Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko fired Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun Thursday, prompting Interior Minister Vasyl Tsushko to dispatch police to form a protective chain around the General Office of the Public Prosecutor. Piskun himself initially defied the dismissal, but subsequently said that he will leave office once the order is published in the presidential register and [...]

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Judicial corruption is hurting the rule of law around the world, according to an annual report on the problem released Thursday by Transparency International (TI) . TI's Global Corruption Report 2007 found judicial corruption to be particularly prevalent in the former Soviet republics in eastern and central Europe, and central Asia. In Moscow alone, the [...]

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The US Senate voted 74-24 Wednesday to slash the number of temporary guest workers that could be annually admitted into the United States under the proposed Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 . The amendment proposed by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) would reduce the previous maximum limit of 600,000 guest workers to 200,000. The White [...]

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Aitzaz Ahsan, a lawyer on the defense team for suspended Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry complained Wednesday before the Supreme Court of Pakistan that his legal team was under "enormous government pressure" meant to discourage it from arguing its case. Ahsan accused the government of tapping the legal team's telephones, and said that members [...]

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted Wednesday to approve new interpretive guidelines for Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 , relaxing previous guidelines which critics have called inflexible, burdensome, and wasteful. Section 404 requires public companies to continually evaluate the internal controls they have in place to ensure that external auditors [...]

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