Magic Johnson is super serious when it comes to his snacks, or so claims one of his former private jet stewardesses.

Lanita Thomas filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, claiming Johnson fired her after she was just seven minutes late, according to Courthouse News.

Thomas says he was just using her mild tardiness as an excuse for age discrimination.

She was trying to Accomodate one of the NBA legend's more particular food requests — a sandwich with two specific types of turkey, according to the lawsuit.

Thomas' main duties were stocking up the plane with newspapers, DVDs, and Johnson's "highly specific in-flight food and beverage choice," including red vine liquorice, the suit said.

Out of the 10 to 12 hour work days, she claims she spent a third of the time trying to meet the former L.A. Lakers point guard's picky requests.

Thomas, who is over 40, argues in the suit that she was discriminated against because of her age. Johnson hired a younger woman shortly after firing Thomas, according to Courthouse News.

Magic Johnson Entertainment did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

SEE ALSO: Meet The Fascinating Spouses Behind The Nation's Supreme Court Justices >

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An ex-employee of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says her boss told her to distort the employment statistics of its graduates, according to a sworn declaration.

The declaration was filed in a class action that a Thomas Jefferson grad filed claiming it deliberately misleads aspiring lawyers about their job prospects.

That suit was part of a wave of litigation accusing law schools of lying just to get prospective students in the door.

As part of the suit against Jefferson, the school's former career services director Karen Grant submitted a declaration alleging some pretty shocking practices at that school.

Grant says her boss instructed her to fudge employment stats reported to NALP, which tracks legal industry statistics, as well as the American Bar Association.

Her boss told her to mark students as "employed" if they had any kind of job since graduation – even if they lost that job, Grant says.

When Grant expressed reservations about that practice, the sworn declaration says, her boss told her "everybody does it" and it's "no big deal."

Law School Transparency first reported Dean's declaration on Tuesday.

Rudy Hasl, Thomas Jefferson's dean, told that publication he questions the ex-employee's reliability, and that the school stands behind its stats.

The ABA, meanwhile, says "the actions of a few schools have called into question the integrity of all," according to Law School Transprency.

SEE ALSO: Here's How To Get Ready For Your Harvard Skype Interview

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Legal comics strike again — this time as part of a law firm's colorful marketing efforts.

The Thompson Coburn law firm has come out with a two-page comic called "Swept Away," which follows the misfortunes of a company that chooses to use someone else's sweepstakes rules instead of hiring a legal team to sort things out.

It seems absolutely ridiculous, and, well, it might be, but the cartoon does its job.

Among the characters are a pair of Canadian mounties, the FBI, FTC, and a postal service inspector, to name a few.

Dale Joerling, a partner at the firm and the man behind the comic, writes on the Sweepstakes Law Blog that the idea came when he saw Bob Kohn's cartoon brief last month in the Apple e-book price fixing case.

And if you aren't sure how this is an example of goofy, but perhaps functional marketing, the two lead characters conclude with: "Whew. Using someone else's rules can be expensive! We should have talked to Thompson Coburn."

Shameless self-promotion? Yes, but that's how marketing works, even for law firms.

Check out the full comic here.

SEE ALSO: This Man Had To Learn To Survive In Prison When He Was 11 Years Old >

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Don't tell Tom Cruise he doesn't spend any time with his six-year-old daughter, Suri.

The 50-year-old recently divorced actor filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit against "Life & Style" magazine Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles over the tabloid's July cover story "Suri in Tears: Abandoned by Her Dad."

Cruise's attorney, Bert Fields, blasts the mag, saying their headline "is a disgusting, vicious lie."

"Until this week, Tom was shooting a film on location, but he spoke to Suri every day," Fields said in a statement. "He's with Suri right now; and he was with her the day before Life & Style trumpeted their cruelly false accusation. Tom dearly loves Suri and the last thing he would ever do is abandoned her."

"Tom doesn't go around suing people. He's not a litigious guy," Fields continued. "But when these sleaze peddlers try to make money with disgusting lies about his relationship with his child, you bet he's going to sue."

But this isn't the first time Fields has gone after a publication on Cruise's behalf, the attorney also sent threatening letters to the National Enquirer and Vanity Fair this year regarding their coverage of the actor's personal life and connections to Scientology.

And Fields didn't hold back on taking shots at Life & Style's owners, either: "These serial defamers are foreign-owned companies with their global headquarters in Hamburg. They take money from unsuspecting Americans by selling their malicious garbage. Having to pay a libel judgment may slow them down. Tom will undoubtedly give the money to charity. He always has."

