The Ministerial Meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC countries concluded on Sunday with an agreement to cut oil production and raise prices in an attempt to stabilize the global oil market, which has seen significant fluctuation in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The agreement calls for significant reductions in production. ll Participating Countries agreed to [...]

The High Court of South Africa in Pretoria cleared South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of corruption charges on Tuesday. The president made an inaccurate statement before the Parliament in 2018 concerning a campaign donation made to his son by African Global Operations. He later wrote a letter to the Parliament to clarify the error. The [...]

A bill to abolish the death penalty in Colorado passed the General Assembly on Wednesday in a House vote of 38-27, following the Senate’s 19-13 vote on January 31. The bill, “Concerning the repeal of the death penalty by the general assembly in all circumstances charged on or after July 1, 2020,” would remove the [...]

Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong-born bookseller who became a Swedish citizen in 1996, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday by China’s Ningbo Intermediate People’s Court for illegally providing information overseas. Minhai originally disappeared in 2015 while in Thailand. A statement by an EU spokesperson released Wednesday morning says, “ rights, including inter [...]

Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolved the Future Forward Party on Friday and banned 16 of its leaders from politics for 10 years. The party was charged with violations of election laws by taking a 191 million baht loan from the party’s billionaire leader, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. The decision, which leaves open the possibility that the elections commission [...]

London-based law firm Stoke White submitted evidence to the US, the UK and Turkey on Wednesday requesting the arrest of Mohammed Dahlan. Dahlan is “the key advisor to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan” of the United Arab Emirates, according to Stoke White’s media brief. The brief presents an overview of the evidence submitted [...]

The California Senate voted on Thursday to reject SB50, rejecting an effort to substantially increase available housing. SB50 acknowledged, among other issues, that California’s housing has created a unfilled backlog, an increase in pricing, and “premature and unnecessary development of agricultural lands for urban uses” which has “adverse effects on the availability of those lands [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 Tuesday that adjunct professors at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are outside of the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and the university could therefore not be ordered to bargain with a labor union. Adjunct professors at Duquesne attempted to [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled on Friday that, for women in female same-sex marriages, Indiana must include the names of both women on the birth certificate of their children. The state argued birth certificate parentage in Indiana is based on biology, not parentage. However, the district court ruled that in [...]

A California appellate court overturned a lower court decision on Friday, ruling that charter cities must comply with the state’s sanctuary laws. The city of Huntington Beach argued that because they are a charter city they are entitled to autonomy in regulating and enforcing laws deemed to be “municipal affairs” without state intrusion in accordance [...]