High court upholds Ariz. employer law

High court upholds Ariz. employer law

PHOENIX

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld an Arizona law that penalizes businesses for hiring workers in the country illegally, buoying the hopes of supporters of state crackdowns on illegal immigration.

They predicted the ruling would lead to many other states’ passing laws that require employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check that workers aren’t illegal immigrants. And some said the ruling bodes well for the prospects of a much broader and more controversial immigration law in Arizona, known as SB1070, to be found constitutional.

The state is appealing a ruling blocking portions of that law from taking effect.

Judge voids Wis. union law

MADISON, Wis.

The fight over stripping collective-bargaining rights from Wisconsin’s public workers will move into the state Supreme Court, and possibly back into the Legislature, after a judge ruled Thursday to strike down the law that passed despite massive protests that paralyzed the Capitol.

Republican backers of Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal said they were confident the state Supreme Court would overturn the judge’s ruling that the law is void because lawmakers broke open-meetings statutes during the approval process. She temporarily had blocked the law shortly after it passed in March.

The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear arguments in the case June 6. Republicans who control the Legislature also could pass the measure a second time to avoid the open-meeting violations.

Mladic arrested on war-crimes charges

BELGRADE, Serbia

After 16 years on the run, a frail and haggard Ratko Mladic was hauled before a judge Thursday — the first step in facing charges for international war crimes, including the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.

No longer the fearsome, bull-necked military commander, Mladic was arrested by intelligence agents in a raid before dawn at a relative’s house in a village in northern Serbia. The act was trumpeted by the government as a victory for a country worthy of European Union membership and Western embrace.

Mladic, 69, was one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives. He was the top commander of the Bosnian Serb army during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which killed more than 100,000 people and drove another 1.8 million from their homes.

2 NYPD officers acquitted of rape

NEW YORK

Two police officers were acquitted Thursday of raping a drunken woman they’d been called to help, with a jury convicting them only of misdemeanor official misconduct charges in a case that pitted a stunning claim of police abuse against the officers’ insistence that it simply didn’t happen.

Looking exhausted but relieved as they left court, Officers Franklin Mata and Kenneth Moreno said they felt vindicated by the verdict, though it could send them to jail and immediately got them fired. Moreno called it both “a lesson and a win.”

“My intentions were, from the beginning, just to help her,” Moreno said. He was accused of raping the woman, with Mata serving as a lookout; the two had returned to her apartment three times after an initial call to help her get home.

Associated Press