SEE ALSO:

Tom Cruise causes trouble in the new "Jack Reacher" trailer >

People paid Justin Timberlake & Jessica Biel a measly amount for their wedding photos >

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Award-winning visual effects guru Andrew MacDonald was fired from Ascent Media Group after calling out the drug use of one of his superiors, reports The Hollywood Reporter.

Visual effects supervisor Alex Frisch—best known for his work on films such as the "Pirates of the Carribbean franchise—was often referred to as "Power Donut Man" and "Cokey the Clown" in the office, according to papers filed by MacDonald.

MacDonald sued AMG, not Frisch personally, in September 2010, after he was terminated from the company for telling an exec he was worried about Frisch's "open and notorious drug abuse at the office during working hours."

When asked if he had proof of the drug use, MacDonald jokingly asked the exec if he should videotape the bathroom. But the next day, MacDonald met with an AMG in-house lawyer, who accused him of actually videotaping the bathroom and charged him with lying before he was eventually terminated.

While Frisch has denied all of the claims, a jury ruled Wednesday that MacDonald should be awarded $450K—two years worth of salary for wrongful termination. And MacDonald will back in court Wednesday to collect punitive damages.

Meanwhile, Frisch is no longer even working at AMG, as he left to co-found a new visual effects studio that works with musical artists.

SEE ALSO: James Cameron just announced his first project after the 'Avatar' series >

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Al-Qaeda member Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested as he entered the United States driving a car packed with explosives, was previously jailed for 22 years, twice, but both sentences were quashed, the last in 2010.

On Wednesday, US District Court Judge John Coughenour, ruling in court in Seattle, rebuffed a prosecution call for a Ressam to be jailed for 65 years to life, in passing a sentence of 37 years.

"This case provokes our greatest fears. In the late 1990s, Mr. Ressam plotted a terrorist attack to kill and injure a large number of people," said his 18-page sentencing order, posted online.

"Many, including the federal government, believe that Mr. Ressam is a continuing threat and he should never see freedom again. But fear is not, nor has it ever been, the guide for a federal sentencing judge.

"The court is imposing a sentence that is sufficient, but not greater than necessary," he said, citing federal sentencing guidelines.

Ressam was arrested as he crossed the US-Canadian border with a carload of explosives which prosecutors said he planned to detonate at Los Angeles's busy airport in a spectacular eve-of-Millennium attack.

He was convicted of nine counts connected to the plot in April 2001, but sentencing was delayed until 2005 as US authorities sought his cooperation to help uncover information about other global terror suspects.

Ressam was eventually jailed for 22 years, but his sentence was vacated after he successfully challenged his conviction on one of the charges -- relating to declarations made to customs officials -- on technical grounds.

In January 2007, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld his appeal and ordered the entire sentence be sent back to a lower court for resentencing.

A judge reaffirmed the 22-year sentence in 2008, prompting a new appeal by prosecutors, resulting in the sentence being quashed in February 2010.

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There's a big story by Greg Miller in the Washington Post on how the Obama administration has expanded its powers in the War on Terror.

Miller notes that the legal foundation for U.S. counterterrorism strategy is partially based on "the Congressional authorization to use military force" (AUMF) that was passed after 9/11.

Specifically it seems to be based on an interpretation of the AUMF that was "reaffirmed" by the indefinite detention clause of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). 

This explains why Obama is fighting so hard to keep the indefinite detention clause in effect.

In court the government argued that the indefinite detention clause is simply a "reaffirmation" of the Authorization Use Of Military Force (AUMF), which gives the president authority "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those ... [who] aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons." In the NDAA lawsuit, the government argued that the NDAA §1021 is simply an "affirmation" or "reaffirmation" of the AUMF.

But the NDAA adds language to the AUMF when it says "The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in the aid of such enemy forces."

That extra part is what Judge Katherine Forrest ruled unconstitutionally vague. And since Judge Forrest was careful to protect the AUMF in her permanent injunction, the government should be OK with that decision if the AUMF and NDAA indefinite detention powers are precisely the same.

Tangerine Bolen, an activist and plaintiff on the NDAA lawsuit, told us that the government's reaction raised "significant red flags" that the indefinite detention clause is "a retroactive legislative fix ...[that] allows them to continue to arbitrarily apply indefinite detention to whomever they wish, whenever they wish, for whatever reasons they wish without being held accountable."

Thus a victory for the plaintiffs in the NDAA lawsuit would strike down unjustified indefinite detention powers that the government has been claiming for years.

