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High Court rules against Northern Ireland's abortion law
Attorney News |
2015/11/30 22:26
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A Belfast High Court ruling is expected to ease Northern Ireland's strict anti-abortion laws to make it easier for women to terminate pregnancies in some cases.
Abortions are illegal in Northern Ireland except in extreme cases when a woman's life is deemed at risk from her pregnancy. Judge Mark Horner said Monday that certain prohibitions violate the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights — cases where a fetus has fatal abnormalities or when a woman became pregnant as a result of sexual crimes like rape or incest.
John Larkin, attorney general for Northern Ireland, said he was "profoundly disappointed" by the court's ruling and said he is studying grounds for a possible appeal.
Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, but it has much more restrictive abortion laws than the other regions.
Judge Horner said the present law making it illegal for a mother to terminate her pregnancy where her fetus cannot survive independently once it leaves the womb constitutes a "gross interference with her personal autonomy." He said in such cases "there is no life to protect."
Horner also said the existing law is unfair to victims of sexual crimes who become pregnant.
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Ruling gives Sandusky back $4,900-a-month Penn State pension
Attorney News |
2015/11/14 16:08
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The state must restore the $4,900-a-month pension of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky that was taken away three years ago when he was sentenced to decades in prison on child molestation convictions, a court ordered Friday.
A Commonwealth Court panel ruled unanimously that the State Employees' Retirement Board wrongly concluded Sandusky was a Penn State employee when he committed the crimes that were the basis for the pension forfeiture.
"The board conflated the requirements that Mr. Sandusky engage in 'work relating to' PSU and that he engage in that work 'for' PSU," wrote Judge Dan Pellegrini. "Mr. Sandusky's performance of services that benefited PSU does not render him a PSU
employee."
Sandusky, 71, collected a $148,000 lump sum payment upon retirement in 1999 and began receiving monthly payments of $4,900.
The board stopped those payments in October 2012 on the day he was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison for sexually abusing 10 children. A jury found him guilty of 45 counts for offenses that ranged from grooming and fondling to violent sexual attacks. Some of the encounters happened inside university facilities.
The basis for the pension board's decision was a provision in the state Pension Forfeiture Act that applies to "crimes related to public office or public employment," and he was convicted of indecent assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.
The judges said the board's characterization of Sandusky as a Penn State employee at the time those offenses occurred was erroneous because he did not maintain an employer-employee relationship with the university after 1999.
The judges ordered the board to pay back interest and reinstated the pension retroactively, granting him about three years of makeup payments. |
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Lufthansa cancels 930 flights Wednesday due to strike
Attorney News |
2015/11/13 16:09
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Lufthansa has canceled 930 flights scheduled for Wednesday at three hubs in Germany after efforts failed to halt an ongoing strike by flight attendants.
The cancellations affect 100,000 travelers going to or from Frankfurt, Munich and Duesseldorf.
They were announced even as the airline and the union said late Tuesday they were open to mediation.
Officials for the UFO flight attendants union did not call a halt to the ongoing stoppages at Frankfurt, Munich and Duesseldorf, but indicated they would be open to mediation under certain conditions, the dpa news agency reported. A mediation proposal had been sent by the company.
As things stood, the union was to strike long-haul and local flights Wednesday through Friday at the three airports. The strike action started Friday and took a break Sunday.
Lufthansa has been able to carry out most flights despite extensive cancellations.
A court decision in the German city of Duesseldorf added to uncertainty. The labor court there ordered a temporary halt to the strike in that town, saying the strike's goals were not clearly formulated.
Court spokeswoman Anke Salchow said the decision only applied Tuesday. The court was to hear another request from Lufthansa on Wednesday. |
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Mississippi Supreme Court narrowly grants same-sex divorce
Attorney News |
2015/11/07 14:35
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The Mississippi Supreme Court voted to allow a lesbian couple to seek a divorce, even as two justices questioned the U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage and suggested that landmark ruling has no constitutional basis.
The decision Thursday came after DeSoto County Chancery Judge Mitchell Lundy Jr. ruled in 2013 that the Mississippi Constitution and state law prevented him from granting a divorce to Lauren Czekala-Chatham and Dana Ann Melancon because the state didn't recognize same-sex marriage.
Czekala-Chatham appealed, and it was initially opposed by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat. However, Hood asked the court to allow the divorce after the June 26 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.
On Friday, same-sex couples will be in federal court seeking to overturn Mississippi's last-in-the-nation ban on adoption by gay couples.
In the Mississippi court's divorce ruling, five of nine justices said in a two-page order that because Hood had reversed his position, "we find no contested issues remain" and sent the case back to DeSoto County for further action.
Justices Leslie King and James Kitchens agreed with the outcome, but dissented, calling for the court to issue a full opinion. King and Kitchens called for Mississippi to overturn its ban on same-sex marriage and grant the divorce in February.
Czekala-Chatham and Melancon were married in San Francisco in 2008 and bought a house in Mississippi before separating in 2010. Czekala-Chatham said she hopes to soon be divorced from her wife, who now lives in Arkansas.
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Chinese woman pleads guilty in college test-taking scheme
Attorney News |
2015/11/01 07:47
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A Chinese woman pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to have two other women take college admissions examinations in her place to help her get accepted to Virginia Tech.
Yue Zou acknowledged having her boyfriend contact a China-based test-taking service.
After that happened, Zou, of Blacksburg, Virginia, supplied her passport information through an online network known as QQ Chat, which enabled people in China to create in her name phony passports that were shipped to her in the United States.
On the passports were the photos of two other Chinese women, who took tests in the Pittsburgh area while pretending to be her.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jimmy Kitchen told the judge that Zou forwarded results from the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, to Virginia Tech in November 2013 and results of a Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, taken by another Chinese impostor in March 2014.
Zou, from Hegang, a city in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, paid an unspecified sum for the TOEFL and $2,000 for the SAT, Kitchen told a judge in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh.
Zou, 21, faces up to five years in prison when she's sentenced in February. She could also be deported, though that will be handled by federal immigration officials in a separate proceeding.
Federal authorities haven't explained how they learned of the scheme.
Zou's attorney, Lyle Dresbold, told the judge that Zou will remain confined to her Blacksburg apartment with an electronic monitoring bracelet until she's sentenced. He told the judge she's still enrolled at Virginia Tech.
University spokesman Mark Owczarski said he could not comment on her status. But he said students found to have submitted work that is not their own to gain admission would face a range of possible sanctions, including expulsion, under the university's honor code.
Zou's TOEFL test was taken by Yunlin Sun, 24, of Berlin, Somerset County. She pleaded guilty in August and faces sentencing in December. Prosecutors say Ning Wei, from Taiyuan, in the Chinese province of Shanxi, took Zou's SAT. She hasn't been arrested, and prosecutors say they believe she returned to China.
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