Voters in Chile elected Michelle Bachelet as president with 56 percent of the vote in a runoff election Sunday. Bachelet and her parents were imprisoned and tortured in 1973 under the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet , after her father, an air force general, opposed the coup which brought Pinochet to power. Bachelet, a pediatrician [...]

California executed 76-year old Clarence Ray Allen Tuesday morning, despite protests that executing the ailing inmate was cruel and unusual punishment. Allen, who was blind, nearly deaf and confined to a wheelchair, was California's oldest death row inmate and the second-oldest person executed in the US since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Governor [...]

In the months following Sept. 11, the National Security Agency provided a "flood" of surveillance information to the FBI, most of which proved to be worthless and a waste of FBI resources, and which prompted FBI doubts about the legality of the NSA's increasing role in domestic intelligence, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Stephen Vladeck of the University of Miami School of Law says that for all the issues presented at various junctures by the Jose Padilla case, none is more important – nor, at this point, more politically sensitive – than that concerning the extent of Presidential power under the 2001 Authorization to Use [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Shane of Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, says that the confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito were a distressingly hollow ritual that reflected poorly on the nominee, the Senators questioning him, and the current state of the confirmation process… To start candidly, I was opposed [...]

Restoring the Rule of Law, former Vice-President Al Gore, January 16, 2006 . Excerpt: A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they [...]

Senate leaders announced late Monday that a US Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel Alito which could have taken place as early as Tuesday will be postponed by a week until January 24, with consideration by the full Senate to follow immediately afterwards. Ranking Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy said [...]

In a scathing and fiery speech in Washington Monday on eavesdropping and excesses of executive power, former Vice-President and 2000 Democratic Party nominee Al Gore declared that the US Constitution was in "grave danger" and accused President Bush of repeatedly breaking the law by authorizing warrantless wiretaps on domestic communications. Gore said that the "disrespect [...]

A Bangladesh court Monday sentenced a member of the outlawed Islamist militant group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen to 15 years in prison for involvement in a wave of bomb attacks across the country on August 17 last year that killed 2 and wounded 100. The group wants to turn Bangladesh , now the third most populated Muslim country [...]

Human rights groups Monday voiced objections to Sudan President Omar al-Bashir becoming the rotating chair of the African Union for 2006-2007 when African nations hold a summit in Khartoum next week. In a letter to African leaders, a coalition of 50 groups expressed concern about Bashir shaping the peace progress in the violence-wracked Darfur region [...]