UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland Thursday appealed to warring groups in the tsunami affected areas of South Asia to respect ceasefires, suspend their conflicts and stop reported acts of "banditry" that in a few instances he said have involved violence, attempted kidnapping and the hijacking of relief assets. Egeland observed that the [...]

Following up on a report this morning in JURIST's Paper Chase, Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate have halted Congress' formal certification of the electoral college results and have forced a two-hour debate on problems encountered in the Ohio presidential vote after a challenge. This is only the second time since 1877 that such [...]

Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi announced Thursday that he has extended for a further 30 days the country's emergency law approved in July but only implemented in November. The extension carries the National Safety Law – authorizing the imposition of curfews, the closing of borders and airports and the detention of suspected insurgents without [...]

Peter Tillers, Cardozo Law School: "Dear Senator Brownback: The department that the U.S. Attorney General heads is called the 'Department of Justice,' and not the 'Department of Security.'… Senator Brownback said that the first priority of the Attorney General is protection of the security of the United States. The Attorney General is in part a [...]

Lawyers for suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla have asked a South Carolina federal judge to hear their claim for a writ of habeas corpus or release Padilla, currently being held in the US Naval Weapons Station brig in Charleston. A brief filed Wednesday said that the claims made against Padilla, who has been held for [...]

AP is reporting that the Ukrainian Supreme Court has rejected losing presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych's appeal of last month's presidential revote. 12:45 PM ET – BBC News now has a full story here.

Anthony D'Amato, Northwestern University Law School: "Although the N.Y. Times and Washington Post have been admirably accurate in reporting the standard legal issues, they have overlooked the single most telling point in the debate about Gonzales, perhaps because of its subtlety. We start by observing that whenever the Department of Justice gives any legal advice [...]

Continuing his campaign for tort reform, President Bush meets with lawmakers Thursday to discuss shifting many class-action suits from state to federal courts a day after delivering a speech in Illinois on capping damage awards for medical malpractice. The administration and its Congressional supporters emphasize the costs of so called "junk lawsuits" to business and [...]

AP is reporting that a federal bankruptcy judge in Alexandria, Virginia, has canceled a collective bargaining agreement between US Airways and its machinists union (part of the International Association of Machinists), providing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings to the struggling air carrier, but forcing pay cuts for union workers ranging from 6 [...]

Kenneth Anderson, Washington College of Law American University: "One thing that is missing in the whole torture-interrogation debate is the question of who you are interrogating. Can you use a different level of interrogation on Zarqawi, for example – knowing it is Zarqawi – than you could on someone who might indeed turn out to [...]