Leading Monday's states brief, the California Supreme Court today extended child support laws and custody rights to estranged gay and lesbian couples who used reproductive science to conceive by ruling that same-sex couples who raise children are the lawful parents and must provide for the children after a break up. The legal director of the [...]

Glenn Allen Powell, a former employee of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) , has pleaded guilty to charges that he accepted bribes and defrauded the US government when awarding a contract to an Iraqi company in 2004. According to the plea agreement, KBR discovered during an internal investigation that Powell had accepted more [...]

Iraqi constitutional negotiators who submitted a draft constitution to Iraq's National Assembly shortly before the deadline at midnight local time Monday have withdrawn it in the face of continued Sunni opposition, and the Assembly has adjourned without voting in a bid to avoid its own dissolution in the absense of an accepted charter. A senior [...]

The US Supreme Court refused to rehear the Kelo v. New London eminent domain case Monday, without comment. In June the justices held by a 5-4 margin that the local authority in New London, Connecticut could expropriate private land, homes and businesses for private redevelopment confering economic benefits on the community such as more jobs [...]

AP is reporting that the speaker of Iraq's National Assembly has said that the draft constitution has been submitted ahead of the midnight deadline, but that there remain "pending points" that parties will try to resolve within the next three days. Earlier Monday, there were reports that Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni Arab negotiators continued to [...]

AP is reporting that a Shiite member of the committee writing the Iraqi constitution has said that a draft has been completed and will be submitted to the National Assembly shortly, despite ongoing Sunni reservations about federalism. 3:23 PM ET – Sunni negotiators are denying that an agreement has been reached on the draft constitution. [...]

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced Monday that the state has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) . The complaint alleges that the NCLB is illegal because it requires states to provide programs and expensive testing without furnishing adequate funding and asks that the judge declare that states and [...]

Eric Rudolph , who pleaded guilty in April to the 1996 Olympic Park bombing and later bombings at an abortion clinic and gay nightclub in Atlanta, Monday was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences plus 120 years for the bombings. In July, Rudolph was sentenced to life without parole for the 1998 bombing of an [...]

Egypt's Supreme Committee of Presidential Elections has rejected any international assistance in monitoring the upcoming presidential elections, the first multi-candidate election in Egypt's history. Committee spokesperson Osama Attawiya told the Kuwait News Agency Monday that under Egypt's constitution, only the judiciary had the ability to monitor the elections and that international monitoring would compromise the [...]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Monday rejected a request by prosecutors to speed up the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic . Milosevic's trial on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity began in February 2002 and ICTY prosecutors had requested that the UN war crimes tribunal work four [...]