Speaking at the annual conference of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) in London Thursday, US Congressman Michael Oxley (R-OH) said that the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation was "rushed" and includes "excessive" corporate reforms. The legislation sponsored in 2002 by Oxley and Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) came in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom financial scandals [...]

UN Special Representative for Sudan Jan Pronk said Thursday that bandits in the Darfur region of Sudan have been stealing food and terrorizing and killing workers bringing supplies into the region. Pronk also said a group of bandits attacked offices of the UN and an international nongovernmental organization last Saturday night but failed to take [...]

Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu said Thursday that he and his Cabinet will resign after the country's Constitutional Court ruled Wednesday that rejected reforms to the justice system designed to facilitate Romania's entry to the European Union (EU) . The EU had mandated the reforms to create an "independent, impartial and efficient" justice system [...]

Leading Thursday's corporations and securities law news, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer will retry ex-Bank of America broker Theodore Sihpol. Sihpol was acquitted on 29 counts of fraud-related charges last month , but the jury deadlocked on 4 counts and the judge declared a partial mistrial, leaving Spitzer the choice to retry those 4 [...]

Leading Thursday's states brief, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled today that interrogations of juvenile prisoners must be electronically recorded. In reversing a 2003 Court of Appeals decision the court stated that recording the interrogations by videotape or audio record will prevent disputes about police misconduct and provide an accurate record of the interrogation. The court [...]

An intellectual property infringement lawsuit by SCO Group against IBM will not go to trial until February 26, 2007, over two years later than originally scheduled. US District Judge Dale Kimball rescheduled the trial Thursday to allow the two sides to work through what is anticipated to be a lengthy discovery period. Judge Kimball also [...]

Hassan al-Turabi , a Sudanese Islamist leader freed last week after a 15-month detention in connection with an alleged coup plot, has spoke out against the country's Sudan's new constitution . He called the committee that drafted the constitution "not representative" of the people and complained that members of the current legislature were either appointed [...]

Military judge Col. James Pohl has declined a request by lawyers for US Army Pfc. Lynndie England to step down from her Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse case. Defense lawyers claimed that Pohl asked inappropriate questions while presiding over the first trial, which ended in a mistrial as the answers contradicted statements from England. Pohl rejected [...]

Bearing in mind the experience of Muslims in the United States after 9/11, the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission has urged UK Muslims to stay indoors to avoid being targeted for revenge in the wake of Thursday's terrorist bombings in London which have been tentatively linked to al-Qaida. IHRC chairman Massoud Shadjareh said The Islamic [...]

Leading Senate Democrats said Thursday that although they appreciate the phone calls from the Bush administration following the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor , they want to know exactly who President Bush is considering as a replacement before he submits a nomination to the Senate. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) stated, "To be meaningful, consultation [...]