"Our lawsuit is the lock on Pandora's box," Bolen said. "And Pandora's box is the overly broad application of the AUMF… [Blocking NDAA §1021] is to suddenly and sharply delimit powers upon which President Obama has come to rely wrongfully. He never should've had these powers. Bush never should've had these powers."

The Post notes that critics of Obama's secret drone war argue that its legal justifications have become much weaker as "the drone campaign has expanded far beyond the core group of al-Qaeda operatives ... [and] officials see an array of emerging threats beyond Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — the three countries where almost all U.S. drone strikes have occurred."

Bolen argues that the "irreparable harm" is that the permanent injunction would be "exposing illegal activities for the last decade. It could have such a set of ripple consequences: we could see people in the Bush administration, Obama administration and security agencies be investigated for how they have applied the AUMF. Obama could finally be forced to release all the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared for years. It's an incredible headache for him."

SEE ALSO:  The NDAA Legalizes The Use Of Propaganda On The US Public >

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Rajat Gupta was sentenced to two years in prison and one year supervised release by Judge Jed Rakoff moments ago, Bloomberg News reports.

Gupta was convicted of passing illegal tips to disgraced Galleon chief Raj Rajaratnam while serving on the boards of Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble. 

The sentencing guidelines called for a 121-month maximum sentence, according to Bloomberg News. 

Gupta's attorney Gary Naftalis had asked that his client go to Rwanda for community service instead of serve time in prison, DealBook reported last week.  

Back in June, Gupta, 63, a former McKinsey & Co. exec and former Goldman Sachs board member, was convicted of insider trading, conspiracy and securities fraud by a U.S. jury.  

Rajaratnam is currently serving 11 years in prison for orchestrating one of the largest insider trading schemes in history.

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Indiana can’t block state-administered Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood just because the organization provides abortions, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, upholding the crux of a lower court order that said the state can’t deny patients the right to choose their own health care provider.

Though federal law already prohibits states from using federal funds to provide abortions– and Indiana has similar laws on the books with regard to state funds– the Wall Street Journal reports that Indiana went a step further to say that any organization that provides abortions is also ineligible for funding. 

In their estimation, even if the bills are earmarked for a different procedure, it’s still indirect funding since it covers costs in other areas.

Planned Parenthood immediately challenged the law with help from the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana.  District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt blocked the state from enforcing the law in June 2011, so the flow of taxpayer cash continued.

The state appealed that order– reiterating that in providing money to Planned Parenthood, it is indirectly funding abortion– but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld the core portion of Pratt’s order Tuesday.

“The de-funding law excludes Planned Parenthood from Medicaid for a reason unrelated to its fitness to provide medical services, violating its patients’ statutory right to obtain medical care from the qualified provider of their choice,” the ruling reads, essentially saying it interferes with a person’s ability to choose their own doctor.

Bryan Corbin, a spokesman for the Indiana attorney general’s office, said the state was reviewing the appeals court opinion. The state can either ask the full court to review the panel’s ruling or appeal directly to the Supreme Court. The governor’s office did not return phone calls Tuesday morning seeking comment.

The ACLU said the appeals court decision was a victory, above all, for women.

“This law was an attempt by politicians to punish organizations that are providing legal services,” Talcott Camp, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a news release. “Elected officials should not place politics above women’s health.”

The appeals court also said Pratt needed to modify other sections of her order that ACLU attorney Ken Falk said dealt with revenue sources other than Medicaid.

“Ending funding for birth control, well-woman exams, or cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood health centers is badly out of touch with the needs of American women and families,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in an emailed statement. “That is why the public stands with Planned Parenthood, just as the court did today.”

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Think divorce in the United States is hard? Try ending your marriage in two countries at once.

Red tape, financial obstructions and cultural differences are just a few of the added problems faced by a divorcing American who is a dual citizen, living abroad or married to a citizen of another country.

There are no statistics on how many Americans deal with divorce and dual citizenship, but it is a growing trend due to custody issues, says Ken Altshuler, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

"We're seeing more parental kidnappings, more conflict, more litigation and simply more to fight about," says Altshuler. "Back in, say, 1975, or even in the 1980s, if a woman wanted to move her kid to Brazil, she would have, and nobody would have challenged that because the man was not going to win."

Keep reading the article on Reuters >  

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A lawsuit-happy Manhattan mega-attorney is suing his daughter for defamation after she asked the state to audit her trust fund.

