Following up on a story reported on JURIST's Paper Chase earlier today, Canadian parliamentarians late Tuesday afternoon turned back an opposition amendment to government-proposed same-sex marriage legislation that would have limited marriage to union between a man and a woman. Thirty government Liberal MPs split from their party in supporting the traditionalist amendment, but members [...]

The top religious official in Saudi Arabia has banned the practice of allowing parents to force women to marry. Sheik Abdul-Aziz al-Sheik said in a statement that coercion to marry was "un-Islamic," and that fathers who forced their daughters to marry would be imprisoned. The divorce rate in Saudi Arabia is 50 percent, and forced [...]

The nomination of John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN is expected to be approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as early as Thursday, despite intense criticism by a former State Department official during a hearing Tuesday. The key senator on the committee, RI Sen. Lincoln Chafee , said he remained inclined to [...]

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle has announced that the state will join nine others in suing the Environmental Protection Agency over a recently announced rule to reduce mercury emissions. The lawsuit, led by New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey , alleges that the rule violates the Clean Air Act because it does not regulate mercury as [...]

John Negroponte on Tuesday promised that security and intelligence agencies would not use torture in gathering intelligence under his watch as National Director of Intelligence. Negroponte faced tough questioning during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee , which continues throughout this afternoon. In response to a question of whether interrogations of suspects would [...]

The federal government has unsealed the indictment of three men charged with plotting an attack on several financial institutions in the US. The three charged were Dhirin Barot, Nadeem Tarmohamed and Qaisar Shaffi, all of the UK. The indictment accuses the three men of conducting surveillance of the New York Stock Exchange and Citicorp Building [...]

Following up on a story reported yesterday in JURIST's Paper Chase, the New York State Assembly Codes Committee Tuesday defeated a bill to reinstate New York's death penalty by a vote of 11-7. The legislation, supported by Governor George Pataki , is now effectively defeated for this year. The vote came after five days of [...]

The US Supreme Court asked for more police on Tuesday, citing recent attacks on judges and fears of terrorism. Justice Anthony Kennedy submitted a request to Congress for an additional $639,000 to pay for additional police patrols in the court's plaza and around the building. "A visible security presence is believed to be one of [...]

Topping Tuesday's international brief, leaders from the Zimbabwean opposition party Movement for Democratic Change have filed the first of nearly a dozen legal challenges to the validity of the March 31 elections in Zimbabwe . MDC Legal Affairs Minister David Coltart said that the first legal challenge had been filed Tuesday before the election court [...]

The RIAA announced Tuesday that it intends to sue hundreds of individual college students accused of illegally distributing music and movies across Internet2 , a super-fast computer network connecting universities and used for internet research. RIAA executives said it will file federal copyright lawsuits Wednesday against 405 students at 18 colleges with access to Internet2, [...]