2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, March 8, 2006 . Read the full text of the reports. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act of 2006, US Congress, March 7, 2006 . Read the full text of the Act . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The US House Appropriations Committee late Wednesday voted 62-2 to amend an emergency appropriations bill for Iraq and Gulf Coast reconstruction with a provision blocking a controversial takeover of operations at six US ports by United Arab Emirates-owned Dubai Ports World . The amendment, which is expected to be debated in the full House next [...]

Prosecutors in Yemen Wednesday called for the death penalty against the editor of a Yemen newspaper who republished cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad originally printed in a Danish newspaper in September. Muhammad al-Asadi was arrested last month with three other editors at the Yemen Observer on charges of "offending Islam". Lawyers commissioned by the Shura [...]

The UN Security Council will take up the issue of Iran's nuclear program after Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency , transmitted his official report on Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council Wednesday. ElBaradei told the IAEA Board of Governors meeting since Monday in Vienna that: Although the Agency has [...]

Frank Swaney : "Forgotten largely by national media coverage and private donations, the Mississippi Gulf Coast represents the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. The Mississippi Center for Justice therefore has a 2-fold job on its hands, dealing with the problems, and drawing attention to them. The main focus of the Center has been addressing [...]

The jury in the Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing trial heard testimony Wednesday that, during a visit to Malaysia in 1999, a man matching Moussaoui's description told Islamic militant Fauzi bin Abu Bakar Bafana that he he'd had a dream about flying a commercial airliner into the White House. According to a 2002 videotaped disposition played in [...]

Britain's chief inspector of prisons has expressed concern after Muslim inmates in London's maximum-security Belmarsh Prison – dubbed "the UK's Guantanamo Bay" by the British press – told authorities that the staff did not understand their social and religious behavior. Chief Inspector Anne Owers said in a report based an unannounced October visit and survey [...]

The US State Department on Wednesday named North Korea, Burma and Iran among the world's biggest human rights offenders in its 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices , saying that "countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world's most systematic human rights violators." The reports [...]

The chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay denied Tuesday that detainees at the facility were tortured, but acknowledged the vagueness of the definition of torture itself. USAF Col. Morris Davis of the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions will prosecute 10 Guantanamo detainees. Davis said in an AP interview before a talk at [...]