The New York Court of Appeal hears arguments Wednesday afternoon on whether the state's 50-year old statutory ban on the televising of trials is constitutional under state and federal law. New York temporarily allowed video coverage of trial proceedings...

A bill to legalize same-sex marriage in California has passed its first legislative test. The California Assembly Judiciary Committee approved it 6-3 Tuesday, clearing it to move on to another committee and, if again approved, from there...

Nepalese police arrested former Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba Wednesday in a middle-of-the-night raid on his residence after he had refused to appear as requested before a royal commission investigating government corruption. The arrest...

Hopes for a bipartisn resolution of the judicial filibusters issue faded Wednesday in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's rejection of a compromise advanced by Minority Leader Harry Reid that would have allowed at least...

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said Wednesday that Republicans were prepared to reverse course on controversial changes to House ethics rules that had raised Democratic ire and had led to deadlock in the House Ethics Committee ,...

The Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress ruled Wednesday that under the Hong Kong Basic Law the new leader of Hong Kong to be selected on July 10 will serve out the remaining two years of his...

The Minuteman Project , a civilian border patrol group that has already claimed credit for alerting federal authorities to over 300 illegal border crossings from Mexico, announced Tuesday that it wants to expand its operations northwards to the...

A Russian court Wednesday postponed until May 16 a scheduled verdict in the controversial tax fraud prosecution of oil magnate and former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky . The postponement was announced by a simple notice on a...

The Council of Europe, the continent's human rights watchdog institution, condemned US detention practices at Guantanamo Bay Tuesday in a sharply-worded resolution passed by the parliamentary assembly of the 41-nation body accusing the US of having "betrayed its...

Small v. US, Supreme Court of the United States, April 26, 2005 . Excerpt from the opinion by Justice Breyer:...foreign convictions differ from...