Richard Fischbein, 70, is suing his daughter Beth Fischbein-Bodner for $3 million after she claimed he and her stepmother so badly mishandled her trust fund that Fischbein-Bodner was left with only $114,000, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.

Fischbein-Bodner, who got her start working at her father's firm after he paid for her law school, asked the New York State Surrogate's Court to audit her fund — something her father called "silly."

Fischbein made his fortune representing Donald Trump, the Black Panthers, and Tupac Shakur's estate. He's also been the plaintiff in at least 21 lawsuits since 1977, according to the Daily News, which cited court records.

He claims he paid for his daughter's private schools, law school, and all other living expenses and once the audit was finished, Fischbein-Bodner would actually owe him money.

"However, he will not asked for it to be reimbursed," Fischbein's attorney told the Daily News.

Well, that's generous of him.

As Above The Law pointed out, it might not be the best idea for Fischbein-Bodner to make these kinds of public accusations against her father this late in his life.

"One has to wonder: why is she making such public accusations against her father, knowing that he is (1) presumably wealthy and (2) 70 years old? This won’t exactly endear her to dad when he’s making up a new will," the legal insider blog mused.

DON'T MISS: Professional Models Are Accusing Top Agencies Of Massive Fraud >

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The world is actually a significant safer place than it was a year ago, at least when it comes to terrorist attacks.

Recent high-profile terrorist attacks like the one that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi have left the world reeling and worrying about a new spate of attacks across the globe.

But that isn't actually the case, according to the FBI's recently released 2011 Report on Terrorism.

The report found that the total number of attacks worldwide last year fell by nearly 12 percent from 2010 and nearly 29 percent from 2007.

That means the number of attacks in 2011 actually hit a five-year low.

That being said, more than 10,000 attacks were carried out last year, killing more than 12,500 people.

Unsurprisingly, Afghanistan experienced the most attacks of any country. But India, Russia, the Philippines, and Thailand also rounded out the top 15 countries.

DON'T MISS: American Teen Says The NYPD Paid Him To Trick Muslims Into Looking Like Terrorists >

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For years Tory Burch and her ex-husband, Christopher, have been embroiled in an ugly legal spat.

It appears that things just got even worse. 

The beef between the Burches is over him trying to sell his stake in her $2 billion fashion brand and her saying that his company, C. Wonder, copied her eponymous brand. 

Tory Burch's attorney just offered the most candid comments anyone's made in the case so far. 

“Tory Burch is saying it won’t let Christopher Burch sell out his interest and get hundreds of millions of dollars and continue to compete against the company [via C. Wonder],” Marc Wolinsky told Women's Wear Daily. “This guy ripped off Tory Burch. His product looks like our product, his stores look like our stores.”

Christopher argues that his C. Wonder merchandise is much cheaper than Tory Burch and therefore is marketed to a completely different customer. 

And there's the matter of him getting her business off the ground. 

Tory had no design or business experience when Christopher, a longtime veteran of the retail industry, invested millions into her company. 

He had sold his own apparel company for $60 million back in the eighties. Since then, he's invested in and helped start dozens of retail companies. 

Eight years after Christopher helped Tory start her line, she owns a $2 billion empire. 

But Christopher just wants to move on with his life, according to WWD. 

"“The last thing Chris wanted to do was have a lawsuit against the Tory Burch company. He has a lot of his wealth invested in it,” his attorney said. "Chris is a reluctant plaintiff in this case." 

DON'T MISS: How Tory Burch Created A $2 Billion Empire In Less Than A Decade > 

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This weekend's tragic shooting at a Wisconsin spa opened the door to a flood of questions about how a man with a restraining order against him was able to purchase a gun.

Radcliffe Haughton reportedly killed three people and wounded four Sunday at the Azana Salon & Spa before fatally shooting himself.

Federal law prohibited Haughton from buying a gun because of his restraining order.

But a loophole in Wisconsin law let him purchase a firearm through a private seller without undergoing a background check, the AP reported.

And recent reports reveal the classified site that ran the private seller's ad, Armslist.com, was actually investigated by New York City in 2011 for its questionable business practices.

In its "Point, Click, Fire" investigation of illegal online gun sales, NYC investigators found that 62 percent of private gun sellers, most of them online, agreed to sell a gun to a customer who admitted he probably couldn't pass a background check.

And some of the worst offenders were unlicensed sellers on Armslist.com.

The report found a number of high-powered rifles, like a Ruger Mini 14 assault rifle, for sale on Armslist.com

In one videotaped phone call, an undercover investigator asked a seller who advertised a gun on Armslist if he was "one of those licensed guys" and admitted he couldn't pass a background check — to which the seller only laughed.

