US President Donald Trump told reporters Friday he is nominating William Barr, a former attorney general under President George HW Bush, to be the next Attorney General. Barr has public experience in the CIA, Department of Justice, White House and as a clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. [...]
The Washington State Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a proposed initiative to block funding to open up safe injection sites in King County. In response to the opioid epidemic in 2016, Seattle and King County created a “Heroin and Prescription Opioid Addiction Task Force. This task force was created “to identify strategies and recommendations to improve [...]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday proposed changes to limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal power plants. The proposed “Best System of Emission Reduction” would replace a 2015 rule that identified partial carbon capture and storage. The new proposal states partial carbon capture and storage is too costly, with limited geographic availability. The EPA [...]
A Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company, Actelion Pharmaceuticals US, Inc., settled with the US government for $360 million Thursday to resolve claims of illegally using a charity to receive kickbacks on Medicare patients. By donating to Caring Voice Coalition (CVC), the government alleges that Actelion induced patients to purchase company drugs and defrauded the Centers [...]
The Italian Court of Cassation, the nation’s highest court, on Wednesday ordered the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles to return a valuable Greek statue recovered by Italian fishermen and sold to the Getty Museum in 1977 for USD $4 million. “hree different judges have reaffirmed that the statue belongs to the Italian state [...]
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Gamble v. United States, a case that will decide whether a longstanding exception to the Constitutional protection against double jeopardy will remain in effect. Terence Gamble was convicted of robbery in Alabama in 2008. As a convicted felon, Gamble was not permitted to own or possess [...]
The California Building Standards Commission approved a new rule Thursday requiring that all homes built in California after 2020 have the capacity to produce and process solar energy. The rule was first announced in May but faced backlash due to cost concerns as it could raise the average price of a new home in California [...]
A Polish court on Thursday ordered anti-communist dissident and former Polish president Lech Wałęsa to apologize to opposition party leader Jarosław Kaczyński for comments made on Wałęsa’s Facebook page. Wałęsa suggested that Kaczyński, leader of the currently ruling Law and Justice Party, was responsible for a 2010 air crash that killed Kaczyński’s twin brother and [...]
The Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, on Thursday released the court’s annual Report on Preliminary Examination Activities. This report, which spans December 1, 2017, through November 30, 2018, summarizes work done by the Office of the Prosecutor to determine whether situations meet legal criteria established by the Rome Statute and warrant further investigation. [...]
The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the highest court in Russia, on Thursday upheld a decision to draw a border between the Republics of Ingushetia and Chechnya. In September the two Republics signed an agreement to define the border between them. This was the first time that the border has been defined since the [...]
