A judge for the US District Court for the Central District of California on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against the FBI alleging that it illegally directed its agents to spy on Muslim communities. Judge Cormac Carney dismissed the case after concluding that allowing the lawsuit to move forward would risk exposing important state secrets. The [...]

The High Court of Australia on Wednesday rejected a request by the nation of Hungary to extradite a Nazi war crimes suspect. The case concerned a man named Charles Zentai , an Australian citizen and Hungarian native who was accused, along with two other Hungarian soldiers, of beating a Jewish teenager in Hungary to death [...]

A judge for the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court on Wednesday declined to issue an injunction to prevent the state’s voter ID law from taking effect. The plaintiffs in the case are Pennsylvania residents who lack photo ID. They argued that HB 943 will disenfranchise a large number of voters and that Pennsylvania’s rationale of preventing voter [...]

Syrian forces and their supporting Shabbiha fighters have committed “war crimes and gross violations of international human rights and humanitarian law,” according to a report released Wednesday by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI). The report found that government and Shabbiha forces are responsible for instances of rape, murder, torture and attacks against [...]

The High Court of Australia on Wednesday upheld a law that requires cigarette packages to display graphic images warning of the dangers of smoking and bans brand logos. The plaintiffs in the case were several tobacco companies which argued that the law in question, the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act unconstitutionally infringed upon their intellectual property [...]

Executive Director of Greenpeace International , Kumi Naidoo, on Tuesday called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to refrain from implementing a new law that labels rights groups that receive overseas funding as “foreign agents,” a term often associated with “spies” in Russia. The law, already passed by both houses of Russia’s parliament and signed by [...]

A court in Egypt on Tuesday sentenced 14 Islamist members of the jihadist organization Al-Tawhid we Al-Jihad to death for their roles in a series of attacks in northern Sinai in July 2011. The Ismailiya Criminal Court, located in the city of Ismailiya on the west bank of the Suez Canal, convicted the 14 Islamists [...]

A lawyer in Egypt filed an appeal on Tuesday challenging a declaration by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi , granting himself as president complete legislative and executive power. The appeal was filed in a Cairo court by lawyer Mohamed Salem. Morsi’s declaration, which was made on Sunday, effectively abolished a June declaration by Egypt’s Supreme Council [...]

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Tuesday that Wells Fargo will pay a $6.5 million fine for improperly selling high-risk mortgage securities to investors during the housing market crash in 2007. The SEC claimed that Wells Fargo did not adequately inform investors of the risk or complexity of the securities it sold. In [...]

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Tuesday ruled that police did not violate the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches when they tracked a suspect’s cell phone using the phone’s global positioning system (GPS) signal. Melvin Skinner was convicted on drug charges after police used the GPS [...]