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 [...]

AP is reporting that a Sunni member of Iraq's constitutional committee has said that he doubts that a deal can be reached on an Iraqi constitution "in the next few hours." As previously reported on JURIST's Paper Chase, Shiite and Kurdish negotiators have indicated that they have agreed on a draft, but Sunni negotiators have [...]

Reuters is reporting Monday that a draft of Iraq's constitution calls the country a "republican, parliamentarian, democratic and federal" state, but fails to detail the extent of the federalism. The vague language may indicate a compromise between various ethnic groups, with Kurds and some Shiites pushing for a more federal form of government and Sunnis [...]

CT v. Spellings, State of Connecticut, August 22, 2005 . Read the full text of the complaint here . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Iranian political prisoner, dissident journalist Akbar Ganji , has ended the hunger strike he began on June 11 to protest the conditions of his confinement, his wife confirmed Monday. The confirmation follows an earlier announcement from the Iranian judiciary that Ganji had called off his protest. Ganji was sentenced in 2001 to six years in [...]