The US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in Bates v. Dow Agrosciences that a group of Texas farmers could sue a chemical company for damage caused to their crops by a weed killer. Dow had argued that federal labelling law prevented states from imposing any kind of labelling requirement apart from that mandated by the Environmental [...]

The New York Court of Appeal hears arguments Wednesday afternoon on whether the state's 50-year old statutory ban on the televising of trials is constitutional under state and federal law. New York temporarily allowed video coverage of trial proceedings for a ten year period beginning in 1987, but the authorization lapsed in 1997 and was [...]

A bill to legalize same-sex marriage in California has passed its first legislative test. The California Assembly Judiciary Committee approved it 6-3 Tuesday, clearing it to move on to another committee and, if again approved, from there to the Assembly floor. Opponents of the bill argue that it is clearly inconsistent with Proposition 22 , [...]

Nepalese police arrested former Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba Wednesday in a middle-of-the-night raid on his residence after he had refused to appear as requested before a royal commission investigating government corruption. The arrest was made four days before the scheduled end of a national state of emergency declared by King Gyanendra on February [...]

Hopes for a bipartisn resolution of the judicial filibusters issue faded Wednesday in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's rejection of a compromise advanced by Minority Leader Harry Reid that would have allowed at least two of the President's blocked judicial nominees to go forward with the understanding that current rules allowing filibusters [...]

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said Wednesday that Republicans were prepared to reverse course on controversial changes to House ethics rules that had raised Democratic ire and had led to deadlock in the House Ethics Committee , preventing it from getting down to business this term. The most problematic change involved altering committee procedures [...]

The Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress ruled Wednesday that under the Hong Kong Basic Law the new leader of Hong Kong to be selected on July 10 will serve out the remaining two years of his predecessor's term and not a brand new 5-year term. The ruling, which follows a draft recommendation made [...]

The Minuteman Project , a civilian border patrol group that has already claimed credit for alerting federal authorities to over 300 illegal border crossings from Mexico, announced Tuesday that it wants to expand its operations northwards to the much longer Canadian border. A spokesman said that the group hopes to establish citizen patrols for Idaho, [...]

A Russian court Wednesday postponed until May 16 a scheduled verdict in the controversial tax fraud prosecution of oil magnate and former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky . The postponement was announced by a simple notice on a Moscow courthouse door which cited no reasons for the delay. Observers speculate that the postponement may be an [...]

The Council of Europe, the continent's human rights watchdog institution, condemned US detention practices at Guantanamo Bay Tuesday in a sharply-worded resolution passed by the parliamentary assembly of the 41-nation body accusing the US of having "betrayed its own highest principles in the zeal with which it has attempted to pursue the 'war on terror'." [...]