Leading Wednesday's environmental law news, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that it has initiated a status review of the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) to determine whether it should be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act . If listed, federal agencies would have to factor in the health of the species [...]

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has backed off his pledge to push through legislation that would allow women to succeed to the royal throne for the first time since the 1700's. The bill – first proposed because not a single male has been born in the royal family for over 40 years – was supported [...]

French Judge Fabrice Burgaud told a parliamentary inquiry Wednesday that he had not acted incorrectly when investigating pedophilia charges in the French town of Outreau. Thirteen people were wrongly convicted of pedophilia and spent 16-39 months in jail before all the convictions were finally overturned late last year after the accuser admitted that her accusations [...]

The World Trade Organization has made a preliminary ruling that European Union restrictions on genetically engineered crops violate international trade rules. The United States, Canada, Argentina – which together grow 80 percent of all biotech crops sold commercially – challenged the process by which the EU regulates such crops. The countries argued that the EU's [...]

US Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence has called for a complete review of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) , which governs the monitoring of phone calls within the United States for national security reasons, so that proper congressional oversight may be given to the [...]

The Italian Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would increase the number of women elected to parliament. If the bill becomes law, it would require that females make up one third of all national election candidates. Women currently make up only ten percent of the legislature in Italy, one of the lowest percentages in the [...]

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights has said that it will conduct its own investigation into the sinking of a ferry carrying 1,400 Egyptians in the Red Sea earlier this month. Another Egyptian NGO, the Civil Observatory for Human Rights, has meanwhile called for a greater degree of transparency in the official government probe. There [...]

The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) has filed two federal lawsuits challenging laws in Maryland and Suffolk County, New York designed to push large retail stores such as Wal-Mart to spend more money on employee health care. The Maryland law requires companies with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8 percent on employee [...]

Lawyers for naturalized American citizen Shawqi Ahmad Omar, who has been detained in Iraq for over a year, have asked a federal judge to intervene in the case and prevent Omar's transfer to Iraqi custody. US Justice Department officials say that Omar, who they believe is a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi , was [...]

British pharmaceutical company Chiron has announced that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ended its investigation of the company, which was related to Chiron's failure to supply sufficient flu vaccines in October 2004. The inability to deliver an adequate vaccine supply was due to UK regulators shutting down a Chiron-run vaccine manufacturing facility [...]