"We had a successful magistrates ruling just before Christmas with one particular premises.
The case is the first of a recent wave of corruption investigations to make it to trial, and it is being watched closely to see if France's new and far more aggressive investigating magistrates will be successful in obtaining convictions.
If successful, this will be the second magistrate whom Mr. Alexander has forced to step down from the case, which has been postponed nine times since his arrest last September at his home outside Windhoek.
Watt's father, the treasurer and magistrate of Greenock, ran a successful ship- and house-building business.
In a nearly 700-page indictment issued last year, the Spanish investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón accused one of the Syrians, a successful businessman named Muhammad Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi, of distributing $800,000 for the Qaeda network under the cover of a Spanish real-estate development company.
A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world's most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms.
On June 1st, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, the man who contributed the phrase "We the People" to the preamble, expressed support for popular election, noting that "Experience, particularly in N. York & Massts, shewed that an election of the first magistrate by the people at large, was both a convenient & successful mode".
With a bachelor's from the University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from Tulane, he set off on a successful career in criminal defense and civil rights litigation, eventually serving as a magistrate judge for 7 years.
Under French law, the investigating magistrate can, in effect, overrule the state prosecution service but the chances of a successful prosecution are inevitably dimmed.
