A judge of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled on Friday that when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 reduced the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) shared-responsibility payment for not obtaining health insurance to $0, the provision ceased being a tax, making it an invalid exercise of Congress’s power to tax. This does not [...]
The Parliament of Kosovo approved a package of bills on Friday that will allow Kosovo to form a military and defense ministry. All three bills, one establishing a Defense Ministry, one that converts the limited Kosovo Security Forces (KSF) into a professional army and another that regulates service in the forces, garnered convincing majority votes [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Thursday to reduce the scope of a nationwide preliminary injunction that had prevented the Trump Administration from enforcing rules that exempted employers from the contraceptive care requirement of the Affordable Care Act based on religious and moral grounds. The court agreed with the district court’s finding that the Departments [...]
The Tbilisi Appeals Court in the Republic of Georgia on Wednesday rendered a precedent-setting decision for the victim in what is believed to be the country’s first sexual harassment lawsuit against an employer. Journalist and actress Tatia Samkharadze filed a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment against Shalva Ramishvili, her former boss at Imedi TV in 2016. In January 2018, [...]
Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, and Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, presented a bipartisan bill on Thursday that would extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans currently in the US. TPS is a federal program under Section 244 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act that provides status to individuals from countries [...]
The Parliament of Hungary passed a package of bills on Wednesday that establishes a new system of courts that will be supreme in administrative matters. Drafts of the two bills, T/3353 and T/3354, were submitted by the government on November 6 and passed with 131 in favor and two against and 130 in favor and 3 [...]
The UN Committee against Torture posted a letter online, bearing Tuesday’s date, that calls on Saudi Arabia to release over a dozen imprisoned activists and cites credible claims of improper treatment, sexual assault and torture. The UN group charged with overseeing compliance with the Convention Against Torture claims that seven activists have been held without official [...]
The Hungarian government passed a suite of amendments to the nation’s labor laws that will significantly benefit employers on Wednesday despite vocal protests on the Parliament floor. The new laws increase the number of overtime hours that employers can require employees to work per year from the code’s previously allowed 250 hours to 400 hours. The [...]
President Trump signed the Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act of 2018 into law on Tuesday. The bill establishes “US policy to ensure that humanitarian, stabilization, and recovery assistance for nationals and residents of Iraq or Syria, and of communities from those countries, is directed toward ethnic and minority individuals and communities with the greatest [...]
President Trump’s former personal lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution by a federal judge in New York on Wednesday. This comes following a request from federal prosecutors for a “substantial” prison term on December 7. Cohen plead guilty to lying to [...]
