President Bush announced on Wednesday the nominations of five people to serve as federal appeals court judges on the US Courts of Appeals for the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits. The nomination of the five conservatives has already caused concern among Senate leaders with a spokesman for Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid labeling the announcement [...]

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday once again said that Iran will not cease its uranium enrichment program, despite an August 31 deadline set by UN Security Council Resolution 1696 , stating that "the Iranian nation will not accept for one moment any bullying, invasion and violation of its rights." Non-compliance with the deadline may [...]

The South African National Assembly , the lower house of the country's parliament, has passed the Prohibition of Mercenary Activity and Regulation of Certain Activities in Areas of Armed Conflict Bill , legislation that would prevent South African citizens from serving in foreign armies or security forces abroad without first receiving permission from the South [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Brian Concannon Jr., Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says that although the political prisoners lingering in Haiti's squalid jails are not the byproduct of the policies of incoming President René Préval, they are certainly his problem, drawing criticism with each passing day not only from international [...]

In re: Vioxx Products Liability Litigation, Barnett v. Merck & Co., US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, August 30, 2006 . Read the full text of the ruling . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Scotland Yard received a final one-week extension from a High Court judge in London Wednesday, permitting British police to detain and question five British Muslim men suspected in connection with an alleged terror plot to blow up US-bound planes over the Atlantic for an additional seven days before they must either charge the suspects with [...]

UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland condemned Israel Wednesday for its "immoral" use of cluster bombs in the most recent Middle East conflict . Egeland based his criticism on UN officials' recent discovery of 359 separate sites of cluster bomblets, saying that 90% of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours [...]

National Resources Defense Council v. Environmental Protection Agency et al., United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, August 29, 2006 . Read the full text of the ruling . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The US Marine Corps Wednesday held separate hearings preliminary to possible court-martial at Camp Pendleton , California, for two of the eight American soldiers, including seven Marines and one Navy corpsman, charged with the April 26 murder and kidnapping of an Iraqi man in the town of Hamdania. The eight men allegedly dragged the man [...]

A district court in Tokyo Wednesday dismissed an action filed on behalf of eight Chinese women who claim they were forced to act as sex slaves, or "comfort women" , for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The plaintiffs, teenagers during the war, sought both monetary compensation and an apology from the Japanese government, and [...]