The US Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the execution of Alabama death row inmate James Harvey Callahan "pending the timely filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari." Callahan had been scheduled to be executed at 6 PM CST on Thursday. The stay will terminate automatically if Callahan's petition for certiorari is [...]

US President George W. Bush Thursday signed a 15-day extension to the temporary Protect America Act , carrying it beyond its February 1 expiration date. The Protect Act, enacted as a stopgap while Congress worked on long-term legislation to "modernize" the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) , currently allows the US government to eavesdrop [...]

The Russian Supreme Court Thursday rejected an appeal to overturn a life sentence for former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin for his involvement in organizing a series of contract killings. Pichugin was convicted by the Moscow City Court in August 2007 for organizing three murders and four attempted murders. Pichugin originally received a 24-year sentence [...]

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) Thursday called for Malaysia to lift the Internal Security Act (ISA) , a preventive detention law that allows the Malaysian government to detain suspects for two years without trial and to renew the detention indefinitely. The FIDH said that the ISA is contrary to fundamental human rights and [...]

The Zimbabwe High Court Wednesday ruled against an appeal filed by the legal team defending Simon Mann seeking to prevent Mann's extradition for trial in Equatorial Guinea. Judge Rita Makarau held that the government had enough evidence that Mann was involved in a plot to overthrow Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Ngeuma to allow the [...]

Tom Burke : "The main legal issue is: the imprisonment, trials, and sentencing of Colombian revolutionaries in U.S. courts is a violation of the Colombian people's sovereignty. Ricardo Palmera is a political prisoner of the U.S. government. The U.S. has no right to put Ricardo Palmera on trial or to imprison him. The Bush administration [...]

Seven Islamic militants involved in multiple bombing attacks on a town in northwestern Bangladesh were sentenced to life in prison by a Bangladeshi court Thursday. The attacks were part of a larger bombing plot allegedly organized by the Islamic group Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) that set off more than 400 bombs nearly simultaneously throughout the [...]

The US Department of Justice asked US District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper Wednesday to lift a preliminary injunction restricting the US Navy's use of sonar along the coast of Southern California. President Bush granted an exemption earlier this month allowing the Navy to continue using sonar, after which Cooper eased portions of the order . The [...]

A federal judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia Wednesday ruled that the US Department of the Interior (DOI) "unreasonably delayed" the accounting of billions of dollars of American Indian money , adding that it is now impossible for the DOI to remedy the breach. The decade-old Indian Trust case returned [...]

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a class action lawsuit brought by residents of New Orleans against the US Army Corps of Engineers , ruling that the Flood Control Act of 1928 grants immunity to the Corps. The residents of New Orleans sued the Corps alleging that the Corps had been negligent in the collapse [...]