"No, I just take cash, and there you go!" the seller said while laughing.

Armslist.com boasted 54,745 active listings as of Thursday. In Wisconsin alone, the site is advertising Rugers, a Bushmaster AR-15 and a Remington 7600 pump 270.

We were unable to reach Armslist for comment but the site does instruct sellers to "always comply with local, state, federal, and international law."

DON'T MISS: How The Denver Shooting Will Shape The Debate On Gun Control >

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For two years the Obama administration has been secretly developing a "disposition matrix" that draws on all known information about suspected terrorists and provides advice on how to pursue them, reports Greg Miller of the Washington Post.

The "single, continually evolving database," is being developed and run by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

But that's not the only thing they track. SInce its formation in 2003, NCTC has run a "massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States," according to the ACLU.

So the same people running the new kill list are also in the domestic spying business, and they can also pull data from other government agencies in name of national security.

The NCTC matrix serves to harmonize the separate CIA and Pentagon kills lists while also providing strategies to kill or capture individuals who appear on those lists based on how each fits into the matrix. 

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official told the Post.

The nation's other domestic spying apparatus, exposed by National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney, tracks all kinds of electronic activities—phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media—and map them to collect "all the attributes that any individual has" to build a profile based on that data.

The NCTC goes further to collect "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records" because "literally anything the government collects would be fair game," the ACLU notes.

ACLU's legislative counsel Chris Calabrese calls it a "reboot of the Total Information Awareness Program that Americans rejected so vigorously right after 9/11."

What this means, Glenn Greenwald explains, is that "the NCTC — now vested with the power to determine the proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects — is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens."

In other words, welcome to the matrix.

SEE ALSO: Why Losing Indefinite Detention Powers Would Be A Disaster For Obama >

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Gloria Allred dropped her big October surprise this week.

The news about Mitt Romney's testimony in a divorce is a little anti-climactic, but Allred is getting tons of press nonetheless.

How does she manage to take up so much of the spotlight? Here's a quick history of her ascent.

• Allred, a former high school teacher, graduated from LA's Loyola Law School when she was almost 33 years old. She went on to become a representative for the National Organization of Women, according to this New York Magazine profile.
• She had one of her first brushes with stardom in 1979, when she was photographed walking into a press conference with Patty Hearst, arguably history's most famous kidnapping victim.
• Allred was relatively low on the national media radar in the 1980s. But she stepped back into the spotlight the following decade, representing a former Melrose Place star who got canned, as well as the family of Nicole Brown Simpson.
• In the aughts, she began injecting herself into political campaigns. In 2003, Allred represented a Hollywood stuntwoman in her sexual harassment suit against Arnold Schwarzenegger, CNN reported at the time. The Terminator was still elected for governor that year.
• During the recent Republican primaries Allred did her part to take down presidential hopeful Herman Cain before moving in on Romney during the general election.

Allred seems to have a talent for grabbing cases that will attract headlines, and a blog post today on Legal Insurrection, claims she tries to endear herself to media and politics alike.

Back in the 1990s, journalist Joel Engel was writing a piece for The New York Times about media celebrities and their "pet causes." He got Allred on the phone by dropping the Grey Lady's name.

Allred began chatting cheerily and said, according to Engel, "As I said, just the other day to President William Jefferson Clinton, in my private meeting with him in the Oval Office ..."

It does not appear that Allred ever represented Monica Lewinsky.

SEE ALSO: An Ex-Staffer's Revelation Could Doom A Law School Accused Of Massive Fraud

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Airline fees have become something of a universal certainty — along with death and taxes. 

That is why when a 25-year-old Stanford grad coded a simple website to check him in automatically 24 hours before a flight, Southwest Airlines sent him a cease-and-desist letter threatening to sue him, according to NBC. 

He took it down immediately, although he says he disagrees with Southwest.

What the airline claims Nikil Viswanathan did was create a website that competed with its own $10 "Early Bird" check-in option, which allows passengers to choose seats before everyone else.

Viswanathan wrote up the code in less than an hour back in January, and at the beginning of October, he created the CheckIntoMyFlight.com domain for it.

That is when it exploded — by the first week of the month, the site had 5,000 visits, Viswanathan writes on the now defunct website. 

Following his short, but much publicized conflict with Southwest, the coder received and turned down job offers from Expedia and Facebook.

“My favorite question is, ‘What would you do if you had unlimited time, unlimited money?’ And it’s like, exactly what I’m doing right now," he told NBC.

