US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said that he will divert additional resources to New Orleans to address the city's high crime rates following the Hurricane Katrina disaster . The additional resources include ten temporary prosecutors to handle gun, drug and immigration cases, nine permanent lawyers to assist in fraud and violent crime cases, and [...]

Testimony from Kurdish survivors of the 1987-1988 Anfal campaign in Iraq continued Wednesday during the trial of Saddam Hussein , where Hussein and six co-defendants face genocide and crimes against humanity charges . Following testimony the day before describing chemical attacks , Adiba Oula Bayez, a Kurdish woman, described the August 16, 1987 attack on [...]

A plan by the US Forest Service to allow commercial logging inside Central California's Giant Sequoia National Monument violates environmental laws , US District Judge Charles R. Breyer held Tuesday. Breyer had previously issued an injunction to stop the logging in response to a lawsuit filed by environmental groups including the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and [...]

Passions Video, Inc. v. Nixon, US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, August 21, 2006 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

US officials have arrested eight people for allegedly attempting to buy weapons to use against the Sri Lankan military, and for attempting to bribe US State Department officials to remove their organization from the State Department's list of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations . Following the arrests, federal prosecutors unsealed two criminal complaints Monday against eight [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday filed a complaint in federal court seeking an injunction against Verizon Communications and the Maine Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to prevent the PUC from demanding that Verizon attest in a sworn statement to comments previously made regarding Verizon's participation in the NSA domestic surveillance program . Verizon [...]

An Israeli military court on Tuesday charged Palestinian parliament speaker Aziz Dweik with membership and activity in a terrorist organization, over Dweik's complaints that the Israel Defense Forces court has no jurisdiction over elected Palestinian officials. Dweik's next court hearing is scheduled for August 31, again at the Ofer military base in the West Bank. [...]

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 is now the first international treaty to gain universal international acceptance, according to Jean-Philippe Lavoyer, head of the legal division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) . Lavoyer said on Monday that with accessions to the Geneva Conventions by Nauru on June 27, and Montenegro on August [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report Tuesday finding that security forces in Guinea are routinely torturing people to coerce confessions in an increasingly unstable domestic climate. According to the report, "the most common types of abuse committed by the police…include binding the detainee with nylon cords in painful positions and then beating him." Within [...]

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday voiced disapproval of congressional efforts to address "net neutrality," arguing that if current regulations do not prevent broadband providers from accepting money from content providers in exchange for preferential bandwidth treatment, or from interfering with the content of competitors, then the free market will resolve [...]