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NEW YORK (AP) - A federal judge has told the government it will have to release additional pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, civil rights lawyers said. Judge Alvin Hellerstein, finding the public has a right to see the pictures, told the government Thursday he will sign an order requiring it to release them to the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawyers said. The judge made the decision after he and government attorneys privately viewed a sampling of nine pictures resulting from an Army probe into abuse and torture at the prison. The pictures were given to...

BOSTON -- Opponents saw it as a huge blow to the American family. Supporters looked on it as a moment of liberation. The first legal gay marriages in Massachusetts were a pivotal moment in America's culture wars. A year later, the legacy is mixed -- they remain legal here, and civil unions have been legalized in neighboring Connecticut, but a dozen states were propelled to prohibit same-sex weddings. In the past year, more than 6,000 same-sex couples have tied the knot, many rushing to exchange vows in the days and weeks that followed the May 17 start to the weddings....

Virginia Court Strikes Down Law Against Sex By Singles POSTED: 4:20 pm EST January 14, 2005 RICHMOND, Va. -- The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down an archaic and rarely enforced state law prohibiting sex between unmarried people. The unanimous ruling strongly suggests that a separate anti-sodomy law in Virginia also is unconstitutional, although that statute is not directly affected. The justices based their ruling on a U.S. Supreme Court decision voiding an anti-sodomy law in Texas. "This case directly affects only the fornication law but makes it absolutely clear how the court would rule were the sodomy law...

DALLAS - The arrest of a 12-year-old boy on charges that he molested a 4-year-old girl at a fast-food restaurant playground may point to a growing problem of sexually aggressive children, child-abuse experts say. The boy was arrested Wednesday in suburban Houston on charges of indecency with a child and aggravated sexual assault. Police would not discuss in detail what happened to the girl, other than to say her mother said she'd been touched inappropriately. The arrest came a week after the Dallas Independent School District expelled two first-grade boys after one performed a sex act on another during class....

Focus on the Family is forcing lawmakers who voted against the impeachment of a Denver judge to turn over all their correspondence in the case. The Colorado Springs conservative group, citing the state's Open Records Law in letters to each member of the House Judiciary Committee, demanded e-mails, letters, cell phone bills and notes from the hearing on the effort to impeach Judge John Coughlin. Focus on the Family lobbied in favor of impeaching Coughlin because of a decision he made in a lesbian custody case. But the impeachment effort failed when three Republicans joined five Democrats on the committee...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government does not have to release 11-year-old photographs from the suicide of Clinton administration White House lawyer Vincent Foster.</p> <p>The unanimous decision makes it more difficult to use a public records law to access law enforcement records. Justices said the privacy rights of survivors outweigh the benefits of releasing some photographs.</p>

SALT LAKE CITY — A leading civil rights attorney prepared Monday to file a federal lawsuit challenging Utah’s ban on polygamy, citing the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Texas sodomy law. The suit says Salt Lake County clerks refused a marriage license to plaintiffs G. Lee Cook, an adult male, and J. Bronson, an adult female, because Cook was already married to D. Cook. That woman had given her consent to the additional marriage. In denying the marriage license, the county violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment right to practice their religion, attorney Brian Barnard says in...

Court Allows Arrests of All in Drug Stops WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court issued a traffic warning Monday: Beware of whom you ride with. If drugs are found in a vehicle, all occupants can be arrested, the justices said in a unanimous decision. It was a victory for Maryland and 20 other states that argued police frequently find drugs in traffic stops but no one in the vehicle claims them. The court gave officers the go-ahead to arrest everyone. In a small space like a car, an officer could reasonably infer "a common enterprise" among a driver and passengers,...

Sad day for freedomMona Charen (archive) December 12, 2003 | Print | Send On Dec. 10, 2003, freedom took two body blows. The first was the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to permit the limitation of political speech. This is not exotic dancing or flag burning. This is "Vote for Sam Smith" -- the beating heart of our democracy. The Supreme Court has just tied a gag around our mouths, and most of the intellectual class is delighted. Apologists obscure the crude reality of this repression by calling it "campaign finance reform." Well, you can call...

