Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff , indicted by a federal grand jury on bank fraud charges last week, will plead not guilty, according to a statement made by his lawyer Neal Sonnett Thursday. The charges allege he defrauded two lenders of $60 million to buy San Cruz Casino from Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, who was murdered in [...]

The Federal Election Commission voted 6-0 in favor of Reps. Howard Berman (D-CA) and John Doolittle (R-CA) Thursday to allow members of Congress to raise unlimited funds from unions, corporations and other donors to fight Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Proposition 77 . The redistricting initiative would place the power to draw congressional and state legislative in [...]

Sunni Arab negotiators working on Iraq's draft constitution continue to refuse to compromise their demands for a strong central government in Iraq , fearing that federalism will divide the country. While the Supreme Council for the Islam Revolution in Iraq , the largest Shiite political party, supports the creation of a federal region in Shiite-dominated [...]

The Walt Disney Company asked the nonprofit firm Verite to investigate allegations of labor abuse in factories run by its Chinese contractors, according to a statement Friday. Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) , a non-governmental, Hong Kong-based organization created by students to protect workers' rights, made the initial allegations in a report titled [...]

The Hamburg Supreme Court convicted Mounir el Motassadeq Friday of belonging to a terrorist organization and sentenced him to seven years in prison, but acquitted him of being an accessory to the murder of the over 3,000 people killed in the World Trade Center attacks. The German Supreme Court threw out his conviction on both [...]

Doe v. US, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, August 18, 2005 . Excerpt: We conclude our analysis with a few words of sympathy. Anencephaly is a horrible defect that leaves families like Doe's devastated, faced with difficult decisions and even more difficult psychological experiences. We depart from our analysis only to [...]

Court documents released Thursday revealed that the US government is arguing that Australian citizen David Hicks should face a military commission trial following an appellate court ruling from a three judge panel that included US Supreme Court nominee John Roberts . In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit [...]

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that congressional legislation that permits medical insurance for US military personnel to pay only for abortions needed to save the life of the mother was constitutional. The three judge panel from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit criticized the legislation however, as "callous and unfeeling." The [...]

The last of the publicly accessible documents authored by US Supreme Court nominee John Roberts in storage at the Reagan Library in were released simultaneously Thursday in California and Washington, DC. The thousands of pages of material complete the greater-than 50,000 pages of work product produced by Roberts while he was a junior White House [...]

David Radler, former Chicago Sun-Times publisher, Mark S. Kipnis, former lead counsel for Hollinger International , and Ravelston Corp, a private company controlled by Conrad Black were charged with five counts of federal mail fraud and two counts of federal wire fraud on Thursday. The two men and the company are part of an ongoing [...]