(Michael) Frisch eviscerated both the OPR report and the David Margolis memo. The key ethics inquiry, he argued, was under Rule 1.2(d)—whether Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury were actually counseling a crime. In this case, the evidence that their advice was designed to facilitate torture is clear-cut, torture is a felony, and multiple players putting a [...]

Three developments last week show the growing gap between the Obama Administration and its NATO allies with respect to the legacy of torture from the Bush era. They also demonstrate that, contrary to Obama’s promises faithfully to uphold the Convention Against Torture and Geneva Conventions, his Justice Department has no intention of doing so when [...]

Imagine The Sopranos, The Wire and Gordon Gekko’s Wall Street all rolled into one. You don’t have to: the FBI has just broken one of the largest-ever insider dealing rings in Wall Street. It wire-tapped its way into a seedy world of secret tips, kickbacks and disposable, pre-paid mobile phones. A network including staff of [...]

The Bill proposes forcing foreign banks operating in the US to disclose American customers’ names and annual account balances or face a 30 per cent tax on the bank’s income from US assets.
All Americans with more than $50,000 in foreign assets would have to declare their holdings in their tax return. Failure to do so [...]