A Florida jury Monday ordered Morgan Stanley to pay $604 million in damages to billionaire investor Ronald Perelman after finding that he relied on the company when it advised him to sell his 82-percent stake in camping goods company Coleman for cash and stock in appliance company Sunbeam. An accounting fraud scandal that led to [...]

Russian oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky was found guilty of all seven charges of tax evasion, fraud and embezzlementafter the Moscow court on Tuesday finished reading the verdict it began announcing on Monday . The court will rule Wednesday on another charge relating to alleged theft of a 20-percent stake in a fertilizer plant that the [...]

A United Nations-appointed committee investigating the UN oil-for-food program has won the right to inspect internal documents a former investigator turned over to the US Congress. Robert Parton resigned last month from the Independent Inquiry Committee because he felt the UN investigation wasn't tough enough. The House had subpoenaed the documents for their own investigation [...]

The chief federal prosecutor in a terrorism case marred by prosecutorial misconduct resigned on Monday. Richard Convertino won convictions against four terrorism suspects in Detroit in 2003, but the government later had them tossed out because possibly-valuable defense information was not turned over by the prosecutors as required. Convertino later sued then-Attorney General John Ashcroft [...]

At the United Nations, Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan introduced a draft resolution Monday to expand the UN Security Council from 15 to 25 countries and give themselves permanent seats. Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed changes to the Council in March and member nations have different ideas on how the body should be reformed. Italy recently [...]

Report on oil allocations granted to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Comittee, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, May 16, 2005 . Excerpt: This Report presents the evidence gathered by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (the "Subcommittee") establishing that Russian official Vladimir Zhirinovsky was granted lucrative allocations of oil from the [...]

AP is reporting that a military jury empaneled for the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse trial of Spc. Sabrina Harman has convicted her on six of seven counts. AP has more on Monday's closing defense arguments in her case at Fort Hood, Texas, which began last Thursday. 9:57 PM ET – Reuters now has more on [...]

Granholm, et al. v. Heald, et al., Supreme Court of the United States, May 16, 2005 . Excerpt from the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy: We hold that the laws in both States discriminate against interstate commerce in violation of the Commerce Clause, Art. I, §8, cl. 3, and that the discrimination is neither authorized [...]

AP is reporting that Newsweek magazine has officially retracted its May 9 story that US personnel at Guantanamo had desecrated the Koran. Editors at the magazine began publicly backtracking from the story Sunday night after a source said he could no longer be certain that he had read of any such actions in Pentagon documents; [...]

Database giant Oracle has agreed to pay $8 million to settle a dispute over claims that the company fraudulently billed the US government for software training from 1997 through 2003. Former Oracle employee Robert J. Makheja, who claimed he was fired after challenging the company's billing practices, will receive $1.58 million in the settlement. The [...]