Leading Wednesday's corporations and securities law news, the SEC has announced that three Bank of America Corp. brokerage units have agreed to pay $375 million to settle market timing charges. The SEC charged the three units with entering into improper and undisclosed agreements which allowed larger investors to engage in market timing and late trading [...]

Negotiations continued in Washington Wednesday on a draft Inter-American Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples , an initiative of the Organization of American States . Progress towards completion of the declaration, the first to enshrine the economic, social and property rights of the western hemisphere's 40 million indigenous people, has been hindered by disagreements over [...]

The Federal Communications Commission has said that it is overhauling the system it uses to process complaints about indecency on the public airwaves . The FCC has hired additional staff to review complaints and is revising the process it uses to track complaints. Meanwhile, on Wednesday Congress began reviewing a proposed bill that would force [...]

Menatep , the majority shareholder of Russian oil company Yukos , has sued the Russian government for over $28 billion, saying the government's sale of Yukos' production arm Yugansk was illegal. The government seized and sold Yugansk last year in order to offset Yukos' $27 billion back tax bill. Menatep alleges that the government's action [...]

In person on national television Wednesday UK Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized to members of the Conlon and Maguire families who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced for the 1974 IRA bombings of British pubs in Guildford and Woolwich. Eleven individuals from the two families were arrested, tried, and convicted on evidence that was later completely [...]

The US Army announced Tuesday that Corporal Dustin Berg, a soldier in the Indiana National Guard awarded the Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Iraq, has been charged in the murder of an Iraqi civilian. Berg was charged for the murder in late January, and is also facing charges of false swearing and the wearing [...]

A federal immigration judge Tuesday ordered the deportation from the United States of a Palestinian fund raiser for an Islamic charity alleged to have supported Hamas. Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, who was found to have been living in the US without a valid visa, had raised funds for the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development [...]

A spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq said Wednesday that the announcement of final results from last month's Iraqi elections will be delayed so that the Commission can recount votes from 300 ballot boxes. The results were originally scheduled to be announced Thursday. No new date for an announcement was set. According to [...]

Allen Raymond, former president of Republican consulting group GOP Marketplace, has received a five month sentence for his role in a plot to jam Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 election. Raymond pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy charges for plotting to jam phone lines that were meant to help voters get [...]

Same-sex marriage bans made headway in several state legislatures Tuesday. The Alabama Senate voted unanimously in favor of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages after the House voted overwhelmingly in favor of an identical proposal last week. One chamber will have to pass the other's version of the bill before the proposed amendment will go [...]