Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel announced on Friday that he appeal a federal judge’s decision striking down a state law that bans abortions starting at 12 weeks of pregnancy. Last month US District Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that the state law is unconstitutional and that abortions cannot be restricted until a fetus reaches viability. [...]

Egyptian prosecution authorities referred 220 supporters of deposed president Mohammed Morsi to criminal court over the weekend for their involvement in protests in downtown Cairo on the January 25 anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution earlier this year. The 220 Morsi supporters face a number of charges including attempted murder, illegal possession of firearms, unlawful [...]

An Iranian appeals court on Saturday overturned the death sentence of ex-Marine Amir Hekmati who was convicted of spying for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2011. Saturday’s ruling decreased Hekmati’s sentence to 10 years in prison. Hekmati is a dual US-Iranian citizen who was arrested in August 2011 and accused of receiving special [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Hanan Salah of Human Rights Watch says that if the Libyan government does not take immediate steps to rectify its dysfunctional justice system it risks a complete collapse… This past week, Libya’s official television station broadcasted a series of videos featuring al-Saadi Gaddafi, a son of the deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, [...]

The Authors Guild filed an appellate brief on Friday, renewing its complaint that Google is violating copyright laws with its mass book digitization project. The brief, filed with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit , claims that Google’s “Library Project” is scanning copyrighted works and making them available online without the copyright [...]

Amnesty International (AI) expressed concern Friday over the new Egyptian anti-terror law set to be approved by interim president Adly Mansour . The law, which was passed in response to an attack on Cairo University , is aimed at deterring the recent escalation of terrorist violence in Egypt during its transition following the ouster of [...]

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring on Friday filed an appellate brief in support of the district court’s ruling that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. The brief, filed with the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit , argues that the state’s statutory and constitutional bans on same-sex marriage violate the Equal [...]

The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, called Friday upon the owners of the Washington Redskins football team to change the team’s name . Anaya focused on the hurtful history of the term “redskin” as it relates to Native Americans in the US. In the press release, Anaya stated: While [...]

JURIST Guest Columnists Peter J. Brann, David Swetnam-Burland and Stacy O. Stitham of Brann & Isaacson discuss the patent eligibility of computer-implemented inventions… The US Supreme Court’s consideration of the patent eligibility of computer-implemented inventions in Alice Corporation Pty., Ltd. v. CLS Bank International, et al, has drawn commentary not only from the usual suspects [...]

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released the results of the Global Study on Homicide 2013 (GSH) which detailed the global prevalence of intentional homicides, finding 437,000 homicides in 2012. The UNODC collected a wide breadth of statistical data including identities of perpetrators and victims, murder weapons, and murder rates by nation. The [...]