The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday that the state of California acted unconstitutionally by threatening criminal prosecution and shutting down websites that incorporated vote-swapping mechanisms prior to the 2000 US presidential election, holding that the "websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutional [...]
The Hanoi People's Court on Tuesday convicted nine defendants, including three former Vietnamese government officials, of gambling and bribery charges . Bui Tien Deng, a former project management head in the Ministry of Transportation , was sentenced to 13 years in prison for placing bets totaling $760,000 on European soccer matches and subsequently attempting to [...]
Ukraine became the first Eastern European country to offer its jails to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Tuesday, as the two bodies signed an enforcement of sentences agreement under which Ukraine agreed to imprison convicted criminals in the country. Until Tuesday, only the Western European countries of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, [...]
The Basmanny District Court in Moscow issued a new arrest warrant Tuesday for exiled business tycoon Boris Berezovsky on charges that he allegedly embezzled an additional $13 million in credit funds from SBS-Agro Bank , which he then owned, to purchase real estate in southern France. The UK has already denied repeated requests from Russia [...]
A Trinidad court Monday ordered the extradition of three terrorist suspects to the United States for their alleged role in a terrorist bomb plot targeting John F. Kennedy International Airport . The three suspects – Trinidad national Kareem Ibrahim, and Guyana nationals Abdul Kadir and Abdel Nur – have been charged by US federal prosecutors. [...]
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday ordered the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department (NYPD) to redact and turn over hundreds of field intelligence reports containing information the NYPD gathered through covert surveillance of organizations planning demonstrations at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Magistrate Judge James [...]
US District Court Judge Ronald Whyte issued a permanent injunction Monday against a 2005 California law restricting the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, agreeing with the Video Software Dealers Association and the Entertainment Software Association that the law was an unconstitutional infringement on the industry's First Amendment free speech rights. Whyte [...]
The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office said Tuesday that it has asked the United States to release five Guantanamo Bay detainees who were legal residents in the UK prior to their detention. The Foreign Office said that the five detainees – Saudi Arabian Shaker Aamer, Jordanian Jamil el Banna, Libyan Omar Deghayes, Ethiopian Binyam Mohamed [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard arguments Monday from defense lawyers representing three former Enron Broadband Services executives who are seeking the dismissal of remaining charges after a jury failed to reach a verdict on all counts in their 2005 fraud trial. The three defendants – former VP Scott Yeager, former [...]
A federal judge Monday overturned a $1.52 billion jury decision against Microsoft awarded after the jury found that Microsoft violated two digital music patents held by Alcatel-Lucent . The patents govern technology that converts audio input into MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly known as MP3, which Microsoft has incorporated into several variants of its [...]
