The US Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday filed fraud charges against two former Kmart executives for misleading investors about Kmart's financial future before the company filed for bankruptcy in January 2002. Former Chief Executive Officer Charles C. Conaway and former Chief Financial Officer John T. McDonald allegedly disclosed "materially false and misleading" information about the [...]
Mikhail Khodorkovsky , the former head of Russian oil company Yukos who is currently serving a 9-year prison sentence for fraud and tax evasion, plans to run for the State Duma , the lower house of the Russian Parliament, his lawyer said Tuesday. Ivan Starikov, a senior member of the liberal Union of the Right [...]
The results of a new poll suggest that British citizens are receptive to tough new anti-terror laws detailed by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair earlier this month. The poll, conducted by ICM for the Guardian newspaper, reveals that 73 percent of British respondents are willing to lose some civil liberties to improve security, with only [...]
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) , Britain's police watchdog agency, promised Tuesday to release a report on the death of Brazilian citizen Jean Charles de Menezes by the end of the year. De Menezes was killed by police on the London subway on July 22 after being mistaken for a suicide bomber. Richard Latham, [...]
A Tokyo court has ruled that a contest by Japanese soldiers in 1937 to behead Chinese soldiers did occur, and was not fabricated by the media, as claimed by families of the Japanese soldiers concerned. Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun ran a story in 1937 detailing a game between two army lieutenants, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi [...]
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin has signed legislation banning verbal panhandling in popular downtown tourist destinations, including the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site . The ordinance bans "commercial solicitation" and all verbal requests for money or other valuables in a public place "under circumstances where a reasonable person would understand that the purchase is [...]
Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo used her majority in Congress Tuesday to frustrate opposition attempts to impeach her. The opposition is attempting to consolidate three separate impeachment complaints to one strong case, while the majority has pushed to eliminate all but one weak charge. The complaints center on the rigging of last year's presidential election, [...]
Humam Hammoudi, head of Iraq's constitutional drafting committee , told reporters Tuesday that it was unlikely that the three additional days provided by the National Assembly to settle differences over the charter would be sufficient to solve all the outstanding issues in the proposed draft . The committee deferred a vote on the draft Monday [...]
Suicide and Homicide in State Prison and Local Jails, US Department of Justice, August 22, 2005 . Excerpt: Over the past two decades, State prison and local jail inmate mortality rates have displayed some dynamic changes. Suicide was the leading cause of death among jail inmates in 1983 (129 per 100,000 inmates); by 1993 that [...]
Leading Monday's corporations and securities law news, the Financial Times is reporting that the US Department of Justice is nearing a settlement with Big Four accounting firm KPMG . KPMG has been under investigation for its creation and marketing of illegal tax shelters and in June, KPMG publicly accepted responsibility for the illegal actions of [...]
