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 [...]
Judge Trevor McFadden of the US District Court for the District of Columbia Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) challenging President Trump’s May executive order on “preventing online censorship”. The executive order was issued with the expressed intent of promoting “free and open debate online”. It asserted that [...]
A US federal court judge Friday denied a motion for a preliminary injunction against Governor Tom Wolf’s ongoing mask mandate and Covid-19 contact tracing program. The motion was part of a lawsuit filed in the Middle District of the US District Court of Pennsylvania in September. The suit was brought by the American Freedom Law [...]
An international tribunal on Friday issued five life sentences to Salim Jamil Ayyash, a Hezbollah member who was convicted in absentia in August for the assassination of former Lebanon prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005. Hariri was killed in a massive suicide bomb explosion in Beirut which also killed twenty-one other people and injured 226. [...]
More than 1,000 pro-democracy protestors in Thailand rallied Thursday for revocation of the kingdom’s lèse majesté law, which proscribes acts of defaming, insulting or threatening the king, the queen, the regent or the heir apparent. The protestors gathered at the 14 October 1973 Memorial which commemorates civilian protestors who lost their lives in the 1973 [...]
