The Constitutional Court of Austria ruled Friday that the ban on wearing headscarves in elementary schools is unconstitutional as a violation of the principle of equality in connection with an individual’s right to religious freedom. Section 43a of the School Education Act of 1986 prohibited the wearing of any ideological or religious clothing involving the [...]
The national civil registry of Bolivia recognized for the first time on Friday a same-sex civil union after a two-year legal battle between the applicants, a gay couple, and the administrative authorities. The case stemmed from an application by David Aruquipa and Guido Montaño, who had applied to register their relationship as a “free union” [...]
In a report submitted Thursday to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Together, the Scottish Alliance for Children’s Rights, called for changes to Scotland’s compulsory religious instruction law. The report cites 30 areas of concern identified by the participants of a series of webinars and surveys conducted by Together in an effort [...]
A federal judge of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin dismissed a lawsuit by President Donald Trump’s campaign against the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Saturday. The judge rejected the plaintiffs’ request that the Wisconsin presidential election results be declared void and that the Wisconsin legislature instead select the state’s ten electors. [...]
The US Senate passed the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Friday with veto-proof majority support amidst President Trump’s threats to reject the legislation. The defense bill, through which Congress authorizes the Pentagon budget, has passed every year for 59 consecutive years. The legislation garnered widespread bipartisan support in the Senate and passed [...]
Nguyen Nhat Cam and nine other defendants were found guilty Saturday by the Supreme People’s Court of Vietnam for exploiting a testing kit purchasing scam. Cam was the former chief of Hanoi’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while five of the other nine defendants were senior officials. The rest of the defendants were [...]
Alfred Bourgeois, who had been on death row for 15 years, was executed by the US government Friday after the US Supreme Court rejected a last-minute application for a stay. He was the second federal prisoner to be executed by federal authorities in just two days. Both cases were surrounded by uncertainty. Bourgeois’s appeal claimed [...]
Cydia, a popular app distributor for jailbroken devices before Apple launched App Store, filed a lawsuit Thursday against Apple in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Apple uses anti-competitive practices to assert a monopoly over software distribution on iOS. The lawsuit alleges that Apple has eliminated all competition in the [...]
Bhutan’s parliament adopted the Penal Code (Amendment) Bill of 2019 on Thursday, decriminalizing homosexual conduct between two consenting adults. The legislation was tabled before both houses, being the National Assembly and the National Council, in a joint sitting of the bicameral legislature this year. Section 213 of the Penal Code of Bhutan criminalized “unnatural sex,” [...]
Tesla’s upcoming car factory in Germany might be delayed after environmental groups Thursday obtained a temporary injunction against construction. The factory, originally slated to be operational by July 2021, has been subject to litigation by environmental groups. A lower court in Frankfurt an der Oder initially ruled in favor of Tesla. Upon appeal, a higher [...]
