XENIA, Ohio - October 13 - Greene County Prosecuting Attorney Stephan Haller and Sheriff Gene Fischer abruptly announced they were dropping an investigation into same-day registrants last week, after Demos and other voting rights advocates warned that their actions appeared to violate federal voting rights protections.

WASHINGTON - October 8 -  Following the release of a damning Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-funded report yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union demanded an end to the government's use of data mining. The report, "Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists," was conducted by a group of privacy and technical experts called the Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals.

WASHINGTON - October 8 - Last night, President Bush signed into law a bill to provide personnel and funds for federal investigations into murders and other crimes committed during the civil rights era. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act authorizes the attorney general of the Department of Justice to spend $10 million annually over 10 years to investigate and prosecute these cold cases.

WASHINGTON - October 7 - Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, issued the following statement in response to the decision by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to allow the 17 remaining Uighur Guantanamo detainees to be released into the United States while their habeas corpus cases are decided. All these men were ruled to be non-enemy combatants by the U.S. Department of Defense:

NEW YORK - October 7 - A federal judge today ordered the release of a small group of Chinese Muslims who have been held without charge at Guantánamo Bay. U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina in Washington, D.C. rejected the Bush administration's position of indefinitely holding the detainees, known as Uighurs, since they are not considered enemy combatants. The Uighurs have been held in Guantánamo for seven years.

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project:

NEW YORK - October 7 - In a radical departure from years of legal precedent, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is considering ending the practice of allowing immigrants to reopen cases that they lost because of their lawyers' mistakes or incompetence. Mukasey announced that he was considering the issue late this summer and then imposed the unrealistic deadline of October 6 for interested parties to submit briefs, preventing organizations opposing the change, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Bar Association (ABA), from providing a meaningful response.

NEW YORK - October 6 - Today voting rights advocates at the Brennan Center for Justice called on Montana election officials to reject the challenges of 6,000 voter registrations, citing the crude basis for the challenges and their inconsistency with the National Voter Registration Act and Montana State Law.