Media workers and reformists are urging Iran's new prosecutor general Abbas Jafari Dolat-Abadi to remove bans placed on newspapers and to free journalists who were imprisoned during the term of his predecessor, Saeed Mortazavi , according to a letter posted Saturday on the website of leading reform party Mosharekat . The letter was accompanied by [...]

Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) said Saturday that it is doing its job faithfully and impartially in an attempt to reassure the Afghan public amid allegations of voter fraud in the recent presidential election . The remarks are mainly in response to complaints by Abdullah Abdullah , the central challenger to current President Hamid Karzai [...]

Iran opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi on Saturday called for continued protests over the recent controversial election in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected. Mousavi maintained his position that the election was fraudulent and urged supporters to oppose the results. Mousavi's statements came just days after Ahmadinejad called for the prosecution of opposition leaders , [...]

The Belgian Foreign Ministry announced press release] Friday that they have accepted a former Guantanamo Bay detainee into their country for resettlement. The Belgian government announced that the detainee, who has not been named, will receive a work permit and that further "accompanying measures will be specific with a view to ensuring his effective integration [...]

The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Friday ruled that Airbus received illegal subsidies from European governments, according to sources familiar with the unreleased decision. The preliminary ruling came in response to a complaint filed by the US Trade Representative alleging that the subsidies caused material harm to US aircraft manufacturer Boeing , in violation of [...]

Barry Steinhardt : "Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have a legitimate power to search for contraband goods crossing national borders. But searching laptops is not a search of goods. It is a search of a storehouse of information – private correspondence, financial and medical records, business records. It is a search of speech protected [...]

Christopher Huther and Jeremy Keim : "On August 28, 2009, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an opinion in Comcast Corporation v. FCC, which vacated the FCC's 30% limit on the number of subscribers to which a cable operator could offer service. This cap, created in 1993, was initially intended [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Friday that former attorney general John Ashcroft is not entitled to absolute and qualified immunity, allowing an unlawful detention lawsuit by US citizen Abdullah Al-Kidd to go forward. At the heart of the case is whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) policy of using the [...]

Al-Kidd v. Ashcroft, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, September 4, 2009 . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here. Latest commentary available here. JURIST has more on John Ashcroft.

Former US soldier Steven Green was sentenced Friday to five consecutive life terms in prison for the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenage girl and the murder of her family in Mahmudiya. A federal jury in the US District Court for the Western District of Kentucky , which convicted Green in May, failed to [...]