Jordan's King Abdullah II has urged the Jordanian parliament to quickly approve new anti-terrorism legislation, drafted two weeks ago in the wake of last month's hotel bombing that left 57 people dead. During the Thursday opening of the third parliamentary session since 2003 elections, King Abdullah II said that "we do realize that Jordan's location, [...]

Convicted drug trafficker and Australian citizen Van Tuong Nguyen was executed by Singapore Thursday, despite a strong plea for clemency submitted by the Australian government to the president of Singapore. Nguyen was caught with 14 ounces of heroin at Singapore's Changi Airport in 2002, a crime invoking a mandatory death sentence under the Misuse of [...]

Conrad Black , press baron and former chairman of Hollinger International, pleaded not guilty to eight fraud charges during his arraignment in Chicago Thursday. Along with other former Hollinger executives, he is accused by the US government of diverting more than $80 million from Hollinger International and its shareholders during Hollinger's $2.1 billion sale of [...]

Leading Thursday's environmental law news, James Hardie Industries signed an agreement Thursday with the government of New South Wales to pay $4.5 billion to compensate Australian asbestos victims. Hardie, a building products company, will make payments capped at no more than 35 percent of the company's cash flow in any year into a compensation fund [...]

The Bush Administration Thursday asked the US DC Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the US Defense Department's mandatory anthrax vaccination program . The anthrax vaccine is currently labeled for use by individuals who are at high risk for exposure to the disease; however, the Bush Administration argued that that definition is broad enough to [...]

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias al-Murr announced Thursday that Lebanon will ask the UN Security Council to extend for another six months its investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri . UN chief investigator Detlev Mehlis was scheduled to deliver his final report on the investigation on December 12, after which he [...]

New trials have begun in Uzbekistan for fifty-eight people charged with terrorism, religious extremism and other serious crimes stemming from the death of as many as 1,000 villagers in the Uzbek city of Andijan, the country's Supreme Court announced in a statement Thursday. This second round of trials follows the government's successful prosecution of 15 [...]

Members of the European Parliament on Thursday criticized EU leaders for failing to push the United States on recent reports of a secret network of CIA prisons in Europe used to hold suspected terrorists. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has, on behalf of the EU, written to Washington seeking clarification on the alleged prison system, [...]

The Connecticut General Assembly passed a tough new campaign finance law Thursday that strictly limits campaign contributions for all state offices and creates a public campaign finance system. Once enacted, the bill will ban political contributions from lobbyists, their spouses, and state contractors, limit contributions of political action committees, and close a loophole that previously [...]

Samsung , the world's largest maker of computer memory chips, has pleaded guilty to criminal antitrust charges and was ordered pay a $300 million fine, the second largest fine in a criminal antitrust case, for conspiring to fix the price of its personal computer chips. The South Korean-based company was charged with artificially inflating the [...]