Myanmar's military government Friday rejected a UN Security Council denunciation of its use of violence against peaceful demonstrators and its accompanying call on the government to release political prisoners and negotiate with the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi . The junta said September's actions against protesters were not [...]
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill Thursday designed to increase funding to legal aid representation for low-income residents of California. The new law, which will take effect in January 2008, will enable banks to invest money from lawyers' client trust funds (IOLTA accounts) in higher interest-yielding accounts than those currently used. Client trust accounts, [...]
The Taiwan High Court opened proceedings Friday in the corruption trial of Ma Ying-jeou , the opposition presidential candidate in the 2008 Taiwanese presidential election. Ma was acquitted of the corruption charges by the Taipei District Court, but the Taipei High Prosecutors Office appealed that decision to the High Court. Ma was indicted in February, [...]
The Supreme Court of Pakistan on Friday agreed to review a "reconciliation ordinance" that granted amnesty to former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and paved the way for a power-sharing agreement between Bhutto and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf . The agreement reached between the two political rivals clears the way for Bhutto to return to [...]
Giovanni Di Stefano : "I have been asked on countless occasions by students at universities, fellow lawyers, colleagues, journalists my simple view on the current situation in Iraq. It is without doubt the consequences of all that is occurring in Iraq is strictly owing to the unprovoked and unlawful attack on Iraq by the US/UK. [...]
Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to withdraw Russia from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty Friday unless the treaty is expanded to include neighboring countries such as China, India and Pakistan. The treaty, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1987, requires signatories to disarm their ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of [...]
The Arizona Supreme Court indefinitely stayed the execution of a man on death row Thursday, saying it will wait until the US Supreme Court reviews whether lethal injection is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment in Baze v. Rees (07-5439) . The Arizona Supreme Court has already ruled that the state's lethal injection method is constitutional, [...]
El Salvador defended its 1993 amnesty law in a hearing Wednesday before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) dealing with the country's failure to investigate the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero . Representatives of the Salvadoran government maintained that the amnesty law has prevented compliance with a 2000 IACHR report recommending that the [...]
A private advocacy group requested a temporary restraining order Thursday to compel the White House to save back-up disks of all e-mails relating to the Bush administration. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives and Records Administration last month over their alleged failure [...]
Over 2,000 people died while being arrested by various US state and local law enforcement officers between 2003 and 2005, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) reported Thursday, including over 1,000 deaths caused by the law enforcement officers themselves. The report, which was required by the Death in Custody Reporting Act , showed a 13 [...]
