Military prosecutors late Thursday dropped adultery and obstruction of justice charges against US Army Spc. Charles Graner on the eve of Friday's start of jury selection in his court-martial trial in connection with abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. In photos that precipitated an international scandal when they were released early [...]

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania; official website here) said Friday that he expected White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to be approved by his Committee and confirmed in the wake of Thursday's seven-hour hearing on his nomination for the post of US Attorney General. As reported yesterday in JURIST's Paper Chase, Gonzales was subjected [...]

Israeli authorities Friday arrested independent Palestinian presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouti, a distant relative of imprisoned militant and withdrawn presidential contender Marwan Barghouti, as he tried to attend prayers at the El Aksa Mosque in East Jerusalem. He was later taken a checkpoint outside the city limits and released. Mustafa Braghouti is one of seven candidates [...]

John Bolton (official biography here), the US Under-Secretary of State who led the US campaign against the establishment of the International Criminal Court (see a representative speech by Bolton here) and later helped negotiate a series of controversial bilateral agreements with countries around the world that would exempt American personnel from its jurisdiction, is planning [...]

An alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan was arrested in Mississippi Thursday after being indicted by a grand jury for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers that later inspired the movie "Mississippi Burning". The accused, Edgar Ray Killen is a now-80 year-old Baptist minister and one of eighteen individuals who stood trial [...]

The Washingston state governor's race went back to court Thursday as voters filed two challenges to the recount results which gave Democratic Christine Gregoire a victory over Republican Dino Rossi by a margin of 129 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast (official recount results from the WA Secretary of State here). The state Republican [...]

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 [...]