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 [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit Monday in Alabama's Montgomery County Circuit Court, challenging an Alabama law that prevents some convicted felons from voting. A 2003 amendment to the state constitution says that felons convicted of "crimes of moral turpitude" are ineligible to vote, and specifies 15 qualifying crimes. Alabama Attorney General [...]

Louisiana state prosecutors on Monday petitioned the US Supreme Court to reconsider its June decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana , where it found that imposing the death sentence for child rape where the victim was not killed constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The Court had noted in that ruling that very few states had such [...]

A Serbian prosecutor said on Tuesday that the government plans to extradite Bosnian Serb leader and former fugitive Radovan Karadzic to the Hague to face an International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)  war crimes indictment . Karadzic was originally indicted by the court in 1995, but had been in hiding under an assumed identity until his arrest Monday [...]

Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win has called for the newly-established Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of ASEAN member nations. The comments, made during a Monday meeting to organize the new ASEAN human rights committee, indicate that Myanmar may block attempts to give the new body any [...]