, said he was optimistic. The first round of formal talks will take place next week, after the new Parliament convenes.

Japanese war shrine — For a third time this year, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, refused supporters’ calls to visit a controversial Tokyo war shrine, sending a ceremonial offering instead in what was apparently an effort to avoid angering Asian neighbors, including China. Before becoming prime minister, Abe had vowed that if he won the office, he would not stop visiting the Yasukuni shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals from World War II.

French expulsions — Shock over France’s recent expulsion of a 19-year-old Armenian student and a 15-year-old Kosovar girl, whom the police took off a school bus so that she and her family could be sent back to Kosovo, gathered momentum Thursday with protests by students condemning the expulsions and calling for the resignation of the interior minister, Manuel Valls. On Thursday, it appeared that the government was questioning Valls’ judgment, at the least, in allowing the police to pull children out of school to be deported.