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By Tad Friend
$16.49
By Charles Postel
$28.00
$35
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senate.gov by way of Wikimedia Commons
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Former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska probably lost his seat because he was convicted of corruption charges, but now his guilt may be in doubt. At the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department has asked a federal judge to set aside the verdict and dismiss the indictment because of prosecutorial shenanigans.
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AP photo / Kevin Wolf
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By Chris Hedges — The facts surrounding the trial and imprisonment of Dr. Sami Al-Arian have severely tarnished the integrity of the American judicial system and made the government’s vaunted campaign against terrorism look capricious, inept and overtly racist.
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By William Pfaff — Justice Department documents that demonstrate the Bush administration’s view of the president’s constitutional power in a “state of war” tell us things we suspected but didn’t want to know.
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A new book gives us one of the most indispensable poets in the English language whose work mines the terrain between hope and history.
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By Amy Goodman — Millions have served time in U.S. prisons for crimes that fall far short of those attributed to the Bush administration. Some criminals, it seems, are like banks judged too big to fail: too big to jail, too powerful to prosecute.
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By Eugene Robinson — Is Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich about to be impeached on grounds of loopiness, obnoxiousness and a bad haircut? It is unclear to me what else Blagojevich has done that a duly constituted jury would find illegal.
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By Marie Cocco — There is absolutely no reason to create some newfangled and untested system to charge and try those few terrorism suspects whose legal fates present President Obama with an excruciating political decision.
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By Joe Conason — To understand the philosophy of government that Dick Cheney brought to Washington over the past seven years, it is most instructive to see “Frost/Nixon,” with Frank Langella’s remarkable reanimation of Tricky Dick for a generation that never knew him.
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White House / Eric Draper
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By Eugene Robinson — The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand their choices—but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.
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By William Pfaff — George W. Bush’s war against terror has brought out of the darker places in America a lot of people who want to torture, or like the idea of it. We know it doesn’t work, so what drives Dick Cheney and his colleague to champion such moral depravity?
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By William Pfaff — The steady expansion of nominally illegal colonies into the Palestinian territories has gone on to the point where the political parties are now incapable of disengaging from the settlement enterprise.
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Truthdig / Peter Scheer
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By Jeremiah Levine — A little-noticed California proposition could limit the kind of partisan gerrymandering that Republicans and Democrats have used to influence elections around America for decades. But is that a good thing?
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Wikimedia Commons
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The native people of the state of Roraima have won an important legal victory before Brazil’s Supreme Court. With 100 similar cases hanging in the balance, the court decided to keep an Indian reservation intact, to the chagrin of farmers, loggers and even some military leaders.
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By Marie Cocco — This week marks a decade since a consortium of state attorneys general negotiated the landmark settlement of lawsuits against tobacco companies. The results are in: Cigarette consumption has declined by 28 percent in the past 10 years.
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courtinfo.ca.gov
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The California Supreme Court has agreed to examine the state’s recently adopted marriage ban, scheduling a hearing for March. The court will decide whether Prop. 8 was a sweeping revision or a simple amendment to the state’s constitution, and whether legally married same-sex couples should suffer a blanket divorce.
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Flickr / scott92007
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Is Jerry Brown just doing his job, or is he trying to be all things to all Californians? The attorney general said in a statement that the state’s high court should review the recently passed gay marriage ban, but until then, “... The public interest would be better served by allowing Proposition 8 to remain in effect ... .”
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LA Times / Rick Loomis
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While some whales’ hearts are as big as cars, the hearts on the Supreme Court that ruled Wednesday against a ban on high-powered sonar in Navy training exercises must be shrinking by the minute. The decision was a defeat to environmentalists, who argue that sonar panics whales, makes their ears bleed and pushes them to beach themselves.
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senate.gov
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Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, has been convicted on seven counts of lying about gifts he received while in office. Unless he steps down, the Republican Party will be running a convicted felon for the Senate in the Nov. 4 election.
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syracuse.com
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Want proof that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has brought the democracy it promised? You won’t find it in this case. An appeals court resentenced Parwez Kambakhsh, a student arrested for distributing an article on women’s rights, to a mere 20 years in prison, overturning the controversial death sentence he was given last year.
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In Jonathan Mahler’s new book, George W. Bush emerges as the most lawless president in American history, the first to usurp the law as a matter of policy.
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holocaustresearchproject.org
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In what will be the Pentagon’s first war crimes trial since World War II, the U.S. will go forward Monday in trying Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Unknown still is the trial date for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the government cabal that also may have committed war crimes.
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thewe.cc
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The International Court of Justice on Friday requested the U.S. not execute five death-row inmates in a decision that will put both the U.S.‘s controversial capital punishment policy and its historic rejection of international legal bodies in the global spotlight.
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stan.uio.no
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A court has ordered Google to hand over the viewing log of every user and every video ever on YouTube. Media giant Viacom is suing Google over copyright violations, and won access to the 12 terabytes of data, but not YouTube’s source code, which it also demanded. Google has asked to anonymize the data.
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NOAA
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Nineteen years ago, the Exxon Valdez supertanker struck a reef in Alaska, causing an environmental catastrophe so devastating its impact continues to be felt. A court later slapped Exxon with $5 billion in punitive damages, but on Wednesday the Supreme Court ruled that the oil giant shouldn’t have to pay more than about a tenth of that amount.
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By Marie Cocco — The forceful language of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s decision in the case granting detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp the right to contest their confinement in federal court is the voice of a Supreme Court majority that is fed up.