<p>Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, tobacco advertising, dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, and sexually explicit cable programming, would smile with favor upon a law that cut to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.</p>

Supreme Court whitewash? Posted: December 11, 20031:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com The Associated Press story covering the Supreme Court hearing on requested release of Vincent Foster crime-scene photos read as follows: "Five government investigations concluded that White House attorney Vincent Foster's death in 1993 was a suicide." Not true. There haven't been five government investigations. In fact, there hasn't been even one real government investigation. Instead, there have been five cover-ups, all using the same tainted evidence and the same tainted investigators. Attorney Allan Favish believes the public may learn something from 10 unreleased police photos of Foster and has taken...

[Reading from an Associated Press wire story:] "A sharply divided..." There's nothing "sharply divided" about this. We got four liberals and we got two Republicans who read the editorial pages - or two conservatives who read the editorial pages - on the Supreme Court. Let me just stick with the details here, and then I will ad-lib my commentary and analysis after presenting to you the facts. "A sharply divided Supreme Court upheld key features of the nation's new law intended to lessen the influence of money in politics, ruling today that the government may ban unlimited donations to political...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution Wednesday of a condemned inmate who was part of a lawsuit that challenged one of the drugs used to carry out the death sentence. Kevin Lee Zimmerman won his reprieve about 20 minutes before he could have been put to death for a fatal stabbing and robbery at a Beaumont motel in 1987. In a brief order, Justice Antonin Scalia stopped the punishment pending an additional order from him or the court. ``I'm disappointed,'' Zimmerman told a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman, Michelle Lyons. ``I was ready to...

In a tragic decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that jeopardizes a cardinal principle of the U.S. Constitution: free speech. Concerned Women for America's Chief Counsel Jan LaRue noted that the decision means less protection for political speech, the very speech the First Amendment aims to shield, than for pornography. The following article comes to us from the James Madison Center for Free Speech of Washington, D.C. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution mandates that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Today the United States Supreme Court has...

<p>WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court (search) upheld key features of the nation's new law intended to lessen the influence of money in politics, ruling Wednesday that the government may ban unlimited donations to political parties.</p> <p>Those donations, called "soft money," had become a mainstay of modern political campaigns, used to rally voters to the polls and to pay for sharply worded television ads.</p>

The first killing of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion activist happened in 1993. Since then, six more people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics, which is fewer people who ended up dead by being in the vicinity of recently released Weatherman Kathy Boudin. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle. This brings the total to: seven abortion providers to 30 million fetuses dead, which is also a pretty good estimate of how the political battle is going. The nation embarked on...

<p>A Utah man with five wives is in court fighting to get his bigamy conviction overturned on the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that decriminalized homosexual relations.</p> <p>The legal action by polygamist Tom Green in the Utah Supreme Court seems to confirm predictions of a Republican lawmaker and other social conservatives who warned that the high court's decision would open the door to attempts to legalize other sexual activities that historically have been outlawed by states, such as bigamy, polygamy, prostitution, adult incest and even bestiality.</p>

Think back: How long ago would you have scoffed at the idea of two men getting married? Or the Supreme Court endorsing sodomy? Or "domestic partners" enjoying the same rights and benefits as married couples? Or network television featuring shows with gays and lesbians? Or companies such as Avis announcing, "Domestic partners are automatically included as additional drivers. No extra fees charged. No questions asked." Or even that you would take the term "sexual rights" seriously? It wasn't that long ago. The forces for perversion have subjected us to a propaganda campaign of such intensity that most Americans have surrendered...

TORONTO - Garfield Dunlop is busy on the hustings, giving the same spiel at every door in his suburban Ontario district. "I've got some literature here on same-sex marriage," says the avuncular politician, pressing a pamphlet into the palm of a white-haired woman who smiles and motions him into her home. "It's a sin," he continues, climbing into the foyer. "And it could tear apart the fabric of our society." For a man in for the political fight of his life, an incumbent running for a seat in the provincial parliament, Mr. Dunlop's rhetoric could read like a death wish....

-snip- Judge Roy Moore, the publicity-seeker who put the 2.5-ton Ten Commandments in the Alabama state courthouse, declared Monday that he could disobey the direct order of a federal judge because "judges do not make laws, they interpret them." Since, Moore continued, an interpretation can be wrong, therefore he may defy a judicial order. So presumably Judge Moore also thinks that if he sentences a man to prison, the man can declare that the interpretation might be wrong and walk free? It's exactly the same logic. Moore further said that the First Amendment precept, "Congress shall make no law respecting...