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, [...]

Conservatives in the Canadian parliament plan to introduce an amendment Tuesday to scrap Bill C-38 , which establishes the Civil Marriage Act and allows for same-sex unions. Federal Liberals believe they will have enough votes to block the amendment. Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper argued that the proposed legislation "fails to define marriage as the [...]

Leading Tuesday's corporations and securities law news, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that 20 former NYSE traders who oversaw stock auctions were indicted on charges they traded stocks which benefited their firms at the expense of their customers. Read the NYSE press release. Read the SEC press release and administrative proceeding release . The [...]

A federal judge in Alabama indicated Tuesday that she would throw out three perjury counts against former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy , but that she would allow his trial to proceed on additional charges. District Judge Karon Bowdre indicated that she would grant a defense motion to bar jurors from hearing evidence about Scrushy's sworn [...]

Iran's judiciary Tuesday rejected Canada's demands that the remains of a Iranian-Canadian photographer who died in detention in Tehran be returned to Canada. Officials in Ottawa demanded last week that Iran return the body of Zahra Kazemi , who died in custody in July 2003, so that an autopsy could be performed to investigate allegations [...]

Data services group LexisNexis said Tuesday that personal information of 310,000 US citizens may have been stolen, significantly more than the 30,000 announced in March. An investigation by parent company Reed Elsevier found that company databases had been breached 59 times with stolen passwords, with personal information including social security numbers and addresses possibly stolen. [...]