The Stabroek News is offering to publish, free of cost, the names of persons in public life who have thus far failed to file their declarations of assets and liabilities to the Integrity Commission. The offer was extended on Monday following a recent disclosure by Chairman of the Commission’s Board, Kumar Doraisami that the anti-corruption body lacks the requisite funds to publish the list. Doraisami, during an interview in September, had also said that the Commission lacks funding to prosecute defaulters.

The Integrity Commission Act was assented to in 1997. The Commission’s budget increased from $39 million in 2018 to $45 million in 2019, but Doraisami said that unexpected, urgent renovation work ate into the Commission’s budget, so that the funding which it has remaining is only sufficient to pay staff, rent, and utilities.(stabroeknews)…[+]

Italian prosecutors have accused Egyptian officials of deliberately trying to mislead the investigation into student Giulio Regeni’s death. Regeni, a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge, was doing research for his doctorate in Cairo when he went missing in January 2016.

His body was found nine days later. Prosecutors said Egypt’s claims about Regeni’s death had either been contradicted by a post-mortem examination in Italy, or debunked. Prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco was addressing the first session of a parliamentary commission set up to look into whether Regeni was the focus of scrutiny by security forces in Egypt before his death. The topic the 28-year-old Italian student was looking into – independent trade unions – is politically controversial within Egypt.(BBC)…[+]

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has responded to Donald Trump’s call for the top US court to stop impeachment. “The president is not a lawyer,” she told the BBC in an exclusive interview, adding: “He’s not law trained.” In a wide-ranging conversation, she also said poor women were victims of restrictive abortion access.

The US president is expected to be impeached by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. The House, controlled by the Democrats, accuses him of an abuse of power in his dealings with Ukraine. Impeachment is like an indictment – the charges will then be sent to the Republican-controlled Senate for a trial, where senators act like jurors. President Trump is expected to be acquitted there of the two charges he faces.

Earlier this month, the president suggested in a tweet that the Supreme Court could step in. “Radical Left has NO CASE. Read the Transcripts. Shouldn’t even be allowed. Can we go to Supreme Court to stop?” When the BBC’s Razia Iqbal asked the justice what her reading of the constitution was in this context, she replied: “The president is not a lawyer, he’s not law trained.”

Ms Ginsburg was talking to the BBC at an event where she was awarded the Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture, which is awarded annually to someone whose ideas “have profoundly shaped human understanding and advancement”.(BBC)…[+]