A federal judge has refused a request made six months ago by former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling to dismiss the ten insider trading charges filed against him. Skilling is alleged to have sold $26 million in stock while in possession of non-public information about the company's financial situation, but argued the indictment failed to specify [...]

In a letter to US President George W. Bush, the chief Iraqi defense counsel for Saddam Hussein has urged Hussein's immediate release in order to restore peace in Iraq, and has condemned the ousted president's current trial as a farce riddled with false witnesses and lies. In a copy of the letter obtained by Reuters, [...]

US military authorities at the Guantanamo detention facility announced Thursday that the number of participants in the ongoing hunger strike at the prison has surged, reaching an acknowledged total of 84, including 48 who have joined the action since last Sunday. The Pentagon defines a hunger striker as someone who has refused food for nine [...]

Prosecutors are once again investigating Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi , this time on charges that he bribed his former lawyer to give false testimony in two criminal cases, according to a report Thursday in Milan's Corriere della Sera newspaper. Berlusconi is said to have paid British lawyer David Mills, who worked for the media [...]

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 [...]