US Chief Justice John Roberts has appointed US District Judge and former Whitewater prosecutor John D. Bates to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to replace US District Judge James Robertson , who resigned last December, purportedly in protest over the controversial warrantless domestic eavesdropping program promulgated by the Bush administration. Roberts secretly chose Bates [...]

The US Supreme Court said Friday that it will rehear oral arguments for death penalty case Kansas v. Marsh so that Justice Samuel Alito can break a tie in the deadlocked court. The Kansas death penalty law requires that Kansas juries impose the death penalty rather than life in prison if the evidence for and [...]

The Hong Kong Law Reform Commission (HKLRC) on Friday released its proposals to embed greater safeguards in the executive order on covert surveillance operations made last year by Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen . Hong Kong High Court Justice Michael Hartmann ruled the order unconstitutional in February. The HKLRC report demands regulation of covert surveillance [...]

Abortion rights activists in South Dakota on Friday announced that they will seek a referendum that will overturn the state's newly-enacted abortion ban . The campaign , led by the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families , must collect 16,728 signatures by June 19 in order to get the issue on the November 7 ballot. [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Friday that US authorities have arrested Faheem Mousa Salam, a government contractor performing translation for Titan Corporation in Iraq, on bribery charges in Washington, DC. Salam, a naturalized US citizen, allegedly offered $60,000 to an Iraqi police official to help push a sale of 1,000 armored vests and [...]

Leading Friday's international brief, the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) in Uganda has issued a report warning that the independence of the judiciary and the freedom of the press have been seriously impinged upon in the past year. In a report documenting the activities of the government with regards to human rights issues in [...]

Fresh talks between French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and French trade union leaders over the new First Employment Contract (CPE) labor law ended in deadlock Friday with the government continuing to insist that it will not withdraw the law, although it might amend it . De Villepin appears to have the support of President [...]

American officials denied a claim Friday that they planned to release 12 high-ranking prisoners from the US detention facility at Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport . Iraqi lawyer Badia Aref had said that US officials planned to free the prisoners within two weeks, but that his client, former Iraqi Prime Minister Tariq Aziz , [...]

Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has said that he plans to replace the country's 25-year-old emergency laws with anti-terror legislation. The emergency laws, renewed every three years, are set to expire in May. They were adopted in 1981 in response to the assassination of former President Anwar Sadat , and grant the government the power [...]

Early Friday morning local time, Belarus police swept down on hundreds of demonstrators camped out in Minsk's Oktyabrskaya Square in protest against the results of last Sunday's presidential elections which returned Alexander Lukashenko to power in Belarus with 82.6 percent of the vote, according to official results . After a scuffle with a few protestors [...]