As a panel of three federal judges heard arguments Thursday about how to redraw Texas' 23rd Congressional District without diluting minority votes in violation of the Voting Rights Act , US Circuit Judge Patrick Higginbotham said Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-TX) will likely be "the odd man out" when the lines are redrawn. Bonilla's district stretches [...]

A group of Missouri voters lacking acceptable identification under a Missouri law that requires voters to show photo IDs at the polls filed a lawsuit Thursday, claiming the law could keep people from the polls in November. Though the plaintiffs claim they are unable to cast regular ballots in the upcoming elections because of their [...]

Texas Democratic Party v. Benkiser, US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, August 3, 2006 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch, August 3, 2006 . Read the full text of the report. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Loi n° 2006-961 du 1er août 2006 relative au droit d'auteur et aux droits voisins dans la société de l'information, August 3, 2006 . Read the full text of the law. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Texas Republicans cannot remove former US House Majority Leader Tom DeLay from the November congressional ballot, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled Thursday. Tina Benkiser, chairwoman of the Texas Republican Party wanted to take DeLay's name off the ballot because he now lives in Virginia, but the [...]

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Thursday accepted the nomination of political rival Viktor Yanukovych to serve as the country's prime minister, ending weeks of speculation that Yushchenko's rejection of the nomination would prompt a constitutional crisis . Yanukovych's Party of the Regions won the most votes in March parliamentary elections, but did not secure an [...]

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley Thursday signed into law a bill establishing an innocence inquiry commission which will review appeals by inmates who claim they have been wrongly convicted. The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission is modeled after the system in the United Kingdom and is the first of its kind in the US. Inmates [...]

US-based monitoring group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Thursday that indiscriminate Israeli air and artillery strikes on Lebanese civilians cannot be systematically dismissed as accidents and called several of Israel's attacks "war crimes" in a new report . HRW has been investigating the continuing Middle East conflict by interviewing attack survivors, officials from Lebanon's government, [...]

German Chancellor Angel Merkel called the conditions in the remote Siberia prison holding former Yukos Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky "unacceptable" in a letter published Thursday, and said that the German government had called on Russia to respect international rights standards. Merkel made the comments in response to a call by Germany's opposition Free Democrats [...]