The US House of Representatives voted 247-172 Thursday to pass the Legislative Line-Item Veto Act of 2006 . The bill, which President Bush proposed in March, allows the President to strip special spending and earmarks out of a bill, and then send those provisions back to Congress for an up or down majority vote, rather [...]

Led by Republicans willing to delay a push to abolish the estate tax completely, the US House of Representatives voted Thursday to end taxation for single estates up to $5 million and married couples' estates up to $10 million, beginning in 2011. The bill would reduce tax rates on even larger estates as well, costing [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour Thursday announced the entry into force of an Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on detention visitations. The Optional Protocol, adopted in December 2002 by the UN General Assembly, was signed in May by Honduras and Bolivia, [...]

Thailand's Election Commission (EC) has determined that the ruling Thai Rak Thai political party broke two election laws by paying groups to run candidates in the annulled April parliamentary elections in order to meet election requirements after the main opposition parties boycotted the vote, an Attorney General spokesperson told AFP Thursday. The EC ruled that [...]

If allowed to proceed, a lawsuit filed by an Oregon nonprofit organization challenging the NSA domestic surveillance program would impermissibly reveal state secrets, lawyers for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) argued at a Wednesday hearing in federal court. The DOJ filed a notice Monday with the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) seeking to [...]

The US Senate Indian Affairs Committee led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) released its final report Thursday, saying that the connections between former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Tom Delay aide Michael Scanlon in a scandal collecting millions of dollars from Indian tribes were "astonishing." The report added that tribes should beef up their own [...]

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told an Austrian radio station Thursday that European countries could help bring about the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center by accepting some detainees into their judicial and penitentiary systems. Nowak has previously called on the US to close Guantanamo Bay due to documented human rights violations [...]

No evidence has surfaced to disprove the extraordinary rendition allegations of the German man who sued the US Central Intelligence Agency, a German prosecutor familiar with the evidence collected by the German government in the case said Thursday. Khalid El-Masri has said he was kidnapped in Macedonia in 2003 in an instance of extraordinary rendition [...]

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the "fair report" privilege , a legal protection that allows journalists to report on legal allegations made during official proceedings, even if the allegations are false. Solaia Technology sued Specialty Publishing for defamation after Specialty's subsidiary Start Magazine (now Start-it Magazine) ran an article on a patent infringement [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said that Uzbekistan is cracking down on dissent under the pretext of law, alleging Wednesday that two human rights defenders sentenced to nine years in prison on extortion charges were arrested in a pattern of criminal arrests designed to stifle dissent. Eleven human rights defenders have been convicted so far [...]