California prisons need an influx of $7 billion to bring inmate healthcare up to constitutional standards, said court-appointed prison medical overseer J. Clark Kelso Monday. The state senate has been unwilling to authorize a bond to borrow money for the project, so Kelso has appealed to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to use his emergency powers [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Monday dismissed a challenge to the US military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy which provides for the discharge of openly gay service members. The suit was brought by 12 gay or lesbian former US-military members who had been dismissed under the policy. The appellants, who were [...]

The White House announced Monday that US President George W. Bush signed an executive order Friday directing all federal departments and agencies to require government contractors to use the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) E-Verify system in an effort to ensure that workers meet federal immigration and work eligibility requirements. The order and amends [...]

Rwandan genocide suspect Dominique Ntawukuriryayo pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, and direct and public incitement to genocide before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) . Ntawukuriryayo was arrested in France in October 2007 and indicted for his suspected role in organizing and encouraging the killing of Tutsis. In [...]

British law enforcement and security officials appear sharply split on the advisability of extending the detention without charge limit for terror suspects to 42 days in the run-up to a Wednesday vote on a contentious new anti-terrorism bill in the House of Commons. Unnamed senior police officers quoted by the Guardian newspaper Monday expressed concern [...]

Human Rights Watch decried conditions at Guantanamo Bay as contrary to international norms of humane treatment in a report released Tuesday, saying that detainees face extreme isolation that can cause mental trauma. The group found that many are housed alone in windowless, cramped cells for months or years on end and are denied access to [...]

Fifteen members of Myanmar's National League for Democracy (NLD) were released from custody Monday, two weeks after their arrests at a demonstration in support of detained party leader Aung San Suu Kyi . The activists had staged the event to support Suu Kyi on the day she was scheduled to be released from house arrest, [...]

Fourteen accused Zayidi Shi'ite rebels, among them outspoken Yemeni journalist Abdel Karim al-Khaywani , were sentenced in a Yemeni court Monday for their roles in an ongoing Shi'ite uprising. Thirteen of the rebels received sentences of up to ten years in prison and one was sentenced to death for plotting attacks on Yemeni military bases. [...]

The US District Court for the District of Columbia began hearings Monday in Cobell v. Kempthorne , a class-action suit brought in 1996 alleging US government mismanagement of trust funds for a group of some 500,000 Native Americans and their heirs. Judge James Robertson will decide how much the government owes the class members for [...]

The Supreme Court of Virginia has upheld a woman's visitation rights regarding a child who was born to her former lesbian partner while the two were engaged in a same-sex union under Vermont law . Without reaching the merits of the case , the court ruled Friday for Janet Jenkins against Lisa Miller, finding that [...]