USA Today reported Friday that its inside sources at BellSouth and Verizon are unable to "document a contractual relationship" between the two phone companies and the National Security Agency, or document that "the companies turned over bulk calling records" for the alleged NSA phone records database . Lawmakers sitting on the House and Senate intelligence [...]
Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said on Friday that he would like the state legislature to consider reinstating a ban on same-sex foster parents after the Arkansas Supreme Court Thursday struck down a regulatory provision barring same-sex couples from raising foster children. The court upheld a lower court decision, saying that it found no connection between [...]
The US military is investigating reports that five US soldiers raped a young woman in the city of Mahmudiyah and then killed her and three family members last March, an anonymous official told AP Friday. According to another official, one of the soldiers under investigation came forward on June 22 to confess to the rape [...]
Uzbekistan moved closer to abolishing the death penalty on Thursday as Uzbek President Islam Karimov ordered the establishment of a commission charged with drafting anti-death penalty legislation as well as new criminal laws, both substantive and procedural, to implement the change. The order establishing the working group directed attention to amending the Criminal Code of [...]
A panel of federal judges in Texas has given parties to a lawsuit over Texas' congressional district two weeks to propose a solution to the 2003 Texas redistricting plan for the 23rd Congressional District, which the US Supreme Court scrapped on Wednesday. US District Judge T. John Ward of the Eastern District of Texas set [...]
Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has said that a group of two dozen Hamas MPs and ministers who were detained Thursday will not be held in administrative detention under the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law . Mazuz said he will instead use standard criminal warrants under the Prevention of Terror Ordinance . Mazuz said they [...]
Tenet Healthcare has agreed to pay $900 million to resolve federal allegations of illegal Medicare billing practices. Tenet was charged in 2003 with violating the False Claims Act by billing the government for services not provided to patients, billing it for "outlier" costs "substantially in excess" of the actual cost of care, and for paying [...]
In a victory for German Chancellor Angela Merkel , a package of constitutional reforms aimed at separating and clarifying the powers of the federal and state governments passed Germany's lower house of parliament in a 428-162 vote Friday, with three lawmakers abstaining. After World War II, Germany's government was organized under an inefficient system of [...]
A federal judge has extended a temporary restraining order preventing the state of Georgia from fully enforcing a law that restricts where convicted sex offenders can live. The restraining order issued Monday applied only to the eight plaintiffs in the case, but US District Judge Clarence Cooper in the Northern District of Georgia extended the [...]
The Turkish Grand National Assembly broadened the country's anti-terror laws Thursday by adopting new legislation that delays a suspect's guaranteed access to a lawyer for the first 24 hours of detention and expands the definition of offenses classified as terrorism. New acts classified as terrorism include human trafficking, drug smuggling, obstruction of education, influencing tenders, [...]
