Myanmar police on Sunday charged a rebel Buddhist monk for occupying a government-closed monastery, only a month after he was given amnesty and released from prison . Shin Gambira, who was among 130 political prisoners freed last month following a presidential pardon, is accused of living in and rebuilding the Meggin Monastery in Rangoon. The [...]
A judge for the UK High Court ruled Monday for the British unit of Sony Corporation and eight other record labels on their copyright infringement claim against the Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay . Judge Richard Arnold ruled that the operators of The Pirate Bay planned to infringe the copyright of Sony and other [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Katherine Lewis Parker, Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, says that prayer at government functions that adheres to a particular religious dogma is unacceptable because it has a coercive impact on listeners and violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment… At approximately 7:30PM on a December [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Nadia Bernaz of Middlesex University Law Department says Iraq is not complying with its obligation to respect international law on the right to life, and the UN should, at a minimum, demand that Iraq limit its use of the death penalty to its own justification: fatal acts of terrorism…
JURIST Guest Columnist Alex Luchenitser, Associate Legal Director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says that despite the US constitutional tradition of separation between church and state, US courts lag far behind the UK after a recent decision banning prayers at town-council meetings…
The US Supreme Court on Friday blocked enforcement of a Montana Supreme Court ruling, which upheld a state law limiting the amount of money corporations can spend on campaigns, until it can consider an appeal from the corporations challenging the law. The Montana court ruling in Western Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Montana appears to conflict [...]
US Representatives Edward Markey and Joe Barton, members of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus , and Cliff Stearns, of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations , sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Friday asking it to look into possibly unlawful privacy practices by Google. The letter was a response to a [...]
US Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter Friday to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) stating that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has decided that denying same-sex couples military and veterans benefits violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment . In the letter, Holder explains that denying such benefits to same-sex [...]
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie conditionally vetoed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage and called for a voter referendum to decide the issue, rather than the state legislature . In his veto statement, Christie defended the legal importance of a voter referendum: The framers of our State Constitution created the referendum process in Article IX as [...]
A New Delhi court on Saturday confirmed the Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) charges against US citizen David Headley and eight others, including Canadian citizen Tahawwur Rana, for their roles in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack . The agency accused the terrorist organizations Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of using Headley, a member of LeT, [...]
