NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' failure to maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, a federal judge ruled late [Wednesday].
The decision could make the federal government the target of billions of dollars worth of legal claims by more than 100,000 other individuals, businesses and government entities that also sustained damages from the water that inundated 80 percent of the city when the levees protecting the low-lying city were breached in several places.
It's easy to praise constitutional rights in the abstract, to declare that you are a believer in free speech, the right to trial, the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments when you're speaking only in general terms. The real test comes when you're asked to deal with difficult specific cases.
According to The Associated Press,
Eric Holder will announce later today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and
four other 9/11 defendants will be brought from Guantanamo to New York
to stand trial, in a real criminal court, for the crimes they are
accused of committing. This is a decision I really wish I could
praise, as it's clearly both politically risky and the right thing to
do.
Ninety-five Colombian farmers are suing the oil company BP in the high court in London for allegedly causing serious damage to their land, crops and animals.
In the first case of its kind, the farmers are claiming that BP Exploration Company (Colombia) Ltd, which joined forces with Colombia's national oil company and four foreign multinational corporations in a consortium to construct the 450-mile (720km) Ocensa pipeline, caused landslides and damage to soil and groundwater, causing crops to fail, livestock to perish, contaminating water supplies and making fish ponds unsustainable.
NEW YORK - On the heels of a
federal appeals court ruling that only the U.S. Congress and the
executive branch of government - not the courts - can interfere with
government-sponsored "extraordinary rendition", a U.S. citizen from New
Jersey is asking another court to tell the government it wasn't okay to
secretly imprison and abuse him in three different African countries
over a period of four months.
SAN FRANCISCO -- A ruling that allowed a prisoner to sue former Bush administration attorney John Yoo for devising the legal theories that justified his alleged torture threatens to "open the floodgates to politically motivated lawsuits" against government officials, Yoo's lawyers say.
In papers filed late Monday with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Yoo's new team of private lawyers argued that a judge's refusal to dismiss a suit by inmate Jose Padilla injected the courts into the political arena.
On Monday, the Supreme
Court heard oral argument in a pair of cases from Florida, Graham
v. Florida and Sullivan v.
The
United Nations General Assembly has voted in favour of resolution
endorsing a UN-sponsored report into war crimes committed during
Israel's war on Gaza.
The Goldstone report, which accuses both Israel and Hamas of war
crimes, was endorsed by the assembly on Thursday by a margin of 114 to
18, after two days of debate.
Forty-four member-nations abstained from voting.
The
US House of Representatives has rejected as "irredeemably biased" the
findings of a UN-sponsored report which says Israel committed war
crimes during its military assault on the Gaza Strip.
The house on Tuesday voted 344 to 36 in favour of a non-binding
resolution calling on Barack Obama, the US president, to maintain his
opposition to the report, which was written by a panel led by Richard
Goldstone, a South African judge.
