The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the 527 Reform Act of 2006 , legislation that would require non-profit political groups, called "527s" for the tax code section under which they are organized, to register as political committees and follow campaign finance rules . 527 groups currently are not subject to the same soft-money [...]

The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a criminal investigation into management by British Petroleum of oil pipelines in Alaska, according to a report in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. A corroded pipeline owned by the company spilled an estimated 134,000 to 267,000 gallons of crude oil in March, the largest spill ever in Alaskan history . [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Bill Hing of UC Davis School of Law says that immigration legislation now being debated in Congress presents lawmakers with a moral choice, and that in its own economic, social, and national security interests it's time for the United States to do the right thing… If anti-immigrant forces in Congress have their [...]

A New Jersey state court jury on Wednesday rendered a split verdict after two days of deliberations in a joint trial that pitted two state residents who took the painkiller Vioxx against New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant Merck . The jury found that Merck did not warn either of the men of potential dangers of heart [...]

US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled in Alexandria, Virginia, Wednesday that jurors in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui will be allowed to hear the cockpit tape and read the transcript of United Airlines Flight 93 , hijacked and downed in Pennsylvania on September 11 . Brinkema suggested that the recording, which has so [...]

The Belarus government has charged close to 600 people who participated in the protests that followed the March 19 presidential election that returned incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko to a third term in a landslide, according to Belarus prosecutor general Pyotr Miklashevich on Wednesday. Last week, Miklashevich indicated that there would be trials for the protesters [...]

French judicial officials have begun an investigation of the 172 French companies implicated in the UN oil-for-food scandal by the October 2005 report of the UN Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) chaired by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. French magistrate Philippe Courroye, who has been probing French involvement in the scandal for three years, [...]

Unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States before an as-yet-undetermined cutoff date would be allowed to apply for permanent residency provided they pay fines and back taxes and learn English under the latest alternative immigration reform proposal advanced by a group of conservative senators Wednesday. Under the plan, those who had been in the [...]

French union leaders said Wednesday that there is only one "plausible response likely to end the conflict" over the controversial First Employment Contract (contrat premiere embauche, CPE) and gave French President Jacques Chirac until April 15 to withdraw the law, which allows workers under 26 years old to be fired without cause during the first [...]

Nineteen-year-old Canadian Omar Khadr refused to take part in military commission proceedings during a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Bay Wednesday, claiming that he was mistreated and sent to solitary confinement for no reason. Khadr currently faces charges of murder and conspiracy to commit war crimes stemming from a 2002 incident in Afghanistan where he allegedly [...]