Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker , whose country currently holds the EU Presidency , said Thursday that EU leaders have decided to extend the ratification deadline for the proposed European constitution until at least 2007. The announcement came after the first day of an EU "crisis summit" forced to address the treaty's future in the [...]

Leading Thursday's securities and corporations law news, "Big Four" accounting firm KPMG has apologized for creating illegal tax shelters. The firm vowed to clean up its practices and culture. The apology is part of an effort by KPMG to avoid the type of criminal prosecution that seriously damaged rival firm Arthur Andersen. Read the KMPG [...]

A father and son were indicted by a federal grand jury in California Thursday for allegedly lying to the FBI about the son attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan with connections to al-Qaida. Umer Hayat and his son Hamid Hayat were arrested and charged last Wednesday after the father admitted he paid for his [...]

Leading Thursday's states brief, the Supreme Court of Georgia has warned criminal trial judges to be careful in the way they instruct juries about weighing the value of eyewitness identification. In a decision today, the Court said "We can no longer endorse an instruction authorizing jurors to consider the witness's certainty in his/her identification as [...]

Chechen rebel leader Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev ordered the murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov according to a report released Thursday by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office. Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, was shot to death in Moscow last July . He had written a book in which he referred to Nukhayev as a [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Thursday that police at roadside DUI checkpoints do not have to inform suspects of their right to legal counsel before asking them whether or not they had been drinking or requesting them to perform sobriety tests. In accordance with Canadian criminal procedure, the court ordered new trials for two [...]

Leading Thursday's international brief, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights have filed an official appeal with the African Commission for Human and Peoples' Rights , the regional human rights body in Africa, to intervene in the continuing mass evictions authorized by Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and prevent further evictions and the destruction of informal traders' places [...]

The commander of Dutch UN troops in Srebrenica in 1995 told a preliminary hearing at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Thursday that he did not know Serbian forces had begun killing Muslim men and boys until it was too late. Ton Karremans said that initally his orders had been to protect refugees [...]

Chief lawyer to Saddam Hussein Ziad Khasawneh Thursday accused the Iraqi Special Tribunal and the US government of purposely ignoring repeated requests for legal documents and effectively keeping defense counsel unaware of the trial timetable. Khasawneh, a Jordanian and head of the Committee for the Defense of Saddam Hussein, said in an interview that he [...]

British millionaire Friedhelm Eronat has been awarded oil rights for the Darfur region of Sudan , an area where the Sudanese government has been accused of war crimes and mass murders. Human rights groups like Global Witness are outraged that anyone is doing business with Sudan's government before a peace settlement has been reached. Eronat, [...]