[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled [PDF text] Wednesday that Duke Energy's challenged construction practices did not violate the Clean Air Act's New Source Rules [EPA overview]. The government and several organizations, including the Sierra Club [official website] and Environmental Defense [official website], had sued Duke Energy [press release], one of the nation's largest electric utilities, alleging that the company violated EPA rules when it failed to implement measures to protect against pollution during construction projects. The court held that the EPA regulations did not apply to Duke’s activities because the new construction resulted in the plant operating for more hours each year, not an increase in hourly rate of emissions as required under the rules. AP has more.

[JURIST] After a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit in Cairo, International Criminal Court [official website] prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo told reporters Wednesday that the court will support Sudan in any genuine effort to prosecute suspects in the Darfur uprising. The Sudanese government announced the creation of a domestic tribunal [JURIST report] last week, with proceedings scheduled to begin Tuesday, later delayed until Wednesday [JURIST report]. The delay fueled many skeptics, including Amnesty International [press release], who say the nation is not capable of conducting proper investigations of the alleged war crimes. Surrounding nations, including Egypt, support a domestic investigation into the Darfur crimes. Egyptian Foreign Minister Gheit has expressed his country's support of the tribunal and the peace process in the region. AFP has more.

[JURIST] Leading Wednesday's corporations and securities law news, Bristol-Myers Squib [corporate website] has reached a $300 million settlement with the federal government over securities fraud. US Attorney for the district of New Jersey Christopher Christie [official profile] announced the settlement today, and also announced that two former employees, former Chief Financial Officer Frederick Schiff and the former head of Bristol-Myers medicine division Richard Lane, had been indicted on securities fraud charges. Read the Bristol-Myers Squib press release. The US DOJ press release is also available. Bloomberg has more.

In other corporations and securities law news...

• The European Union [official website] has fined UK pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca [corporate website] $73 million for anticompetitive practices. The EU says, in part, that AstraZeneca mislead regulators in order to extend patents on profitable drugs. AstraZeneca plans to appeal the fine. See the EU press release, and a statement from AstraZeneca. AP has more.
  
  
• As reported earlier in JURIST's states brief, spyware producer Eliot Spitzer [Wikipedia profile] had brought a lawsuit against the Los Angeles based company alleging it had secretly installed spyware programs on millions of computers. In addition to the fine, Intermix agreed to stop producing spyware software. See the Intermix press release. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] Despite the looming threat of a Presidential veto [Reuters report], the US House of Representatives voted 238-187 [roll call] late Wednesday to approve the so-called Sanders Freedom to Read Amendment limiting a section of the USA Patriot Act [text] giving the FBI and Justice Department power to search public library records and book store sales without a search warrant. Supporters of the Patriot Act provision [ACLU FAQ] contended that ready access to the reading habits of terror suspects would be valuable to investigators. Opponents expressed concern about infringement on privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment. The Sanders Amendment was intoduced by Vermont Independent congressman Bernie Saunders; read his press release on the amendment's passage. The America Library Association provides background information about reader privacy issues and the Patriot Act. AP has more. A previous version of the Sanders Amendment failed in the House last year when the body split 210-210 after a similar veto threat [GCN report].

[JURIST] Leading Wednesday's states brief, the Connecticut Supreme Court [official website] ruled today that the town of Greenwich must release its computer database of aerial photographs and maps to the public. The Supreme Court rejected the town's argument that the records were exempt from public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act because the release of detailed information about the town's infrastructure, schools and homes could lead to security breaches and privacy invasions. In its opinion [PDF text], the court said "Such generalized claims of a possible safety risk do not satisfy the plaintiff's burden of proving the applicability of an exemption from disclosure under the act." AP has more.

In other state legal news ...

• Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack [official website] has signed into law [press release] what he calls the "toughest sex offender bill in the country." The bill [text] doubles the maximum prison sentence for a lascivious act with a child to ten years, sets the sentence for a second sex abuse conviction at life in prison without parole and requires all sex offenders to be supervised after their release from prison, with offenders who committed a felony being supervised for life. The bill also calls for an update of the state's sex offender registry and the building of a DNA database. The new measure is expected to cost 5.4 million dollars in the next budget year and becomes effective on July 1. The Quad-City Times has local coverage.
  
  
• New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has reached an agreement in principle with web marketer Intermix Media. Intermix has agreed to pay 7.5 million dollars over three years and to stop the distribution of its adware, toolbar and "redirect" programs that automatically redirect consumers to an advertising page. Spitzer filed suit in April charging Intermix with secretly installing software that delivers pop-up advertisements or similar promotions. The final agreement is two to three weeks away and must be approved by the court. Read the Intermix press release on the settlement. AP has more.
  
  
• Exxon Mobile Corporation has asked the Louisiana Supreme Court to consider a land contamination case in which it was ordered to pay 219 million dollars in damages and remediation costs. A Louisiana Circuit Court of Appeals refused to rehear the case [AP report] after lowering the initial $1 billion verdict against the company to $219 million. In papers filed with the Supreme Court, Exxon said the costs it was ordered to pay are greater than the value of the land and "millions of dollars more than needed for remediation to protect public health and safety." In 2001 a New Orleans jury awarded a landowner who claimed an Exxon contractor contaminated his 33-acre property 1 billion dollars. AP has more.

[JURIST] The Mexican Supreme Court [official website in Spanish] ruled Wednesday that former president Luis Echeverria [Wikipedia profile] can be prosecuted for the deaths of student demonstrators killed in 1971. A panel of judges voted 3-2 to allow Echeverria and his former interior minister to face prosecution after noting that the 30-year statute of limitations began to run in 1976 when Echeverria's final term - and his governmental immunity from prosecution - ended. Prosecutors believe the 83-year-old ex-leader, who previously escaped charges [JURIST report], ordered a paramilitary unit to attack the student protestors. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] Senior US military and Justice Department officials defended Guantanamo prison and US policy towards terror detainees Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee [official website] hearing. Citing continued uncertainty about their status, Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) urged Congress to define the legal rights [AP report] of the detainees, complaining that legislation he introduced in 2002 on the matter went nowhere. Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), who previously called for the government to close Guantanamo [JURIST report], challenged Deputy Associate Attorney General J. Michael Wiggins with concerns that the government would hold prisoners there indefinitely. No representatives of the rights groups which have repeatedly deplored US detention practices at the facility testified in today's proceeding. The Senate has complete testimony transcripts. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] An autopsy report [PDF text] released Wednesday showed that Terri Schiavo [JURIST news archive] had a severely "atrophied" brain that weighed less than half of what a normal brain should weigh and was irreversibly damaged. Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin said that the findings were "consistent" with a person in a persistent vegetative state. The autopsy also found no evidence of abuse, matching conclusions reached by the Florida Department of Children and Families that previous allegations made against husband Michael Schiavo were unfounded [Orlando Sentinel report]. Terri Schiavo died March 31 after a prolonged legal battle over her condition and wishes. The New York Times has more.

[JURIST] The Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST) [official website, English version] Wednesday questioned Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan [AFP report], a half-brother of Saddam Hussein, in connection with crimes committed against the Kurds in the early 1980s. The tribunal questioned Hussein himself earlier in the week [JURIST report]. Although under pressure to move forward in the case, no date has been set for a trial to start. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] New York-based monitoring group Human Rights Watch [advocacy website] reported Wednesday that thousands of people have been arrested [press release] and some 36 killed across Ethiopia in skirmishes with police during election-related protests. HRW said that the deaths occured when "security forces responded to incidents of rock-throwing and looting by opening fire indiscriminately on large crowds of people". The group also claims supporters of opposition leaders in at least nine cities have been arrested. AP has more. The unrest follows growing reports of fraud [JURIST report] in the May 15 general elections. Ethiopian police have confirmed the arrests [AFP report], but government sources many detainees have already been released.

