UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says he expects to see "harsh judgments" of the UN in an interim report to be released Thursday on the purported mismanagement of the $64 billion Oil-for-Food program. Annan set up a blue-ribbon inquiry chaired by former US federal reserve chairman Paul Volcker in the wake of allegations of fraud [...]

French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin has called on French lawmakers to back a new proposal to break up all neo-Nazi groups numbering some 3,000 in France. De Villepin said the groups were responsible for 65 acts of violence in 2004. The minister is seeking to crack down on the spread of neo-Nazism via the [...]

Michael Chertoff , President Bush's nominee for Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security faced repeated questions Wednesday from Democrats at his Senate confirmation hearing about any role he might have played while at the Justice Department in sanctioning improper interrogation techniques used on alleged alleged terrorists. Testifying before the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs [...]

Lord Goldsmith, Britain's attorney general, announced Thursday that seven British soldiers suspected of murdering an Iraqi civilian in southern Iraq will stand trial. The troops, who had been extensively questioned about the death of Nadhem Abdullah on May 11, 2003, will face court martial in Germany. This is the first time that UK soldiers in [...]

Here's a run-down of law-related events, expected developments and live webcasts on JURIST's docket for Thursday, Feb. 3. The US Senate convenes at 9:00 AM ET today, and it is expected to vote on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for attorney general. Watch a live webcast via C-SPAN 2. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for [...]

State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush, February 2, 2005. Read the full text of the Address here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

ACLU, et al. v. Department of Defense, et al., United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, February 2, 2005 . Excerpt: I hold that defendant CIA has failed to satisfy the statutory prerequisites for invoking the operational files exemption, and hence may not avoid the requirements imposed [...]

Little more than two weeks after telling the Washington Post that he would not press the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, President Bush has publicly reversed course in tonight's State of the Union Address:Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be re-defined by [...]

The plaintiffs in a major lawsuit against former directors of WorldCom announced Wednesday that a proposed settlement under which the directors would have personally repaid company investors $18 million of a $54 million total has broken down. The collapse resulted from US District Judge Denise Cote's ruling earlier in the day that conflicted with a [...]

The US House of Representatives passed a resolution Wednesday urging the federal government to appeal a recent 3rd Circuit opinion that struck down a law that prohibited colleges and universities to limit on-campus military recruiting because of its discrimination against homosexuals. The law, commonly known as the Solomon Act , permits the government to deny [...]