A tax reform interest group chairman says that the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform created last January to consider alternatives to the current US income tax system will probably not recommend any major changes to the code when it submit its report to the Treasury Department by November 1st. The panel is considering [...]

According to an attorney for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) , prosecutors in his case offered DeLay a deal that would have allowed him to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges, thus avoiding felony charges of money laundering and criminal conspiracy. In a letter from defense attorney Dick DeGuerin to Travis County District Attorney [...]

In a White House meeting Monday with visiting Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov , President Bush urged the Libyan government to release five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death for intentionally causing an AIDS outbreak at a Benghazi children's hospital in 1999. The story made international headlines last year when the court deciding the case seemingly ignored [...]

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has taken the unusual step of criticizing the state case against Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk , calling his prosecution for "public denigration of Turkish identity" contrary to the efforts of the government to extend greater individual rights to citizens, including freedom of religion and expression. Pamuk, whose work often examines [...]

After being signed into law by President Bush last April, an overhauled US bankruptcy law goes into effect Monday making it more difficult for consumers to prove that they should be allowed to clear their debts and make a "fresh start." The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was prompted by concerns [...]

Iranian officials have approved the basic outlines of a "single-urgency" bill providing for the suspension of Iran's voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) . Mahmoud Mohammadi, a member of the Iranian commission that approved the changes, said the government would suspend the Additional Protocol "if the International Atomic Energy [...]

Republican and Democratic sources said Monday that Senate Republicans have proposed the week of November 7th to begin confirmation hearings for beleaguered US Supreme Court candidate Harriet Miers . Though Republicans are seeking a vote by the full Senate prior to Thanksgiving, it was not immediately clear whether Democrats would attempt to push back the [...]

Lawyers representing 10 terror suspects and 13 human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch , appeared before Britain's House of Lords Monday arguing against a 2004 appeals court ruling allowing Special Immigration Appeals Commission tribunals hearing cases involving foreign terror suspects to consider evidence obtained by torture. Such evidence would not be [...]

An FBI report on US crime released Monday found that while murders in the US fell for the first time in five years, 2004 saw an increase in the number of rapes. Overall the number of violent crimes fell by 1.2 percent and property crimes dropped 1.1 percent. The 350 fewer murders in 2004 compared [...]

The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that death row inmates do not have an automatic right to a jury trial to determine whether or not an inmate is mentally retarded and therefore ineligible for execution. The unsigned opinion comes three years after the Court barred executions of the mentally retarded because they violated the constitutional [...]