[JURIST] The Sarajevo cantonal court in Bosnia-Herzegovina sentenced Serb Goran Vasic [IWPR report] to six years in prison on Wednesday for his role in the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners at a detention camp near Sarajevo in 1992. Vasic was acquitted of an assassination charge due to lack of evidence. He had been tried and convicted three previous times, but appellate courts had ordered new trials each time. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [JURIST news archive; official website] at the Hague had given Bosnian courts permission to try low-level war crimes cases on their own. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] A Senate committee approved the nomination of Lester Crawford [official profile] as the new head of the US Food and Drug Administration [official site] on Wednesday, sending the issue to the full Senate for a final vote. A number of Democrats on the committee had criticized Crawford, currently acting FDA Commissioner, for not having made a determination on allowing over-the-counter sales of emergency contraceptives [Reuters report] and say they will try and block a floor vote. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) [official site] also wants to put a full vote on hold until another birth control issue, condom labeling, is decided. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday that a dozen former Guantanamo [JURIST news archive] detainees have gone back to fighting against the US since their release, as evidenced by their recapture or confirmed death. Gonzales' statement echos similar reports from Pentagon and highly-placed Congressional sources last year [UPI report; JURIST report], when reference was made to 5 released Afghans who had taken up arms again. Gonzales said President Bush will have the final say in any decision on eventually closing the prison, but Bush last week gave no timetable for doing so. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] Canadian Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier [Wikipedia profile] announced Wednesday that Inuit hunters in the North plan to file a petition accusing the US government of human rights violations by continually fuelling global warming. Troubled by the melting of Arctic ice caps, the Inuit hope the petition will put pressure on the US to reduce industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases. Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference [advocacy website] representing 155,000 Inuit in Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Chukotka in the Russian far-east, said that the Inuit planned to file the petition with the human rights branch of the Organization of American States [official website], the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights [advocacy website] before a UN meeting in Montreal [CBC report] later this year to follow up on the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol [Kyoto Protocol]. Watt-Cloutier went on to say that Washington was not doing enough to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, although the US maintains that it is investing large sums of money in clean energy research and hydrogen fuel. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] Valéry Giscard d'Estaing [Wikipedia profile], a former French president and architect of the embattled European Constitution [JURIST news archive], has blamed current French President Jacques Chirac for the rejection of the document by French voters [JURIST report]. In a New York Times interview published Wednesday d'Estaing complained that French voters rejected the charter not because they disagreed with it, but rather because they were unsatisfied with Chirac, who supports ratification. "This was not a vote on the constitution," he said. "That is the key point that has been missed by the political leaders, because political leaders don't normally like to say that the vote could have been against them." D'Estaing also said he has advised Chirac not to send copies of the daunting 448-page constitutional document to all French voters, but that Chirac had insisted on doing so for legal reasons. The New York Times has more.

[JURIST] German authorities announced Tuesday that they have detained three men who allegedly spent thousands of dollars to fund the Ansar Al-Islam terror network [Wikipedia entry] in its terrorist attacks in Iraq. On Tuesday more that 150 German police officers raided two dozen properties in Germany and one in Switzerland in a search for evidence that Ansar was using areas of Europe for fundraising and smuggling activities. The sweep was the fourth since a December investigation when three Iraqis were arrested [JURIST report] on suspicion of trying to assassinate Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi [BBC profile]. Authorities have not yet fully identified the men arrested. The St. Petersburg Times has more.

[JURIST] A new memo may contradict previous denials by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that he played no role in the awarding of an oil contract in Iraq to a company his son worked for. Annan was cleared of any wrongdoing in March [UN press release] and rejected any possibility of resigning over that allegation or any other arising out of the Oil-for-Food scandal [JURIST news archive]. Annan has also denied recent claims [RTE News report] that he was aware that his son's company was in line for a contract. But a company memo [AP report] turned over to the UN committee investigating the Oil-for-Food Program says that Annan met privately with Michael R. Wilson, who worked with his son Kojo Annan at Cotecna [corporate website, press release PDF about oil-for-food] at a summit in Paris about a week before the contract was awarded. Annan says he has "no recollection" of the meeting. The New York Times has more.

