The head executives of oil companies should be tried for crimes against humanity and nature for misleading the public about the impact of oil on global warming , according to a NASA climatologist who testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Monday. James Hansen , the long-time director of NASA's [...]

Tunisia is committing wide-spread human rights abuses under overly-broad anti-terrorism legislation , according to a Monday report by Amnesty International . Amnesty said that while the government claims to comply with international norms on due process and detainee treatment, it rarely investigates allegations of rights violations by state security organs: The fact that gaping discrepancies [...]

The US Supreme Court Monday agreed to hear seven cases , including Ministry of Defense and Support for the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran v. Elahi (07-615) . In that case, the Court will consider whether the brother of dissident Cyrus Elahi, assassinated in Paris in 1990, can collect on a default [...]

Howard Learner : "On the transportation front, the Clean Air Act balances federal and state interests by making clear a binary approach: states are empowered to adopt California's emission standards, if a waiver is approved by the U.S. EPA following reasonable consideration, or default to the federal standards. Federal District Courts in California and Vermont [...]

Parhat v. Gates, US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, June 23, 2008 . Read the full text of the order . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) wrote in a letter to the UN Monday that the Serbian government had failed to cooperate with Tribunal investigations and cases in violation of the court's UN statute . ICTY president Fausto Pocar told UN Security Council President Zalmay Khalilzad that the court [...]

The US Supreme Court handed down three decisions Monday, including Rothgery v. Gillespie County , in which the Court ruled 8-1 that a person accused of a felony has the right to a lawyer at a probable cause hearing before a magistrate judge. The Court held: We merely reaffirm what we have held before and [...]

The Bolivian province of Tarija approved a referendum Sunday calling for greater autonomy, becoming the fourth of nine provinces to approve increased freedom from Bolivia's socialist government. The voting results in Tarija, which has considerable natural gas deposits, were similar to those in three other neighboring provinces, which have similar mineral resource wealth. Voters in [...]

A division of the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance revoked the license of Iranian daily newspaper Tehran Emrouz Saturday for printing articles that criticized the policies of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . The articles were published on the third anniversary of Ahmadinejad's election and focused on his economic and political strategies. The Tehran [...]

A US military court in Iraq Sunday convicted  Alaa "Alex" Mohammad Ali , an Iraqi-Canadian translator working in the country, in connection with the February stabbing death of a fellow military contractor. The case is the first in which a civilian has been charged  and convicted by the military since a 2006 amendment  to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) [...]