Former Enron accounting chief Richard Causey received a 66-month prison sentence Wednesday for authorizing bookkeeping practices that allowed Enron to defraud investors of billions of dollars. Under the original slate of 35 charges against him, Causey had faced up to 20 years in prison. In December he accepted a plea deal offering a maximum seven-year [...]

Lawyers for Saifullah Paracha , a multimillionaire from Pakistan in US custody at Guantanamo Bay , petitioned a federal court Wednesday to enjoin the US military from performing a cardiac catheterization because the facility there lacks sufficient medical equipment and the backup to ensure his health if something goes wrong. Paracha, who suffered a heart [...]

The High Court of Ireland held Wednesday that the protection of an unborn's right to life under Article 40 of the Irish Constitution does not include the preservation of embryos frozen as a part of infertility treatment. Article 40, Section 3.3 says: The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due [...]

Pakistan's National Assembly , the lower house of parliament, passed the 2006 Protection of Women Bill Wednesday, transferring rape case jurisdiction from religious Sharia courts to civil courts. The bill also classifies rape under the penal code and makes it easier for women in Pakistan to prove rape allegations. Religious leaders decried the legislation, saying [...]

Shaun Hansen, former owner of the telemarketing firm Mylo Enterprises Inc., pleaded guilty to two federal counts of conspiracy to commit interstate telephone harassment on Wednesday for his involvement in the New Hampshire GOP's 2002 phone jamming plot against the state's Democratic Senate candidates. Prosecutors alleged that Hansen was paid $2,500 to make phone calls [...]

US Army Spc. James P. Barker pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges stemming from the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family in the Mahmudiya (also "Mahmoudiya") area in March. Barker, who will be spared from capital punishment as a result of the plea, agreed to testify against the [...]

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud Wednesday rejected his cabinet's approval of a UN draft proposal for an international judicial tribunal to try suspects in the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri . Lahoud said the measure was invalid because in the midst of other domestic political turmoil all five Shiite ministers had [...]

The Labour Party government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged Wednesday to "put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system support the police and all those responsible for the public's safety" in its new legislative agenda for the 2006-2007 session of Parliament. In the Queen's Speech , read by Queen Elizabeth II [...]

The US decision to build a 700-mile fence along the US-Mexican border is "inhumane," a senior Vatican official said Tuesday while delivering Pope Benedict XVI's yearly message on migrants . Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Council on Migrant and Itinerant People , compared the proposal in the Secure Fence Act of 2006 to [...]

The US Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged the existence of a memorandum, signed by President Bush, that authorizes the detention and interrogation of terror suspects overseas in a letter sent to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU requested the memo in a FOIA request , sent to the CIA in 2004 , that specifically [...]