Because the Agriculture Department tests only a small percentage of cows for the deadly disease, Kansas meatpacker Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. The government says it can't.

Larger meat companies worry that if Creekstone is allowed to perform the test and advertise its meat as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday overturned a lower court ruling that would have cleared the way for the testing. The appeals court said restricting the test is within the scope of the government's authority.

Mexico City is one of the few places in Latin America that allows abortion without limitations in the first trimester, although abortion rights groups complain most doctors still refuse to do the procedure.

Within minutes of the 8-3 vote in favor of the law, abortion rights groups were thinking of ways to expand the decision to other parts of Mexico and even Latin America, where abortion is virtually unheard of.

"It opens the road for all of Latin America to start visualizing legal paths to abortion," said Raffaella Schiavon, who directs the international abortion rights group Ipas and has been advising the city government.

Mexico City officials said they were preparing to help other local governments in the region interested in approving similar laws.

Elsewhere in Mexico, abortion is allowed only in cases of rape, when the mother's life is in danger or if the fetus has severe deformities. That is standard across Latin America, where only Cuba and Guyana allow abortions without restrictions in the first trimester. Nicaragua banned abortion in all cases in 2006.

Anti-abortion groups were mobilizing to fight other local attempts to legalize abortion.

William Moffitt of Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday filed the lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court. Moffitt was hired by Kilpatrick in February and replaced before Kilpatrick was charged with perjury in March. Moffitt contends in the lawsuit that Kilpatrick has continually refused to pay the bill.

Mayoral spokesman Marcus Reese told the Detroit Free Press it's unfortunate Moffitt decided to air an administrative issue in public, and his office will respond accordingly.

Kilpatrick faces eight felony counts in the perjury case and two felony counts in a separate assault case.

Hundreds of detainees are awaiting hearings in a Washington federal court in the coming months to determine whether they were properly labeled enemy combatants and imprisoned without being charged.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who has said he wants to resolve the 24 cases assigned to him before the next president is sworn in, urged President Bush's administration to find a way for at least part of those cases to be held in public.

"If it can't be done, I have great concern that these hearings will be virtually or exclusively classified, closed to the public and, I might add, to the detainees," Leon said.

Leon said he would try to run a secure phone line from the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to his courtroom so the detainees can listen to the hearing. Because prisoners are prohibited from hearing classified information, however, that effort would be useless if the entire hearing were classified.

Tharin Gartrell is due in Arapaho County Court on Thursday.

Authorities say police found scoped rifles, wigs, fake IDs and a bulletproof vest in the 28-year-old's rented truck after he was pulled over in the Denver area last weekend, ahead of the Democratic National Convention there. The resulting investigation led to the arrest of Gartrell and two other men who authorities say talked about killing Obama.

The U.S. Attorney's Office later said Gartrell and the other men were drug users making racists threats and had no firm assassination plot, and no capacity to carry out any attack.

Parish, an economist who once taught at Charleston Southern, filed a financial affidavit last week seeking help in appealing his federal 24-year prison sentence.

An order filed Tuesday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., assigns the Parish criminal appeal to the public defender.

Parish pleaded guilty last year to two criminal counts of fraud and one count of lying to investigators. Sentenced June 26 and now serving time in a federal prison in North Carolina, Parish has filed a notice of appeal with the 4th Circuit.

While he was also ordered to repay $66 million that investors lost, a judgment in a companion civil suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission and filed in federal court last week indicates only a portion of the money went for his personal use.

Parish personally benefited from only $7.7 million, said Alex Rue, the senior trial counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission office in Atlanta.

The court order requires him to repay that money, along with prejudgment interest, for a total of $8.3 million.

The judgment is in addition to the $66 million Parish was ordered to repay in the criminal case, said David Dantzler, the attorney helping tally Parish's assets. He said that, when everything is counted, investors will likely only recover a dime on the dollar.

Attorney Andy Savage, who represented Parish during the district court proceedings, said the $7.7 million is important.

The ballot question essentially will ask voters to prohibit the practice of same-sex marriage, which was approved this year by the California Supreme Court.

The discrepancy between voters' general attitudes against gay marriage and their position on banning it could be explained by a hesitancy to remove a constitutional right, said Mark Baldassare, president and chief executive of the Public Policy Institute of California, which conducted the poll.

A majority of likely voters, 54 percent, oppose ending gay marriage, compared with 40 percent who support it, the poll said. The result is similar to the findings of a Field Poll in July, which found that 51 percent of likely California voters opposed ending gay marriage, while 42 percent said they supported it.

But when it comes to general attitudes about gay marriage, voters in the Public Policy Institute poll are evenly split, at 47 percent for and against — as they have been for the past three years.