Irish President Mary McAleese signed an emergency bill into law Friday authorizing jail sentences for persons convicted of for having sex with minors, but allowing them to use mistake of age as a defense. The bill was hurriedly passed through the Irish Parliament after the Irish Supreme Court last week ruled a 1935 statutory rape [...]

US District Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled Friday that most of the government documents sought by former Vice-Presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and his defense team were not closely tied to the narrow issue of his case and would not be released to him. Libby has pleaded not guilty to obstruction of justice and [...]

Adnan al-Kazimi, an aide to new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki , said Saturday that the Iraqi government would open its own investigation into the deaths of Iraq civilians in Ishaqi after an official statement by a US military spokesman Saturday cleared US troops from all wrongdoing in the deaths. Kazimi told Reuters, "We have [...]

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Friday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must examine the risk of a terrorist attack when it considers the environmental effect of a proposed expansion project at California's Diablo Canyon Power Plant . The Commission had found that the possibility of a [...]

Judge Robert W. Pratt, chief judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, ruled Friday that a religious prison organization receiving government funds violated the US Constitution because it was used to rehabilitate prison inmates by advocating the tenets of Christianity. He found that inmates who voluntarily entered the program benefited [...]

Cameron Frazier v. Cynthia Alexandre, United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Judge Kenneth L. Ryskamp, May 31, 2006 . Read the full text of the Order . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Dr. Wen Ho Lee , the US nuclear scientist at one time suspected of stealing nuclear secrets for China, Friday settled a civil lawsuit he had brought against the US Department of Justice and the Department of Energy alleging they leaked false and misleading information about him to reporters, contrary to the Privacy Act . [...]

A federal judge on Friday approved a $153 million settlement between tax firm KPMG and 200 of its former clients in a class action lawsuit based on illegal tax shelters sold by the firm from 1996 to 2002 which were categorized as abusive by the IRS . The settlement, preliminarily approved by US District Court [...]

Canadian Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday that he will ask MPs to vote this fall on a federal law permitting same-sex marriage . The Liberal Party of former prime minister Paul Martin, which now controls only 103 of 308 seats in the House of Commons, passed the bill last summer, making Canada [...]

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Friday sentenced Joseph Serugendo to six years in prison for direct and public incitement to commit genocide and persecution as a crime against humanity under a plea agreement where the ICTR dropped the more serious charges of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and complicity to commit genocide [...]