Eight advocacy groups Monday filed a complaint in US district court on behalf of the 6.4 million people who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid to make sure that no elderly or disabled Americans lose access to prescription drugs when they enroll in the new Medicare drug plan. US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike [...]

Leading Tuesday's international brief, three judges from the Kenyan Constitutional Court ruled that a legal challenge to the legitimacy of the upcoming Kenyan national referendum on the proposed draft constitution was invalid and that neither the legislative nor judicial branches of government could stop the referendum. Activists from the Kenyan Yellow Movement had challenged the [...]

The Libyan Supreme Court Tuesday postponed its verdict until January 31 for five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had received death sentences following their convictions for deliberately infecting more than 400 children with the HIV virus as part of an experiment to find a cure for AIDS. The medics appealed their death sentence [...]

Major US media organization Dow Jones & Co. , publisher of the Wall Street Journal and other publications, on Monday challenged efforts by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to keep documents secret in the CIA leak case , asking a federal court to deny Fitzgerald's motion to bar public disclosure of documents. The proposed protective order [...]

The US Senate is set to vote Tuesday on a compromise offered by senators in response to last Thursday's 49-42 vote to deny Guantanamo prisoners habeas corpus access to federal courts in order to contest the legality of their detentions. The Graham amendment to the 2006 Defense Appropriations Bill , if signed into law, would [...]

Hate Crimes Statistics Report, Federal Bureau of Investigation, November 14, 2005 . Read the full text of the FBI report here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

French President Jacques Chirac Monday delivered his first televised address since a recent surge of violence began in France nineteen days ago, promising that justice would be meted out to those responsible for the riots. "Those who make attacks against property and people must know that in a republic, they cannot violate the law without [...]

In a report released Monday, the US Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) characterized the Federal Drug Administration's review of the birth control drug Plan B for over-the-counter sale as "unusual" in procedure. The GAO report alleges that FDA management was more involved in Plan B approval than usual; that the decision not to approve the drug [...]

Schaffer v. Weast, Supreme Court of the United States, November 14 2005. Excerpt: When we are determining the burden of proof under a statutory cause of action, the touchstone of our inquiry is, of course, the statute. The plain text of IDEA is silent on the allocation of the burden of persuasion. We therefore begin [...]

European Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs Franco Frattini said Monday that although the informal EU investigation into the alleged existence of secret US prisons in European Union nations has revealed nothing, the EU will sanction any country found to house such facilities. Human Rights Watch has issued a statement which alleges that "there is [...]