The Austrian Justice Ministry has dropped its case against a former Nazi psychiatrist accused of killing children at a Vienna clinic after he was ruled unfit for trial. The government said Wednesday that Heinrich Gross, 89, suffers from dementia and could not stand trial. Gross worked at a children's clinic in Austria where 789 children [...]

Leading Thursday's corporations and securities law news, Adelphia Communications Corp. is reportedly close to settling claims made by the US Department of Justice and the SEC related to the massive accounting and management scandal at the company. Adelphia will pay about $725 million making it one of the largest penalties paid in recent years. The [...]

A French appeals court on Thursday affirmed a 2002 conviction of investor George Soros for insider trading, including a $2.9 million penalty. The court ruled that Soros' 1988 purchase of French bank Societe Generale SA stock with knowledge that the bank might be the object of a takeover bid broke insider trading laws. Soros has [...]

A United Nations report on peacekeeper sex abuse released Thursday has described its military arm as deeply flawed. The report, authored by Prince Zeid al Hussein, Jordan's UN ambassador, was issued as a response to repeated allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in missions ranging from Bosnia and Kosovo to West Africa and Congo. [...]

Canadian citizens may be subjected to expanded "control measures" such as house arrests currently being developed for use against immigrant terror suspects, Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler has said. The proposed detention rules are meant to expand authorities' options in dealing with immigrants arrested on suspicion of terrorism other than jailing them. However, Cotler said [...]

Itar-Tass is reporting that the Kyrgyz Supreme Court has invalidated disputed parliamentary elections. Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev had been flown to Russia and his family had been taken to Kazakhstan just hours after protestors, demanding Akayev's resignation after allegations of fraud, stormed the presidential compound. Court chairman Kurmanbek Osmonov is quoted as saying that the [...]

AP is reporting that the US Supreme Court has just refused to issue an emergency stay in the Schiavo case, and will not order re-insertion of her feeding tube. From DC, SCOTUSblog reports that the order reads: "The application for a stay of enforcement of judgment pending the filing and disposition of a petition for [...]

Hong Kong democratic legislator Albert Chan announced Thursday that he will head a legal challenge against the government's plan to shorten the term of the territory's next chief executive from five years to two. In the wake of the March 10 resignation of chief executive Tung Chee-hwa , the Beijing-backed Hong Kong government says that [...]

Former Macedonian interior minister Ljube Boskovski surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague Thursday after being charged with war crimes committed against ethnic Albanians. Boskovski, who had been in prison for charges relating to the murder of seven immigrants while he was the interior minister in 2002, was [...]

The United Nations has admitted it erred Tuesday when it said the reason it would pay the legal fees of the Iraq oil-for-food program chief Benon Sevan was because of the importance an independent investigatory body placed on his cooperation in the investigation of the program. The UN corrected its error after former Federal Reserve [...]