A French appeals court Saturday acquitted one of 12 individuals who appealed their convictions in a 2005 child prostitution case, one of the biggest criminal trials in the country's history . Sixty-two men and women were initially convicted for offering forty-five children, ranging in age from six months to fifteen years, for sex from 1999 [...]
The Shiite head of Iraq's Debaathification Commission said Friday he would fight a proposed law allowing former Baath party members to return to their previously held government positions. Despite provisions in the proposal that would prevent reemployment of former Baathists who have been charged with, or are sought for, criminal activities, Shiite leaders oppose the [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held late this week that Arizona may enforce its voter identification law while a non-profit organization challenges the law in federal court. The law, which Arizonans approved in 2004 as Proposition 200 , requires voters to show a government-issued ID at the polls. The Ninth Circuit [...]
A lawyer representing the Venezuelan government said Friday that Venezuela plans to press the United States on its refusal to prosecute or extradite Cuban anti-Castro militant and Venezuelan national Luis Posada Carriles on charges that Carriles orchestrated the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner . Venezuela plans to raise the issue before the United Nations, [...]
Jorge Acosta, president of Ecuador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal confirmed Friday that in a referendum last Sunday an overwhelming majority of voters approved the convening of a constitutional assembly to rewrite the country's constitution . Acosta said 81.72 percent of voters approved the measure and 12.43 percent voted against; 5.85 percent of ballots were either blank [...]
Virgina Tech shooting gunman Seung-Hui Cho was technically prohibited from purchasing firearms after a Virginia court found Cho to be an "imminent danger to himself" in December 2005 and issued an order for Cho to receive psychiatric treatment, the New York Times reported Friday. Under federal law , persons "who have been adjudicated as a [...]
The US House of Representatives voted Friday to provide shareholders with an advisory vote on executive compensation , noting that in the last 15 years, compensation of Fortune 500 CEOs has moved from 140 times that of the average employee to over 500 times. The bill only had minimal Republican support, passing 269-134 after the [...]
Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont announced Friday that the Thai government may grant amnesty to Islamic insurgents, but that it still supports Buddhists who have armed themselves for protection. Surayud, who replaced former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra after a bloodless coup last year, promised to end the violence in the southern region of the country. [...]
The government of Japan said Friday in two statements that it accepted the 1948 rulings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that found Japanese soldiers had coerced women into prostitution, possibly signalling a new course on the sensitive subject of "comfort women" . The government also said that it stood by Japan's [...]
The Office of the New York Attorney General Thursday sent notice of its intent to sue Drexel University for accepting payments from student loan lender Education Finance Partners (EFP) based on the amount of money the private lender loaned to Drexel students. According to NY AG Andrew Cuomo, Drexel committed deceptive business practices for accepting [...]
