In Monday's international brief, France's National Assembly met today in joint session with the country's Senate at the historic Palace of Versailles to approve an amendment to the French constitution that would permit the nation to hold a referendum on approving the proposed European constitution . The amendment was made necessary after the French Constitutional [...]

The Supreme Court Monday granted certiorari to a case raising the question of when plaintiffs can sue in federal court, as opposed to state court. The question has lately sparked an important political debate, as plaintiffs often prefer to pursue claims in state courts, where payouts are larger for class-action lawsuits. Earlier this month, President [...]

Former WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers testified Monday at his corporate fraud trial, now in its sixth week in Manhattan federal court. Ebbers said on the stand that he was unschooled in accounting and finance and that he left money decisions to his finance chief, Scott Sullivan. Ebbers is accused of orchestrating an $11 billion fraud [...]

Judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Monday upheld the convictions of four Bosnian Serbs who found guilty in 2001 of crimes against detainees at a wartime prison camp in Bosnia. Miroslav Kvocka, Mladjo Rdaic, Zoran Zigic and Dragoljub Prcac had received sentences of five to twenty-five years for sexual and physical [...]

Lebanon's Prime Minister Omar Karami announced the resignation of his administration on Monday, just before a no-confidence vote was scheduled to take place. Karami had been under popular pressure to resign after his government was implicated in the February 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri . Hariri had staunchly opposed Syria's presence in [...]

Leading Monday's corporations and securities law news, the Financial Times is reporting that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has expanded his inquiry into the corporate governance and accounting practices at American International Group (AIG) by looking at the company's relationship with Barbados-based Coral Reinsurance. Spitzer also requested information from the Delaware insurance regulator about [...]

The Iraqi Special Tribunal has finished preliminary investigations into some of the crimes allegedly committed by Saddam Hussein’s top aides and announced Monday that the first group of five will be sent to trial. The five include Hussein's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti , former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan , and three other senior [...]

A lawyer for Mikhail Khodorkovsky , former CEO of Russian oil giant Yukos , has said that his client's trial on tax fraud and other charges could end in April. Yuri Shmidt said that while he doubts the judge's ruling will exonerate his client, he is confident that Khodorkovsky will prevail in the end. Khodorkovsky [...]

General Rasim Delic , who headed the Bosnian Muslim army during most of the Bosnian civil war that spanned the 1990s, left Sarajevo for the Hague Monday to surrender to the UN tribunal and face trial for war crimes. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) released an indictment last week charging Delic [...]

Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein will face trial in a reinforced metal cage, much like the one used for the character Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film, the Silence of the Lambs, London's Sun reports in its Monday edition. The tabloid quoted an unidentified source who stated that Hussein will be kept in an underground [...]