A Texas jury Wednesday found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity of drowning her five children in 2001. Yates will now be committed to a Texas mental hospital and will undergo periodic hearings to determine whether she will be eligible for release. Yates' attorney argued that she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis , [...]

US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox suggested that Congress may need to permit increased SEC oversight over hedge funds to protect retail investors and prevent fraud, during a hearing held by the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday. Cox lamented a June decision by a federal appeals court to invalidate the SEC hedge fund rule [...]

Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock Wednesday called on Australian states to ban books inciting terrorism in the wake of a recent Australian Classification Review Board (CRB) decision to ban two Islamic books that allegedly incited terror while allowing five others to circulate. An incitement ban would require changing the current legal test for prohibition, which goes [...]

US Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said Tuesday that arrests of people trying to cross the border illegally have dropped by 45 percent in the two months since President Bush announced a plan to send 6,000 National Guard troops to aid in border security along the Mexican border. Aguilar said that increased resources and personnel, [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit granted an administrative injunction Wednesday in the case of US Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) , preventing FBI review of documents seized from Jefferson's congressional offices until after the court rules on the merits of Jefferson's appeal. Jefferson is appealing a district court ruling finding the search [...]

CIA Director Michael Hayden on Wednesday spoke against requiring the US government to show probable cause to obtain warrants to wiretap domestic conversations thought to involve al-Qaeda affiliates during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on adapting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to the threat of terrorism. Hayden argued that while FISA was appropriate for [...]

Missouri's revised plan for conducting executions by lethal injection fails to ensure that executions do not cause unconstitutional pain and suffering, according to US District Judge Fernando Gaitan , who halted all executions in the state in June . Gaitan wrote on Tuesday that the proposal was an improvement over existing procedures but still did [...]

The Washington Supreme Court ruled Wednesday morning that a statute prohibiting same-sex marriage does not violate the state Constitution. The Supreme Court reversed a 2004 Superior Court ruling that the state's 1998 Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional because it was "not rationally related to any legitimate or compelling state interest and is certainly not [...]

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled 7-0 Wednesday that a Cincinnati suburb may not use eminent domain to take private property on the sole basis of economic benefit to the community. Several residents of Norwood held out on selling their homes to make way for a $125 million commercial development, and after a consulting firm found [...]

Israel has denied using banned cluster munitions in Lebanon. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using the cluster grenades in an attack on a Hezbollah village in South Lebanon last week. Israeli Ambassador to Moscow Arkady Milman called told Russian media that "reports of the Israeli army using cluster munitions is an obvious [...]