S 2986, signed into law by President Bush November 19, 2004 . Read the full text here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Secretary General Kofi Annan admitted Friday that a "small number" of UN civilian and military personnel had committed "gross misconduct" by sexually exploiting refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He expressed outrage at their actions and said the perpetrators must be held accountable. This statement comes after a two year investigation into the incidents [...]

A judge in California has found an 86-year-old man guilty of "sex tourism," specifically traveling to the Philippines to sexually molest girls in violation of a new federal law aimed at protecting children. John W. Seljan was the first to go on trial under the Protect Act (Prosecuting Remedies and Tools Against the Exploitation of [...]

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals issued a ruling Friday denying a rehearing for Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Ku Klux Klansman convicted in 2002 of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The bomb killed four black girls. The ruling came one day after Cherry died in prison at the [...]

Updating a story reported this morning in JURIST's Paper Chase, a spokesperson for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez claimed Friday that Venezuelan exiles in the US were behind the assassination of a top prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, in a car bomb attack Thursday. Chavez accused the terrorists of training for the execution in Florida and called on [...]

The UN staff union passed a resolution late Friday critical of the UN's senior management in the wake of allegations of fraud and corruption in the Iraq oil-for-food program and several supposed incidents of sexual harassment and favoritism. An earlier draft of the resolution was sharper and had expressed a lack of confidence in senior [...]

In Friday's environmental law news, USDA Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth has affirmed the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment (SNFPA), a plan that regulates the 11 national forests that run along the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and Nevada. Originally proposed in 1994, the plan has undergone a few controversial changes since its original framing. [...]

By a voice vote Friday, the US House of Representatives passed a Senate bill that reinstates until 2007 a ban on all state and local taxes aimed at monthly usage fees paid by customers to Internet service providers. President Bush is expected to sign the bill. While opponents argued that the ban's expiration in 2003 [...]

Ray Brent Marsh, a former operator of Georgia's Tri-State Crematory, pleaded guilty Friday to 787 criminal counts including theft, abuse of a corpse, burial service fraud and making false statements. In 2002, an anonymous tip led law enforcement authorities to find over 300 dumped bodies in the woods and buildings behind the family-own crematory, operated [...]

Following Senate approval on Wednesday, and Thursday's 208-204 vote in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, President Bush Friday signed a bill to increase the public debt limit of the United States by $800 billion. The debt allowance increase, President Bush's third in the past three years, was explained by Republicans as necessary to compensate for [...]