US President George W. Bush on Thursday insisted that "the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected" as the government conducts anti-terrorist surveillance in the US. Bush's comments were in response to a report in Thursday's USA Today that calling patterns of millions of Americans are being collected and examined by the National Security Agency [...]
The Libyan retrial of five Bulgarian nurses accused of infecting over 400 patients, primarily children, with the HIV virus, resumed on Thursday morning in Tripoli before being adjourned for procedural reasons until June 13. Prosecutors objected to defense lawyer Othman al-Bizanti's motion for the medics to be released on bail and presiding Judge Mahmud Huwaissa [...]
Less than a year before Germany takes over the European Union presidency in January 2007, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said again Thursday that she plans to revive the European constitution , on hold since major referendum setbacks in France and the Netherlands last year. Merkel told members of the German Bundestag in a major policy [...]
UK Home Secretary John Reid said Thursday that the government will appeal a Wednesday High Court decision to grant asylum to nine Afghans convicted of hijacking a plane to the UK in 2002, allowing them to remain in the United Kingdom rather than be deported to Afghanistan. Mr. Justice Jeremy Sullivan based his ruling on [...]
A committee of the American Bar Association has voted unanimously that judicial nominee Michael B. Wallace is "not qualified" to sit on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit . Wallace, a Mississippi lawyer and former aide to US Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) , has garnered criticism from Democrats and the NAACP among [...]
The US Department of Justice has ended the internal investigation into the role its lawyers played in the NSA's domestic surveillance program approved by President Bush. The investigation had been headed by the Office of Professional Responsibility until department head H. Marshall Jarrett revealed this week that it had been "unable to make meaningful progress" [...]
Former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling face an uphill battle after Judge Simeon T. Lake III agreed with prosecutors in the Enron trial Wednesday that jurors should be allowed to find both men guilty because of "deliberate ignorance" or the so-called "ostrich defense" with respect to conspiracy and fraud that contributed to Enron's [...]
The Constitutional Court of Colombia has handed down a decision legalizing exceptions to the country's abortion ban in cases of rape, incest and if the life of the mother or fetus is in danger. Before Wednesday's ruling, women undergoing an abortion procedure and doctors performing the procedure could be criminally charged and sentenced to jail [...]
An Indonesian government official said Thursday that corruption charges against former dictator General Suharto are expected to be dropped despite criticism from human rights groups, including the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation , which has been outspoken in the pursuit of action against the former dictator. Suharto, 84, who has suffered a series of strokes and [...]
The National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting phone records from major telephone companies AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth to study the calling patterns of millions of Americans in an effort to detect terrorist activity, according to a report from USA Today on Thursday. Although the NSA is not recording or eavesdropping on telephone conversations, the [...]
