The US Senate and House of Representatives Thursday rapidly approved a bill that would give a tax break to donors to tsunami relief efforts by allowing them to claim deductions in the 2004 tax year for donations made prior to January 31, 2005. The measure is designed to encourage fund-raising to help victims of the [...]

Jack Balkin, Yale Law School: "The hearings on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General of the United States have begun. Will no one in Congress say what should be obvious? That Gonzales has brought shame on our country by trying to devise legal strategies and arguments to circumvent laws against torture and [...]

Kenneth Anderson, Washington College of Law, American University: "I have caught just bits and pieces of the Gonzales confirmation hearings for Attorney General today. In general, he does not seem to have faced especially bitter attack – on the contrary, I thought the Democrats appeared to be pulling their punches, at least in the bits [...]

Two law deans, one a former Navy Judge Advocate General and the other a former senior State Department official in the Clinton administration, testified late Thursday at Senate confirmation hearings for US Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales that the permissive approach to torture and the concomitantly narrow approach to the Geneva Conventions adopted by the [...]

Transcript from the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be US Attorney General, January 6, 2005. Read the transcript text from the Washington Post here.

Military lawyers for an Australian detainee held at Guantanamo Bay Cuba have said in court papers that their client, originally detained by the US in Pakistan in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, was later tranfered to US authorities in Egypt who subjected him to torture by beating, electric shock, and near-drowning. Mamdouh [...]

Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales faced almost six hours of Senate grilling Thursday during his portion of a day-long confirmation hearing that was by turns effusive, gruff, and scathing. Democratic Senators challenged the nominee on his handling of a wide range of legal issues as White House Counsel and counsel to then-Texas governor George W. [...]

A US bankruptcy judge in Texas Thursday set February 16 as the start date for two days of oral arguments on the dismissal of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing made in December by Russian oil firm Yukos in a last-ditch bid to avoid Russian government auction of its assets to satisfy unpaid tax bills. Russian [...]

In a highly unusual move, ten former WorldCom (now MCI) directors have agreed to pay $18 million of a $54 million class-action settlement from their own pockets. The agreement is part of a settlement reached Wednesday with plaintiffs led by the New York State Common Retirement Fund who lost billions in the accounting fraud scandal [...]

UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland Thursday appealed to warring groups in the tsunami affected areas of South Asia to respect ceasefires, suspend their conflicts and stop reported acts of "banditry" that in a few instances he said have involved violence, attempted kidnapping and the hijacking of relief assets. Egeland observed that the [...]