Prominent Chinese rights activist Liu Xiaobo was tried Wednesday on charges of inciting subversion. The trial lasted only two hours and was closed to foreign diplomats. Liu, who spent two years in prison following the Tiananmen Square uprising, has long challenged China's one-party rule, and co-authored Charter 08 , a petition calling for political reforms [...]
Former Argentine president Carlos Menem was indicted by the Federal Court on Tuesday on corruption charges. Menem is charged with overpaying government officials while he was in office from 1989 to 1999. Menem's well-known minister of economy, Domingo Cavallo , was indicted on similar charges. Cavallo is known for his economic reforms from 1991 to [...]
Elizabeth Samson : "On January 22, 2009, President Obama issued an executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year and on December 15 he announced his plan to transfer Guantanamo detainees to the Thompson Correctional Center in Illinois. The President is trying to make good on his campaign promise to close [...]
The Russian Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the 2003 arrest of Platon Lebedev , business partner of former Yukos oil executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky , was illegal. The court agreed to review Lebedev's arrest last week after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in 2007 that Lebedev's arrest and pre-trial detention violated his right [...]
An Argentine court on Tuesday sentenced former judge Victor Brusa to 21 years in prison for crimes against humanity during the country's 1976-83 "Dirty War" . The Federal Court of Santa Fe found Brusa guilty of eight counts of crimes against humanity in his capacity as a judicial officer during the dictatorship. The court also [...]
South Korean prosecutors on Tuesday charged former prime minister Han Myeong-sook with bribery. Han is accused of accepting USD $50,000 from former Korea Express CEO Kwak Young-wook in 2007 in exchange for helping him become president of Korea South-East Power Co., an affiliate of the state-run Korea Electric Power Corporation . Han, a senior adviser [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday affirmed a lower court ruling that Microsoft infringed on a patent of Canadian company i4i with portions of its Word 2007 word-processing software. i4i alleged that Microsoft willfully infringed on patents it held on XML technology, which was used extensively in Microsoft Word 2007. [...]
The state of Michigan on Monday filed suit in the US Supreme Court against the state of Illinois seeking to close two waterways that allow invasive Asian carp to reach the Great Lakes. Michigan officials fear that the 100-pound fish, which reproduce rapidly, could wipe out native species and destroy the $7 billion Great Lakes [...]
i4i Limited Partnership, et al. v. Microsoft, US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, December 22, 2009 . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here. Latest commentary available here. JURIST has more on various legal problems Microsoft has dealt with in recent years.
The Lithuanian Parliament National Security Committee reported Tuesday that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established two secret prisons for al Qaeda suspects in the Baltic country. Lawmakers demanded the investigation in October after ABC News reported in August that former CIA officials said that Lithuania provided the CIA with facilities for a secret prison [...]