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Government agents had no legal right to seize hundreds of children from a Mormon fundamentalist compound in Texas, an appeals court has ruled. The government argued that the children were suffering abuse, but the court decided the children had been in no immediate danger.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Imagine what it would be like not to be able to marry the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life. Then imagine how tens of thousands of gays and lesbians in California must have felt last week when the California Supreme Court declared that homosexuals have a right to marriage under the state’s constitution.
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Flickr / bobster1985
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The California Supreme Court has ruled that gays and lesbians have a right to marry. Chief Justice Ronald M. George aptly explained the landmark 4-3 decision: “Even the most familiar ... traditions often mask an unfairness and inequality that frequently is not recognized or appreciated by those not directly harmed.”
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Flickr / feverblue
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The plight of the polar bear has come to represent the real-world impact of the climate crisis, so it is only fitting that the Bush administration had to be ordered by a court to make a decision on the endangered status of the species. After years of delay, the Interior Department finally classified the animal as threatened, but also promised to fight any meaningful protection.
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By Ellen Goodman — As the dust settles from the recent roundup of allegedly abused children from a fundamentalist retreat, some are asking whether saving these kids is worth the human cost.
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publishing2.com
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A Los Angeles judge on Tuesday ordered two Internet spammers to pay a record-breaking $230 million in fines after they sent more than 700,000 unsolicited advertisements to MySpace users. The amount is almost half what Rupert Murdoch spent to buy the social networking site in 2005.
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By Ellen Goodman — By now the Tale of Lilly Ledbetter is beginning to sound like the Perils of Pauline or the Pre-Feminist Follies. At 70 years old, she’s the star of a long-running drama about how hard we have to run to keep from slipping backward.
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By Marie Cocco — Senate Republicans are determined to join with the Supreme Court to keep women on the losing end of discriminatory pay.
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foxnews.com
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A Florida court sentenced Wesley Snipes to 36 months in prison for tax evasion on Thursday, despite the actor’s plea for mercy and written character testimonials by fellow stars Denzel Washington and Woody Harrelson.
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Arizona Department of Corrections
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The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that lethal injection cannot be included under the constitutional amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment, clearing the way for the lifting of state moratoriums on executions that were installed last September.
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A grim picture is emerging from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compound in West Texas, where 416 children have been removed to state custody and 139 women have left. Court documents allege widespread sexual abuse of teenage girls who were married at puberty to much older men by the polygamist sect.
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Washington Post / Karen Ballard
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A recently declassified memo shines the spotlight once again on John “Take Them to the Point of Death” Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor and once deputy legal counsel in the Justice Department.
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nytimes.com
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An interim decision by the Israeli Supreme Court on Wednesday marked the beginning of what could become a two-tiered road system in the West Bank. With two separate legal systems for Palestinians and Israelis already in operation, critics fear segregated roads would lead toward further institutionalization of apartheid in the occupied territories.
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Flickr / dbking
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The Supreme Court examined the District of Columbia’s handgun ban Tuesday, a case that could at last yield a conclusive ruling on the Second Amendment. So far, it doesn’t look good for gun control advocates.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Gruesome details are emerging from the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor (above, right), the former president of Liberia. The leader of one of Taylor’s death squads has testified that the president ordered his militias to cannibalize their enemies, including African and U.N. peacekeepers.
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As many as 166,000 children could be counted as truants in California after the 2nd District Court of Appeal launched a statewide initiative to ensure that home-schoolers were being taught by credentialed teachers.
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wcsh6.com
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Ralph Nader has announced that he will run for the presidency for a third time. In the past months on Truthdig, the case has been made both for and against such a campaign. Here Chris Hedges says why he should run, while Robert Scheer tells Nader himself it would be better if he didn’t.
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AP photo / Lefteris Pitarakis
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A member of Israel’s parliament has an unusual explanation for the recent spate of earthquakes in his country: It’s the gays! Specifically, says Orthodox lawmaker Shlomo Benizri, the Israeli government’s acceptance of and tolerance toward homosexuals have incurred God’s wrath in the form of tectonic rumblers.
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supremecourtus.gov
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The Supreme Court rejected an appeal related to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program on Tuesday, offering no explanation. The American Civil Liberties Union and others have had a hard time proving the plaintiffs were spied on because the evidence they need is considered a government secret.
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bp1.blogspot.com
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich just can’t catch a break in Nevada. First NBC invited him to its debate there, then told him to stay away. A court intervened and said he could appear, but then just an hour before the event, the Nevada Supreme Court decided that NBC could bar Kucinich.
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americasreport.com
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Dan Rather himself once warned, “Don’t taunt the alligator until after you’ve crossed the creek,” but he’s still staring down CBS’ toothy maw and refusing to budge in his $70-million lawsuit against his former host network. On Wednesday, a New York Supreme Court justice ruled that (at least for now) Rather’s suit could go forward despite CBS’ bid to have it dismissed.
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By Marie Cocco — The Supreme Court will soon revisit the constitutionality of Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of men languish without any real legal recourse.
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The Saudi Arabian justice ministry has defended the high court’s decision to lash and imprison a 19-year-old girl and her male friend, both of whom were gang-raped last year. The two are being punished for “illegal mingling” of the sexes and, unofficially, taking their story to the media. The leading Democratic candidates have all signaled their outrage, but the Bush administration has adopted a mind-your-own-business approach.
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thesituationist.wordpress.com
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There’s been a slight shift in the regulation of pornography in America, thanks to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, that might appeal to those of-age-and-consenting types interested in creating racy footage of themselves without the goal of profiting (monetarily, anyhow).
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By Marie Cocco — If American politics is “an arena for angry minds,” then Clarence Thomas is in the right business. His new autobiography is filled with the predictable narcissism, but also a rage that raises questions about the merit of the lifetime appointment.
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