Members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee told senior Bush administration officials Wednesday that lack of disclosure regarding enforcement of the Patriot Act was hurting efforts to renew 15 key provisions set to expire at the end of this year. Senators noted public concerns about govermment spying prompted by insufficient information about the act, and [...]

Togo opposition presidential candidate Bob Akitani Wednesday claimed he had won the presidency of the country with 70% of the vote and called for people to resist the government a day after official results put him a distant second to ruling party candidate Faure Gnassingbe in a poll rife with claims and counterclaims of fraud [...]

Bates v. Dow Agrosciences, Supreme Court of the United States, April 26, 2005 . Excerpt: In areas of traditional state regulation, we assume that a federal statute has not supplanted state law unless Congress has made such an intention " 'clear and manifest.' " New York State Conference of Blue Cross & Blue Shield Plans [...]

Lawfulness of detentions by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Resolution 1433 (2005), Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, April 26, 2005 . Excerpt: On the basis of an extensive review of legal and factual material from these and other reliable sources, the Assembly concludes that the circumstances surrounding detentions by the USA at Guantanamo Bay [...]

President Bush Wednesday signed legislation giving legal protection to developers of technologies designed to enable viewers to "self-censor" portions of DVD movies that they deem inappropriate for viewing by others or themselves. S. 167, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act creates an exemption from current copyright law that would have allowed film producers to sue [...]

The US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in Bates v. Dow Agrosciences that a group of Texas farmers could sue a chemical company for damage caused to their crops by a weed killer. Dow had argued that federal labelling law prevented states from imposing any kind of labelling requirement apart from that mandated by the Environmental [...]

The New York Court of Appeal hears arguments Wednesday afternoon on whether the state's 50-year old statutory ban on the televising of trials is constitutional under state and federal law. New York temporarily allowed video coverage of trial proceedings for a ten year period beginning in 1987, but the authorization lapsed in 1997 and was [...]

A bill to legalize same-sex marriage in California has passed its first legislative test. The California Assembly Judiciary Committee approved it 6-3 Tuesday, clearing it to move on to another committee and, if again approved, from there to the Assembly floor. Opponents of the bill argue that it is clearly inconsistent with Proposition 22 , [...]

Nepalese police arrested former Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba Wednesday in a middle-of-the-night raid on his residence after he had refused to appear as requested before a royal commission investigating government corruption. The arrest was made four days before the scheduled end of a national state of emergency declared by King Gyanendra on February [...]

Hopes for a bipartisn resolution of the judicial filibusters issue faded Wednesday in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's rejection of a compromise advanced by Minority Leader Harry Reid that would have allowed at least two of the President's blocked judicial nominees to go forward with the understanding that current rules allowing filibusters [...]