Prosecutors in Turkey have dropped one of the two state slander charges against Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk , eliminating the allegation that he insulted Turkey's armed forces. Pamuk, whose work often examines the clashes between society and the role of Islam, is on trial for "public denigration of the Turkish identity" after he made supposedly-unfavorable [...]

A Croatian court in Zagreb Thursday sentenced former "Scorpions" paramilitary member Slobodan Davidovic to 15 years in prison Thursday for his involvement in the summer 1995 Srebrenica massacre . Davidovic and five other paramilitary members were arrested in June after they were identified in a video first shown at the war crimes trial of former [...]

C.T. Hanft v. Jose Padilla, Application Respecting the Custody and Transfer of Jose Padilla, US Solicitor General Paul Clement, December 28, 2005 . Read the full text of the application . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

An inquiry by the Pentagon's Inspector General has concluded that websites operated by the US military that pay journalists to write articles and commentary supporting military activities are legal and do not infringe and laws or government policies. The IG investigation determined that two websites aimed at audiences in the Balkans and the Maghreb region [...]

Less than two weeks after arguing in a brief that the US Supreme Court should stay out of the Jose Padilla "enemy combatant" case because criminal charges against Padilla in late November rendered his appeal moot, the US Department of Justice Wednesday asked the Court to intervene in matter of his custody, claiming that the [...]

ProtectMarriage.com, one of two groups attempting to present a same-sex marriage ban to California voters in 2006, has halted its efforts for failure to gather the required 598,105 signatures needed to put the measure on the ballot. The deadline for submission of the signatures was Tuesday. The group cited current political climate and timing as [...]

The Supreme Court of Uzbekistan Wednesday sentenced 11 policemen, soldiers, and prison doctors to jail terms ranging from 1.5 to 11 years for their complicity in the May uprising in Andijan when thousands of protesters gathered after rebels stormed a prison and freed a group of businessmen on trial for alleged Islamic extremism. Government troops [...]

US Chief Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled Wednesday that John Demjanjuk , a retired auto worker living in Cleveland who is accused of having been a Nazi prison camp guard, should be deported to his native Ukraine, Germany or Poland, rejecting arguments that he could be tortured if returned. Demjanjuk is suspected of being "Ivan [...]

The trial of former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling has been delayed two weeks until January 30, following a decision by former co-defendant Richard Causey to testify against his former bosses under a plea agreement made public Wednesday. Causey, Enron's former Chief Accounting Officer, became the sixteenth person connected to Enron to plead [...]

Federal authorities have now indicted a total of 49 people for involvement in a scheme to fraudulently collect more than $200,000 from American Red Cross funds designed to assist Hurricane Katrina victims. The Red Cross discovered the fraud after an internal audit revealed unusually high payouts from the Bakersfield, California Red Cross call center, where [...]