The High Court ruled Monday for the government against Liberty, a UK Civil Rights Group, in a case about government surveillance. Liberty brought this case to challenge the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The Act gave various agencies within the UK government broad powers to collect and retain data as well as a broad ability to [...]
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill Monday which decriminalizes marijuana use in the state. The bill, S.6579A/A.8420, removes criminal penalties for possession of marijuana in amounts less than two ounces. It sets the penalty for the possession of less than 1 ounce of marijuana to a $50 fine. There will now be a [...]
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled Monday that companies embedding the Facebook “Like” button on their websites may be liable for collecting customer data and transferring it to Facebook. The ruling came in response to a German online retailer, Fashion ID, transmitting prospective customers’ personal data to Facebook Ireland when those individuals visited the [...]
Huang Qi, a Chinese journalist and “cyber-dissident,” was sentenced Monday to 12 years in prison for illegally disclosing and providing state secrets abroad. Huang Qi is the founder of 64 Tianwang, a Chinese news site that has reported frequently on protests and human rights abuses by the People’s Republic of China. His site has displayed [...]
Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Monday formed a bench to determine the exact duration of a sentence of imprisonment for life under the country’s law. A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan Asif Saeed Khosa took notice of the issue while hearing a petition to reduce a convict’s life sentence. The bench set to [...]
US President Donald Trump signed a bill into law Monday granting permanent reauthorization of the September 11 Victims Compensation fund. The original fund was set to expire in 2020, but the administrator of the fund announced in February that the fund had limited remaining resources and would be required to significantly reduce its awards. This [...]
The US Supreme Court has granted the Trump administration’s application for stay of injunctions that would freeze $2.5 billion of Department of Defense (DOD) funds the administration planned to use for construction of the border wall. President Donald Trump has been battling Congress for funds to use in constructing a border wall along the southern [...]
A judge in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky on Friday dismissed Nicholas Sandmann’s $250 million defamation complaint against the Washington Post, citing First Amendment protections. The case stems from a conflict that arose at a rally in Washington, DC. Sandmann was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat when his [...]
The upper house of India’s parliament approved a bill on Thursday to amend the Right to Information Act of 2005. The bill has already been passed by the lower house of parliament and will become law once it receives presidential assent. Amendments to the law proposed in the bill include changes to the fixed term [...]
A California judge on Thursday reduced a $2 billion jury verdict for a couple against Bayer AG for causing their cancer by the company’s glyphosate-based weed killer, Roundup, to $86.7 million. Alva and Alberta Pilliod allege Roundup causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that Monsanto (now Bayer) for decades tried to influence scientists and regulators to bury [...]
