Inventor Judas Klausner filed a patent infringement suit Tuesday against nine companies, including Google, Inc., Verizon Communications, and LG Electronics , alleging that they infringe on his visual voicemail technology patent. The technology involves providing a visual list of voicemail through which a user can view and retrieve individual messages. In anticipation of Klausner's attack, [...]

Chinese authorities have released activist Hu Shigen after 16 years of imprisonment, the group Human Rights in China (HRIC) announced Tuesday. Hu had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for carrying out counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement and organizing a counterrevolutionary group. HRIC Executive Director Sharon Hom said in a press release : We welcome [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has asked the Washington Supreme Court to determine whether the sister of a man whose bodily tissues were harvested for medical research without consent may sue for damages. In an order issued Tuesday, a Ninth Circuit panel found that plaintiff Robinette Amaker had raised dispositive issues [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Tuesday ruled that a Chinese couple are eligible for asylum because they reasonably feared persecution as members of the Falun Gong sect . Zhao and Duan came to California in 2001, several months after an incident in which Chinese police had entered their home, arrested [...]

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced Tuesday that a military court had sentenced a former West Bank mayor to six years in prison after finding him guilty of belonging to and assisting the militant group Hamas . Former Mayor Hatam Ridah Jarrar (also "Grar"), of the city of Jenin, was convicted last week of membership [...]

Followers of the Kansas-based fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church plan to stage a protest at the funeral for late Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) Saturday, despite a federal appeals court ruling last week that upheld an Ohio law limiting funeral protests. The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit last week upheld Ohio's funeral protest [...]

A federal judge has rejected constitutional challenges to civilian charges against former US Army Pvt. Steven D. Green in connection with the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the killing of her family in Mahmudiya, Iraq (also "Mahmoudiya"). US District Judge Thomas Russell of the Western District of Kentucky ruled Tuesday that charging [...]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has ordered the prosecution of Florence Hartmann , former spokeswoman for ICTY chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte , on two counts of contempt for allegedly disclosing protected information about the trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic . The ICTY issued an Order in Lieu of [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday ordered the federal government to release eight more grand jury transcripts from the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case . District Judge Alvin Hellerstein emphasized the historical value of the testimony, given in 1950 and 1952 by witnesses who [...]

The Pakistani government reinstated eight judges in the Sindh High Court in Karachi on Wednesday. The judges had previously refused to take office until the reinstatement of all 60 judges dismissed last year by former President Pervez Musharraf , including former Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry . Rashid Razvi, head of the Karachi [...]