SEE ALSO: FBI Reports A Startling Decline In Global Terrorism >

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A New York cop was charged Wednesday in a strange alleged plan to kidnap at least 100 women, including his girlfriend, and cook them, ABC reported first.

The FBI found e-mails and instant messages between Gilberto Valle, 28, and an alleged co-conspirator, also talking about holding at least one woman for ransom, according to the complaint.

One of the more disturbing messages was:

Co-conspirator: "How big is your oven?"

Valle: "Big enough to fit one of these girls if I folded their legs."

While searching Valle's computer, agents said they found files containing the names and at least one photo of more than 100 women.

Valle used the police database to find the targets, according to the complaint.

The Queens officer was suspended immediately upon his arrest and Commissioner Ray Kelly said that the NYPD is reviewing Valle's background to see if anything could have warned the department, according to ABC.

Here are some other disturbing alleged messages between Valle and the unidentified co-conspirator:

July 9 — CC-1: It's really hard to dislocate (lock) a jaw." Valle: "I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus."

July 19 — CC-1: "How was your meal?" Valle: "I am meeting her on sunday."

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In today's legal job market, you might not have much choice about where you live after graduation.

You have to go where the jobs are.

But, according to The National Jurist's most recent ranking of the worst cities for young attorneys, you might want to avoid Little Rock, Ark., at all costs.

Median salary is only $54,000 and the city boasts only 570 law firms.

When students are graduating with $75,700 to $125,000 in debt, that minuscule salary won't be going very far.

The median age of Little Rock dwellers is around 35 years old and around 195,314 people live in the city, according to the most recent Census.

The city boasts only 45 bars, which is hardly anything to write home about given its nearly 200,000 residents.

Maybe A  Move To Texas Is In Order? This Texas Firm Is Paying Unprecedented Salaries To Its First-Year Associates >

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The United Nations is to set up a dedicated investigations unit in Geneva early next year to examine the legality of drone attacks in cases where civilians are killed in so-called "targeted" counter-terrorism operations.

The announcement was made by Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, in a speech to Harvard law school in which he condemned secret rendition and waterboarding as crimes under international law. His forthright comments, directed at both US presidential candidates, will be seen as an explicit challenge to the prevailing US ideology of the global war on terror.

Earlier this summer, Emmerson, who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN, called for effective investigations into drone attacks. Some US drone strikes in Pakistan may amount to war crimes, Emmerson warned.

In his Harvard speech, he said: "If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms … then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act.

"Together with my colleague Christof Heyns, [the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings], I will be launching an investigation unit within the special procedures of the [UN] Human Rights Council to inquire into individual drone attacks."

The investigation unit will also look at "other forms of targeted killing conducted in counter-terrorism operations, in which it is alleged that civilian casualties have been inflicted". Emmerson maintained that the US stance that it can conduct counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida or other groups anywhere in the world because it is deemed to be an international conflict was indefensible.

"The global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law," he said. "It has also given a spurious justification to a range of serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.

"The [global] war paradigm was always based on the flimsiest of reasoning, and was not supported even by close allies of the US. The first-term Obama administration initially retreated from this approach, but over the past 18 months it has begun to rear its head once again, in briefings by administration officials seeking to provide a legal justification for the drone programme of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia …

"[It is] alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view."

Emmerson singled out both President Obama and the Republican challenger Mitt Romney for criticism. "It is perhaps surprising that the position of the two candidates on this issue has not even featured during their presidential elections campaigns, and got no mention at all in Monday night's foreign policy debate.

"We now know that the two candidates are in agreement on the use of drones. But the issue of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques is an one which, according to the record, continues to divide them.

"I should make it absolutely clear that my mandate does not see to eye to eye with the Obama administration on a range of issues – not least the lack of transparency over the drone programme. But on this issue the president has been clear since he took office that water-boarding is torture that it is contrary to American values and that it would stop.

"... But Governor Romney has said that he does not believe that waterboarding is torture. He has said that he would allow enhanced interrogation techniques that go beyond those now permitted by the army field manual, and his security advisers have recommended that he rescind the existing restrictions."

The Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, he pointed out, used the technique. "Anyone who is in doubt about whether waterboarding is torture should visit Tuol Sleng, the infamous S-21 detention facility operated by the Khymer Rouge in Phnom Penh.

"Over a period of four years 14,000 people were systematically tortured and killed there. It is now a genocide museum. And right there, in the middle of the central torturing room, is the apparatus used by Pol Pot's security officials for waterboarding."

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