Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the two other members of the Iraqi Presidency Council refused to sign a provincial election bill on Wednesday, noting that it had been passed by an incomplete parliament. Kurdish legislators boycotted a Tuesday vote on the bill in the Iraqi Parliament , objecting to an attached proposal that would establish [...]

Italy will rework plans to fingerprint the country's Roma minority , altering requirements to only include those who do not have valid identification cards, the country's Interior Ministry announced Tuesday. The decision is seen as a concession to intense criticism of the fingerprinting plan by the international human rights community and Roma advocates . Earlier [...]

Sudan plans to create its own internationally-monitored courts to try war crimes suspects from the country's Darfur region , League of Arab States (LAS) official Hisham Yussef said on Tuesday. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands currently handles such proceedings, but if Sudanese domestic courts are created with appropriate human rights and accountability [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled on Tuesday that the government must unseal most of the grand jury testimony from the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case . In January, George Washington University's National Security Archive petitioned the court for the release of the transcripts, arguing [...]

The Italian Senate on Wednesday announced that it has passed legislation granting Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and other high-ranking officials immunity from prosecution while in office. Berlusconi's government proposed the legislation, which was passed in Italy's lower house earlier this month, saying that officials need to function without fear of politically-motivated prosecutions. Critics have argued [...]

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Tuesday denied an emergency stay for a Mississippi death row inmate challenging the state's lethal injection procedure. The court found that Dale Leo Bishop failed to establish that he would suffer an irreparable injury if the stay of execution was not [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on Tuesday affirmed a lower court's decision granting a permanent injunction against enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) , a federal law that imposes civil and criminal penalties on website operators for making sexually explicit materials available to minors over the Internet. The Act [...]

Executives from several Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and broadband internet service providers urged the US House of Representatives on Tuesday to pass HR 3914 , a bill that would make it harder for companies to avoid Federal Communications Commission (FCC) anti-competitive practice rules. Under current rules , if a telecom company files a petition to [...]

The Canadian Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) announced Monday that it appealed a Federal Court decision in which the Court found that certain notes, records and correspondence generated by government ministers and their staff are not subject to public access under the Access to Information Act . In Canada (Information Commissioner) v. Canada (National [...]

The China Ministry of Commerce said Tuesday that Chinese officials disagreed with and could challenge a World Trade Organization (WTO) panel report which states that the country illegally taxes and disfavors imported auto parts. The US, EU, and Canada submitted complaints in March, alleging that China was taxing auto parts imported from those countries at [...]