South Dakota voters Tuesday rejected a controversial law banning most abortions  passed by the state legislature earlier this year. With 818 out of 818 precincts reporting Wednesday, the final unofficial results for Referred Law 6 were:

NO 185948 56%
YES 148666 44%

The abortion ban, seen as a direct challenge to the US Supreme Court's abortion precedents, was placed on the South Dakota ballot after an advocacy group gathered more than 37,000 signatures on a petition to force a referendum. The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit had already upheld a preliminary injunction against the law's enforcement pending a lawsuit.

Thanks to "Google Bombing," or "Google Washing," an attempt to influence the page ranking in search results by clicking on certain articles or Web sites purposely and repeatedly, candidates' supporters can influence the kind of exposure their opponents get in the online world.

Since the 2004 U.S. presidential election, this new campaign tactic has become another major means for election campaigning along with the "old school" television advertisements.

It's the same kind of attack method, but a bit more subtle.

The new method became so popular that the term "Google Bombing" was introduced in the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005.

This is how it works: Depending on how many times a link is clicked in Google, its page rank goes up, and when the same words are searched, the search engine automatically generates on top of the list the page that was visited most often.

Taking advantage of this function, "Google Bombers" purposely click away on the same negative articles on candidates their choice is competing against, so that when voters log on to find out more information on candidates, they are met with unpleasant stories.

One famous example is on the U.S. President George W. Bush. You type in "miserable failure" and you are directed to many results linking you to the president.

It is unclear where those words came from but its first public application related to the Bush administration was by Dick Gephardt, who claimed during a discussion, "This president is a miserable failure on foreign policy; and on the economy. And he's got to be replaced."

The mid-term election is not an exception for manipulating Google data.

If you google George Allen, a Republican U.S. senator from Virginia who is running to keep his seat, many negative articles such as "Allen Quip Provokes Outrage, Apology" show up right below the link to his official Web site.

Google, one of the most powerful search engines, has responded that it will not alter the results (or other Google bombed results) because it wished to preserve the integrity of its search engine.

As for the new tactic's effectiveness, Chris Bowers, who is an author of the popular liberal blog MyDD.com and conceived of the Google Bombing project aimed at 70 Republican candidates, cast doubts.

"I think Internet users are very smart and most are aware of what a Google Bomb is," he said in an interview with the New York Times. "And they will be aware that results can be massaged a bit."

Delaware Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden ordered a man who twice exposed himself to a 10-year-old girl at his workplace to wear a T-shirt with the words: "I am a registered sex offender" in bold letters, a prosecutor said.

Russell Teeter, 69, who pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent exposure, also was sentenced to 60 days in jail.

Deputy Attorney General Donald Roberts said Teeter had at least 10 prior convictions dating back to 1976 for exposing himself to children and had been diagnosed as a compulsive exhibitionist. Roberts requested the unusual T-shirt punishment because he was concerned about Teeter exposing himself to children at the gardening business he runs with his wife. "This is a unique way to let his customers know that he is a sex offender," Roberts told Reuters.

Teeter, will have to wear the T-shirt at work for 22 months after he gets out of jail. He has 30 days to appeal the sentence. Teeter's attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.

Breaking legal News.com
Robin Sheen
Staff Writer

WASHINGTON - (USDOJ) A former employee of a construction company that has contracts with the U.S. Air Force in Iraq, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan to a one-count criminal information, the Department of Justice announced today.

Samir F. Mahmoud, 56, of Bloomfield, Mich., pleaded guilty to charges of making a false statement stemming from an investigation into possible violations of the Anti-Kickback Act. U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen set a sentencing date for February 2, 2007.

According to the information filed in September 2006, on July 17, 2006, Mahmoud was interviewed by special agents from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regarding allegations of illegal payments and gifts offered to company employees in exchange for promised assistance in obtaining, retaining or altering the Air Force contracts and subcontracts associated with the reconstruction of Iraq. During the interview Mahmoud willfully made materially false statements in that he denied providing gifts to other company employees when he had offered and provided things of value to at least one company employee.

The maximum sentence for a charge of making a false statement is up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

In October 2006, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty announced the formation of a National Procurement Fraud Task Force designed to promote the early detection, identification, prevention and prosecution of procurement fraud associated with the increase in contracting activity for national security and other governmental programs. The Procurement Fraud Task Force chaired by Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division includes the FBI, the U.S. Inspectors General Community, the Executive Office of the United States Attorneys and others.

The case was prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Nathaniel Edmonds and Stacey Luck of the Criminal Division's Fraud Section.

NEW YORK - (ACLU) The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Employment Law Project and the Transnational Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law today filed a petition urging the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to find the United States in violation of its universal human rights obligations by failing to protect millions of undocumented workers from exploitation and discrimination in the workplace.

The petition was submitted to the commission on behalf of the United Mine Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Interfaith Justice Network and six immigrant workers who are representative of the six million undocumented workers in the United States labor force.

"The most poorly paid and least desirable jobs in the United States are filled by undocumented immigrants, yet the government increasingly limits the safeguards available to this population, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and workplace discrimination," said Claudia Flores, an attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. "The United States government has an obligation under universal human rights norms to protect vulnerable populations, such as immigrant women, and has failed in this regard."

Undocumented immigrants make up nearly five percent of the U.S. labor force. However, employment and labor protections under state laws have been either eliminated or severely limited for undocumented workers in some states. These include such basic workplace protections as freedom from workplace discrimination and entitlement to hold an employer responsible for a workplace injury.

"International human rights law requires the United States to apply its workplace protections equally and without discrimination based on immigration status. We bring this petition to cast a global spotlight on the U.S. government’s poor human rights record in protecting undocumented workers from discrimination and to demand accountability from states and the federal government, all of whom are obligated to protect and defend human rights," said Chandra Bhatnagar, a staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program.

The individuals named in today’s petition have each tried to assert their workplace rights but were unsuccessful. They are:

Melissa L., a woman who had to leave her job in New Jersey when workplace sexual harassment became intolerable. She filed a claim against her employer, but because