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 [...]

UK Home Secretary John Reid said Thursday that control orders employed against persons suspected to be national threats when there is not enough evidence to hold them for trial are "far from the best option" in the fight against terrorism. He made the comment after three terror suspects subject to control orders under the Prevention [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) and State Insurance Superintendent Eric R. Dinallo announced Wednesday that Silverstein Properties , which owns a 99-year lease of the World Trade Center site, has settled all outstanding insurance claims with seven insurance companies at a price of $2 billion dollars. Silverstein agreed to yield its claim that the [...]

Spanish judge Santiago Pedraz ruled Thursday that charges against three US soldiers for homicide and a "crime against the international community" in the 2004 death in Iraq of cameraman Jose Couso should stand, despite the appeal of Spanish prosecutors on behalf of the soldiers that the death was an "accident of war." A US military [...]

United Nations inspectors met with Sudanese officials Thursday in the first steps of a UN investigation into human rights abuses by the Sudanese government in Darfur . The seven-person team arrived in Sudan Wednesday and began their inspection in the Darfur region with a goal of creating a series of steps that the Sudanese government [...]

The International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) said Wednesday that a controversial 700-mile fence along the US-Mexican border may violate the 1970 Boundary Treaty , which resolved all pending boundary differences between the United States and Mexico. Sally Spener, spokesperson for the IBWC, said that impermeable fences on US territory but between existing rivers and [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Wednesday that a federal judge presiding over the criminal tax fraud prosecution of accounting firm KPMG improperly exercised ancillary jurisdiction over a state law contract claim brought against KPMG by 16 former partners and employees of KPMG and vacated the district judge's order "as beyond [...]

Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu and international NGO Oxfam Thursday called on developing nations to submit proposals for a conventional weapons convention to the United Nations . Tutu urged developing nations especially to submit proposals for the convention, saying that trade in conventional weapons, especially small arms, "is the modern slave trade" and that developing nations [...]