In Friday's environmental law news, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Thompson has announced that starting in January all tobacco will be banned on HHS property. The Department, which has about 66,000 employees, currently bans smoking inside its buildings. The new ban will extend the smoking ban to all outdoor property as well [...]

NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is expected to file suit Friday or Monday against health insurance consulting firm Universal Life Resources, stemming from a seven-month investigation into bid-rigging in the insurance industry. United Policy Holders, a consumer insurance group, has already filed suit against Universal, alleging that the company accepted payments from insurers to send [...]

The ACLU has sued MA police and port authority over a new security program at Boston's Logan International Airport, which the civil rights group claims leads to racial profiling. In the suit filed Wednesday, the ACLU argues that the "behavior pattern recognition" used by security at the airport "condones and encourages" racial profiling. State police [...]

Ten days after the last ballots were cast, the Washington state governor's race remained too close to call Friday, and the state Democratic party said it was considering options including legal action. State officials still have thousands of provisional ballots to count and only about 3,600 votes separate leader Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine [...]

A UK judge Friday upheld the withdrawal of legal aid funding for Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt in his High Court case against relatives of victims in the Omagh bombing. The Legal Services Commission, the UK public legal services agency, withdrew aid to McKevitt after ruling that he lied on his application. McKevitt and four [...]

A human rights group has sued two former high-ranking Somali officials currently living in the US, alleging that the two took part in torture and killings in their home country during the 1980s. San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability filed suit Wednesday against Mohamed Ali Samatar, a former defense and prime minister in Somalia, [...]

Joost Pauwelyn, Duke Law School : "This is a true David against Goliath story. This dispute illustrates once more how deep WTO commitments penetrate the regulatory powers of its member countries. Under WTO rules, the U.S. agreed not to restrict the importation of certain 'recreational services,' which Antigua argued includes the free flow of cross-border [...]

Gay rights groups have adopted a cautious legal approach to challenging 11 state constitutional bans on gay marriage adopted by referendum in the Nov. 2 elections. Many of the groups fear that an all-out legal assault on the new laws could create a backlash generate public hostility. Instead, groups such as the ACLU's lesbian and [...]

The Dutch parliament (official site in Dutch) Friday asked the government to draft laws restricting the employment of imams at Dutch mosques only to those who have studied Islam in the country. A vote on the new law was delayed after Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner said it may be considered discriminatory unless applied to [...]

The International Atomic Energy Agency has reported that South Korea conducted illegal nuclear tests in the 1980s and 2000, in which it secretly extracted or enriched small amounts of plutonium and uranium. Although the tests did not produce enough uranium for a weapon and South Korea has repeatedly stressed it does not intend to build [...]