[JURIST] The Pakistani government said Wednesday that gang-rape victim Mukhtar Mai [advocacy website, BBC profile] has been removed from a no-travel list and is free to go abroad. In a case that has received international attention, Mai was gang-raped on orders from a traditional village council. Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sharpao announced that the decision to allow Mai to leave the country came from Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz [Wikipedia profile]. The decision comes after the Lahore High Court [official website] on Friday released 12 men connected to the case [JURIST report] after finding no justification for their continued imprisonment. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] US House Judiciary Committee [official site] Chairman James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI) [official profile] said Tuesday that while he thinks that many of the temporary provisions of the Patriot Act [text] should be made permanent, federal investigators should not be given the power to issue their own subpoenas for records, a power recently endorsed by a Senate committee [JURIST report]. "Administrative subpoenas" would allow the government to seize records from businesses or individuals without the approval of a judge or grand jury [JURIST report]. He said these have "no place" in such investigations and wants all warrants to have judicial review "as early in the process as possible". Sensenbrenner also defended his action last Friday in abruptly ending a Patriot Act hearing [JURIST report] called by Committee Democrats:

What the Democrats did on Friday was just bring a bunch of Bush-haters to talk about all the complaints they had about the Bush administration and its law enforcement philosophy... I reminded the members and witnesses about the rule of relevancy, and nobody paid attention to that. I didn't interrupt anybody. I let them use their time as they saw fit.

[JURIST] Despite earlier reports to the contrary, Sudan refused on Wednesday to drop charges against two members of Medecins Sans Frontieres [Medicine Without Borders, advocacy site]. The two had been arrested and investigated [BBC report] for allegedly "spying, publishing false information, and destabilizing Sudanese society" in connection with an MSF report [text] about hundreds of rapes in Darfur [Wikipedia backgrounder]. The UN expected that the charges would be dropped [Reuters report] Tuesday, but a government official said they still stand. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] In an effort to highlight human rights abuses in certain countries, President Bush has begun meeting with dissidents in an approach similar to the one taken by former President Ronald Reagan in his meetings with Soviet dissidents during the Cold War. Earlier this week Bush met with North Korean defector Kang Chol Hwan, who recently published a book recounting his ten-year ordeal in a North Korean prison [NBC interview]. Bush has acknowledged that such meetings are sure to further strain relations with countries like North Korea, a country the US has been trying to persuade to curtail its nuclear program [JURIST report] but groups like Freedom House [advocacy website], which works for liberty worldwide, have applauded the President's method. Kang is reported to have told Bush in the meeting that "for North Koreans human rights issues are more desperate than nuclear issues." The Washington Post has more.

[JURIST] Spain announced on Wednesday the arrest of 16 suspected Islamic militants, including 11 fighters loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [BBC profile] and men training to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq. A statement [press release in Spanish] from the Spanish Interior Ministry [official website in Spanish] characterized the men as "extremely radical and dangerous," and said that five of the 16 had aided the terror cell responsible for the Madrid train bombing [JURIST news archive] of 2004. Eleven of the suspects are Morrocan, two are Algerian, two are Spanish, and the origin of one is unknown. Spain has made over 200 arrests of supected terrorists in nine different investigations. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter [official website] opens hearings Wednesday on the legal rights of detainees [SJC agenda] held by the US at Guantanamo Bay. Part of the agenda for the hearings is to examine the due process rights of the prisoners and the authority held by Congress to make certain they receive the necessary legal representation. An aide to Specter says the Pennsylvania senator wants to investigate how to make the detention and interrogation process more transparent without negatively affecting national security. The hearing comes after reports of prisoner mistreatment [JURIST news archive], high-level calls for the facility's closure [JURIST report], and a 2004 Supreme Court ruling [Rasul v. Bush, PDF text] holding that detainees had the right to challenge their detentions in federal court. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has more.