President Bush Friday signed into law new federal legislation seeking to protect traditional, wireless, and internet phone calling consumers by preventing phone companies from selling their private phone records without customer authorization and criminalizing attempts to obtain those fraudulently. The Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act of 2006 passed the Senate in December in response [...]

US District Judge Claude M. Hilton of the Eastern District of Virginia Friday granted a motion for dismissal made by the New York Times in a defamation suit filed against the paper by Dr. Stephen J. Hatfill , a former US Army germ-warfare researcher who was named a "person of interest" by the FBI in [...]

JURIST Contributing Editor Nancy Rapoport of the University of Houston Law Center says that lawyers who provide free legal representation for poor and/or unpopular clients – including detainees at Guantanamo Bay – should be thanked for their efforts, not shunned or sanctioned at the behest of government officials… Charles Stimson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of [...]

World Report 2007, Human Rights Watch, January 11, 2007 . Read the full text of the report. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Former Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea, who faces genocide charges in connection with the deaths of some 1.7 million people in Cambodia's notorious "killing fields" in the 1970s, denied in an interview published in the Phnom Penh Post Friday that Cambodia's communist regime committed genocide in the 1970s, saying the regime had no reason to [...]

David Cynamon : "The Bush Administration has reached a new low in its contempt for the law as it applies to Guantanamo. Yesterday, in an interview on Federal News Radio , Cully Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Detainee Affairs, listed a number of the law firms, including ours, who are representing detainees, and [...]

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles "Cully" Stimson has set off a firestorm of protest by publicly questioning the propriety of some of the country's top law firms representing Guantanamo Bay detainees. In an interview on Federal News Radio Thursday on the fifth anniversary of the US military prison, Stimson predicted [...]

Three US Justice Department agencies – the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) , the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the FBI – are freezing or slowing recruitment efforts largely as a result of a lack of increased funding from Congress' failure to approve requested 2007 budget increases for the Justice Department. The [...]

The US Supreme Court Friday granted certiorari in four cases , including one that will determine if tobacco companies are protected from judgments in state courts on the grounds that cigarettes are federally regulated. The appeal, Watson v. Philip Morris, Cos. (05-1284) , was filed by two Arkansas women who found their state court case [...]

Germany’s highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, announced Friday that it will not hear the appeal of the 15-year sentence of convicted September 11 conspirator Mounir al-Motassadeq . Moroccan-born Motassadeq has another appeal to German appellate courts filed, but it is unknown when it will be considered. Lawyers for Motassadeq have also said [...]