The Federal Court of Australia on Wednesday ruled that a lower court made several errors of law in its 2006 decision giving Aborigines native title to land in the Australian city of Perth, and said that the case must be reheard. The Australian government appealed the decision in October 2006, arguing that the ruling could [...]

The US government has abandoned a prototype "virtual fence" along the US-Mexico border after the system failed to perform up to expectations, according to Wednesday media reports. The prototype fence, which consists of nine unmanned towers equipped with radar, sensors and cameras along a 28-mile stretch of the US-Mexico border, was too slow in alerting [...]

Federal prosecutors filed felony charges Tuesday against Capt. John Joseph Cota, the California maritime pilot accused in the November 2007 spill of approximately 58,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil in the San Francisco Bay. Cota, who was piloting the M/V Cosco Busan when it collided with the San Francisco Bay Bridge last year, was also [...]

Ali Hassan al-Majid , better known in the Western media as "Chemical Ali," has been released from the hospital and returned to a US detention facility in Baghdad, US military officials said Tuesday. Al-Majid was hospitalized earlier this week after launching a hunger strike over his detention conditions. US officials said that al-Majid suffered a [...]

The US Supreme Court handed down its decision Wednesday in Virginia v. Moore , where the Court ruled that Virginia police did not violate Moore's Fourth Amendment right when they arrested him based on probable cause and performed a search incident to arrest, even when the arrest was prohibited by Virginia law. Moore was arrested [...]

US District Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Central District of California on Monday sentenced former Chinese television executive Tai Wang Mak to 10 years in prison for conspiring with his brother, Chi Mak, to smuggle sensitive naval intelligence data to China . The US government indicted Tai Mak, along with his brother and brother's [...]

US prisons currently house the world's largest inmate population, according to a Wednesday New York Times report citing data provided by the International Center for Prison Studies . The US currently holds 2.3 million inmates, far more than second-in-line China , which holds only 1.6 million inmates even though its population is four times that [...]

Former US Justice Department official Robert Coughlin II pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of criminal conflict of interest in connection to his relationship with disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff . Coughlin, charged on Monday, served as the deputy chief of staff of the DOJ's Criminal Division before resigning last year. He has admitting to [...]

Flavio Sosa, a leader of the 2006 popular uprising in the Mexican state of Oaxaca , was released from jail this weekend after prosecutors failed to convict him of any charges related to the uprising. Sosa, a prominent figure in the People's Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO) , had allegedly led a five-month protest demanding the [...]

Daniel M. Smith : " I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation. James Madison, 1788 October 23, 2001. For sixteen days, U.S. warplanes had been dropping the very latest GPS-guided iron bombs [...]