US military lawyers for Canadian Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr are preventing Khadr from speaking with Dennis Edney, his Canadian civil lawyer, in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, Edney told Reuters Wednesday. Edney said the ban came after he had publicly differed with Khadr's military lawyers and faulted their conduct. In a [...]
The Supreme Court of Pakistan on Thursday sentenced five high-ranking police officers to between 15 days and one month in prison for mistreating Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry when President Musharraf suspended him from duties on March 9, 2007. A videotape of Chaudhry's arrest showed several police officers roughly shoving him into a limousine against his [...]
Not a single condemned prisoner was executed in the United States in the month of October, the first such month in nearly three years, AP reported Wednesday. Across the US, many states have declared a moratorium on lethal injection executions, pending the outcome of a Supreme Court case that challenges lethal injection as a form [...]
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-4 Wednesday to send the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to the full US Senate for ratification. The treaty has been sharply criticized by conservative Republicans who claim it would limit US sovereignty. Foreign Relations Committee ranking minority member Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Wednesday that former Illinois Governor George Ryan could not remain free on bail while he appeals his sentence of corruption and fraud charges. Judge Diane Wood delivered the opinion of the court which said, in part: Appellants here have shown neither a reasonable probability that [...]
A federal jury awarded the father of a fallen Marine almost $11 million in damages Wednesday for harm caused by a Kansas Christian fundamentalist church's protests at his son's funeral. Albert Snyder filed a lawsuit last year against Westboro Baptist Church and three of its leaders after the church staged a protest at the funeral [...]
US House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) Wednesday called on the White House to disclose hundreds of documents relating to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff . In a letter to White House counsel Fred Fielding, Waxman said that the the White House has already turned over 3,700 pages of records, but [...]
Former Assistant US Attorney Richard Convertino was acquitted Wednesday on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false declarations in connection with a botched 2003 terrorism trial. Convertino was the lead prosecutor in a case against North African immigrants accused of operating a terrorist cell in Detroit. A federal judge later overturned the guilty [...]
Some 100 Buddhist monks marched peacefully in a town in central Myanmar Wednesday, marking a resumption of the pro-democratic protests that stopped after September's violent government crackdown. The monks carried no protest signs and shouted no pro-democracy slogans and dispersed after an hour to their monasteries. A spokesman said their demonstration was only a continuation [...]
The Italian judge presiding over the trial of 26 US CIA agents and two former Italian intelligence officials in the 2003 abduction and rendition of Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr on Wednesday suspended the trial until March 12, 2008. Judge Oscar Magi ruled that the trial should not proceed until the Constitutional Court of [...]
