Human Rights Watch (HRW) Tuesday called on US President George W. Bush in a public letter to account for so-called "ghost prisoners" whose whereabouts and identities have been kept secret since September when Bush acknowledged the existence of secret prisons operated by the the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) outside the US where high-value terror [...]

California Family Bioethics Council v. California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Court of Appeal for the State of California First Appellate Division, February 27, 2006 . Read the full text of the ruling . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Canada's House of Commons Tuesday voted against extending two provisions of the country's Anti-Terrorism Act that are set to expire March 1. The controversial provisions include a preventive arrest clause that allows police to arrest suspects without warrant for 72 hours and an investigative hearing clause that allows judges to force individuals to testify in [...]

Charges have been brought against former interim president of Liberia Gyude Bryant for embezzling $1.3 million during his tenure from October 2003 until January 2006, according to a Liberia government statement Tuesday. The indictment was based on an audit conducted by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) , which monitored the interim government [...]

US District Judge Robert G. Doumar of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia Tuesday denied a motion to dismiss filed by the government of Sudan in a lawsuit brought by families of sailors killed in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole . Doumar said the Death on the High Seas [...]

US District Court for the District of Columbia Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson Tuesday sentenced former US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Dr. Lester M. Crawford to three years supervised probation and imposed about $90,000 in fines. Crawford had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of conflict of interest and false writing in October 2006. [...]

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled Tuesday that authorities violated the freedom of the press when they raided the offices of the monthly political magazine Cicero . In September 2005, investigators searched the offices of Cicero in an attempt to find the source of a leak of confidential papers from Germany's Federal Crime Office in connection [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Winkelman v. Parma City School District , 05-983 , where the court must decide whether parents of an autistic child can represent their child in federal court in suits arising under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) . The Winkelmans argue that the act [...]

A grand jury in Mississippi Tuesday refused to indict Carolyn Bryant on charges of manslaughter for the 1955 kidnap and murder of Emmett Till due to a lack of sufficient evidence. Carolyn is the wife of Rob Bryant, who, along with his half brother J.W. Milam, was acquitted in 1955 by an all-white jury on [...]

Australian Prime Minister John Howard was accused Tuesday of yielding to far-right groups who want a "white Australia" after the Australian Senate passed the Australian Citizenship Bill of 2006 on Monday. Seen as the biggest revision of immigration laws in nearly 60 years, the Citizenship Bill will make it harder to become an Australian citizen [...]