The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) , Britain's police watchdog agency, promised Tuesday to release a report on the death of Brazilian citizen Jean Charles de Menezes by the end of the year. De Menezes was killed by police on the London subway on July 22 after being mistaken for a suicide bomber. Richard Latham, [...]

A Tokyo court has ruled that a contest by Japanese soldiers in 1937 to behead Chinese soldiers did occur, and was not fabricated by the media, as claimed by families of the Japanese soldiers concerned. Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun ran a story in 1937 detailing a game between two army lieutenants, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi [...]

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin has signed legislation banning verbal panhandling in popular downtown tourist destinations, including the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site . The ordinance bans "commercial solicitation" and all verbal requests for money or other valuables in a public place "under circumstances where a reasonable person would understand that the purchase is [...]

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo used her majority in Congress Tuesday to frustrate opposition attempts to impeach her. The opposition is attempting to consolidate three separate impeachment complaints to one strong case, while the majority has pushed to eliminate all but one weak charge. The complaints center on the rigging of last year's presidential election, [...]

Humam Hammoudi, head of Iraq's constitutional drafting committee , told reporters Tuesday that it was unlikely that the three additional days provided by the National Assembly to settle differences over the charter would be sufficient to solve all the outstanding issues in the proposed draft . The committee deferred a vote on the draft Monday [...]

Suicide and Homicide in State Prison and Local Jails, US Department of Justice, August 22, 2005 . Excerpt: Over the past two decades, State prison and local jail inmate mortality rates have displayed some dynamic changes. Suicide was the leading cause of death among jail inmates in 1983 (129 per 100,000 inmates); by 1993 that [...]

Leading Monday's corporations and securities law news, the Financial Times is reporting that the US Department of Justice is nearing a settlement with Big Four accounting firm KPMG . KPMG has been under investigation for its creation and marketing of illegal tax shelters and in June, KPMG publicly accepted responsibility for the illegal actions of [...]

The US military announced Monday that three more detainees from Iran, Yemen and Tajikistan respectively have been released from the US terror suspect detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and sent home to their own countries. US Defense Department Combatant Status Review Tribunals had found the Yemeni and Tajik prisoners improperly classed as "enemy combatants" posing [...]

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Leading Monday's states brief, the California Supreme Court today extended child support laws and custody rights to estranged gay and lesbian couples who used reproductive science to conceive by ruling that same-sex couples who raise children are the lawful parents and must provide for the children after a break up. The legal director of the [...]