The Wisconsin Supreme Court voted 3-3 on Thursday not to reopen a case challenging the state’s collective bargaining law because of a justice’s refusal to recuse himself. The court ruled in a 4-3 decision last month that the Budget Repair Bill was not passed in violation of the “open meetings” rule , but plaintiffs asked [...]

Baghdad’s Criminal Court has postponed the trial of Iraq’s fugitive Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashimi until a federal court rules in a pending case on whether the president and other lawmakers can be questioned by the defense as witnesses, according to a lawyer for al-Hashimi. The trial began in May without the presence of al-Hasimi. [...]

French President Francois Hollande announced on Saturday that he plans a new law that would make it a crime to deny the killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was a genocide. The Coordinating Council of Armenian Organisations of France (CCAF) , an advocacy group whose mission is to fight denial of the [...]

The leaders of six West African nations urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate war crimes in Mali at a crisis summit on Saturday. Malian soldiers took control of the government and suspended the constitution in March, and the fighting has since uprooted nearly 320,000 people. The leaders are asking the ICC “to proceed [...]

Lawyers for the state of Georgia argued Friday in court filings with the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that its immigration law is constitutional under the recent US Supreme Court ruling in Arizona v. United States . The appeals court in March deferred ruling on challenges to Georgia and Alabama’s controversial immigration [...]

The New York Fourth Appellate Division for the Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a challenge to the state’s year-old Marriage Equality Act (MEA) , ruling that closed-door meetings between gay rights advocates and state senators did not violate the state’s Open Meetings Law (OML) . This ruling overturned a decision by the Supreme Court of [...]

Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi on Thursday issued a decree appointing a fact-finding committee to investigate the deaths of protesters in last year’s demonstrations. The committee is made up of 16 members including judges, a state prosecutor, a general, a police commander and six representatives of victims’ families. They are charged with reopening files related to [...]

Lawmakers in Romania voted on Friday to impeach President Traian Basescu for overstepping the bounds of his authority by interfering in judicial and legislative affairs. The Romanian Parliament voted 256-114 for impeachment. Romanian voters will have the final say as to whether Basescu will be removed from office in a referendum to be held later [...]

US President Barack Obama signed legislation on Friday that prevents the interest rate on student loans from increasing and maintains jobs on infrastructure and transportation projects nationwide. The bill keeps the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans from doubling from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, as it was scheduled to do absent Congressional action. The [...]

The UN Security Council on Thursday adopted a resolution granting a one-year mandate extension for the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) through June 15, 2013. The Council left the South Sudan mandate unchanged, stressing the need to protect civilians, establish monitoring mechanisms and report the flow of personnel, arms and related material across the [...]