About 300 protesters demonstrated Saturday in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia , calling for a US retrial of Khalid Adem, a Ethiopian immigrant to the United States who earlier this month was convicted of circumcising his daughter in 2001. In what was believed to be the first US case of its kind, a Georgia [...]
Texas US District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. sentenced former Enron executives Michael Kopper and Mark Koenig to 37- and 18-month prison terms respectively Friday for their role in the corporate scandal. The sentences for both men were reduced at the request of prosecuting attorneys in return for the defendants' testimony against other former Enron executives [...]
US District Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California ruled Friday that he will allow a class action lawsuit filed against the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program to go forward while a prior motion to dismiss the case is on appeal. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the class action wiretapping lawsuit against [...]
The US Department of Defense (DOD) announced Friday that it had released three detainees from Guantanamo Bay who Combatant Status Review Tribunals had determined not to be enemy combatants . The US Department of State said later that the government of Albania has agreed to accept and resettle the three, identified as an Algerian national, [...]
Vice President Dick Cheney told the Federalist Society annual meeting in Washington Friday that the Bush administration plans to continue nominating conservative judges to the federal courts notwithstanding new Democratic control of Congress and expectations on both sides of the aisle that more moderate candidates might be put forward after the mid-term elections. "Federal judges," [...]
US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff warned the national convention of the conservative Federalist Society in a speech Friday that international law was increasingly being used as a "rhetorical weapon" against the United States and urged members of his audience to "confront…the rise of an increasingly activist, left-wing, and even elitist philosophy of law that [...]
The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party of Bolivian President Evo Morales gained more power to rewrite the country's constitution over the objections of opposing political parties Friday when Bolivia's constitutional assembly approved a motion to make decisions by majority vote. The measure gives the MAS, which failed to receive two-thirds of the assembly seats in [...]
The UN General Assembly Third Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs has approved a draft resolution calling for an end to politically motivated condemnations of countries for human rights violations. The resolution, adopted Thursday, says that human rights protection should be "guided by the principles of universality, non-selectivity, impartiality and objectivity and should be [...]
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) has opened a full criminal investigation into former Republican congressman Mark Foley in connection with his sexually explicit computer messages to young male pages disclosed earlier this year. The FDLE began preliminary investigations shortly after Foley stepped down on September 29 and announced the start of its full [...]
The Dutch government announced after a cabinet meeting Friday that it will introduce legislation to ban the Muslim full-length burqa veil as well as other face coverings like ski masks in public places "as soon as possible" after the country votes in a national election scheduled for Wednesday. Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk told Dutch media [...]
