[JURIST] Ukraine's Supreme Court has voided as unconstitutional part of the electoral reform package approved earlier this month by the Ukrainian parliament, just one day before the country re-runs its presidential election, the results of which were voided by the high court on grounds of fraud. This time the court struck down a provision limiting voting from home, which had been challenged by supporters of Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych as discriminating against the disabled and housebound. The International Labor Organization estimates that Ukraine's disabled population runs to approximately 8 million, or 14% of the population, a rate twice that of other industralized countries due to injuries from coal-mining (largely in eastern Ukraine, Yanukovych's base), the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Chernobyl nuclar disaster. From Ukraine, the Kyiv Post has more; Kyiv Channnel 5 TV has additional coverage in Ukrainian.

[JURIST] In a major course-reversal, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (official website here), now a candidate for state governor in 2006, has said that he is ready to turn high-profile investigations of wrongdoing by investment banks, mutual funds and insurance companies over to federal regulators, suggesting that state-led crusades balkanize corporate regulation, and that federal agencies have lately become sufficiently aggressive to take the lead. Saturday's New York Times has more.

12/26/04 9:52 AM ET - In a statement criticizing the NYT article Saturday, Spitzer said he did not intend to turn over any existing inquiries to fderal regulators, and that his comments were limited to investigations with which his department was not already actively involved. Sunday's Times has more here.