U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent was sentenced to 33 months Monday. He was also fined $1,000 and ordered to pay $6,550 in restitution to the two women whose complaints resulted in the first sex abuse case against a sitting federal judge.

Kent could have received up to 20 years in prison after admitting to obstruction of justice, but prosecutors said they wouldn't seek more than three years under a plea agreement.

"Your wrongful conduct is a huge black X ... a stain on the judicial system itself, a matter of concern in the federal courts," U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson said as he imposed the sentence. Vinson is a visiting senior judge called in from Pensacola, Fla.

Kent pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in February as jury selection for his trial was about to begin. He had been charged with obstruction and five sex-crime counts alleging that he groped his secretary and his former case manager. Conviction on the most serious of those charges could have sent him to prison for life.

The European Commission is expected to make one of the most significant antitrust decisions in its history on Wednesday when it punishes computer chip-maker Intel for stifling competition from smaller rivals.


The official line is that the case is still ongoing, but one person close to the competition department said on condition of anonymity on Friday that the 27 commissioners will conclude the case, which has been under investigation since 2000, at their next weekly meeting on Wednesday. Intel is the latest giant from the IT industry to be slapped down by Europe's top competition regulator. Like Microsoft five years ago and IBM in the 1980s, Intel claims it is simply doing what any company would, only better. While IBM settled with the regulator, agreeing to change the way it competed in the market for mainframe computers, Microsoft and Intel have stuck to their guns. Consequently Microsoft was fined [euro]497 million (US$663.4 million) for abusing its dominant position in the software market, plus an additional [euro]1.2 billion for failing to respect the antitrust ruling.

Sun Microsystems shareholders filed three separate lawsuits last month in an effort to halt the company's pending sale to Oracle, according to a filing Sun made with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission Friday. The suits, filed in Santa Clara County, California, superior court, name Sun, some of its officials and Oracle as defendants. All three actions are aimed at blocking the US$7.4 billion sale, alleging the price tag is "unfair and inadequate." The defendants have yet to file answers to the complaints, according to Sun. More information about the lawsuits wasn't immediately available.

All appeared quiet at Demjanjuk's home in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills as his wife tended to her lilac bush and an unidentified man visited Saturday, one day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers delivered the notice.

It is the most recent development in a complex 32-year case linking Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN'-yuk) to World War II atrocities. An arrest warrant in Munich accuses the native Ukrainian of 29,000 counts of accessory to murder at Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland, one of the infamous, horrific sites of the Holocaust.

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens had refused Thursday, without comment, to deal with the case.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said there are no plans to appeal to another Supreme Court justice. He said such a move might be seen as a delay tactic, a claim made by the U.S. government about other Demjanjuk appeals.

Hsu, 58 years old, pleaded guilty to five counts of mail fraud and five counts of wire fraud at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in Manhattan.

"I would use later investments to pay off earlier investments, so as to create the impression that my investment strategy was operating properly when, in fact, it was not," Hsu said. "I knew what I was doing was illegal,"

Jury selection is scheduled on the four remaining counts of campaign finance fraud in his case beginning Monday.

Hsu faces up to 20 years in prison on the mail and wire fraud charges.

Alan Seidler, Hsu's lawyer, said Hsu made the plea without having a plea agreement with the government.

Prosecutors had alleged Hsu falsely represented to investors that his companies - Components Ltd. and Next Components Ltd. - were in the business of extending short-term financing to companies and promised short-term, high-return investments.

Between 1997 and August 2007, the government claims Hsu convinced investors to entrust him with at least $60 million in a Ponzi scheme. After repaying some investors their principal and interest, Hsu allegedly swindled other investors out of at least $20 million, prosecutors said.

During his plea, Hsu said the scheme began in 1999.

Prosecutors also have alleged Hsu, in order to raise his public profile, pressured some investors between 2004 and 2007 to individually contribute thousands of dollars to candidates for president and Congress whom Hsu supported.

In some cases, Hsu allegedly reimbursed investors for making political contributions with proceeds from the scam, prosecutors said.

In 2007, Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign agreed to return $850,000 in funds raised through Hsu. Clinton, who was running for president at the time, has since been named U.S. Secretary of State.

A Los Angeles judge has blasted one of the nation's leading plaintiffs firms in asbestos litigation for attempting to obtain an upper hand in the case through what he called a "type of judicially sanctioned extortion."

The judge's statements came in a lawsuit filed by Waters & Kraus on behalf of a Los Angeles man who died of mesothelioma in December 2007. Six months before, the man had been deposed in Texas, where the case was first filed. The case has since been re-filed in California. During the past month, industrial product manufacturer Crane Co. sought to exclude the man's deposition from the case. In court papers, Crane argued that the information gleaned from the deposition, which under Texas law is limited to six hours, was insufficient to obtain summary judgment in California.

On April 7, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Aurelio Munoz, while refusing to grant summary judgment, concluded that Waters & Kraus had re-filed the case in California intentionally as a means to force a settlement. Calling such tactics a "waste of the court's time," Munoz noted that Waters & Kraus has played the same "grisly game of asbestos litigation" in at least nine cases.

Peter Kraus, managing partner of Dallas-based Waters & Kraus, told The National Law Journal that the judge "got it 180 degrees wrong." While not denying the firm's actions, Kraus said that its attorneys must file asbestos cases in jurisdictions where ailing clients don't have to endure lengthy depositions.

"And if they die, the facts necessary to prove their case die with them," he said.

Lawyers for Crane, in an April 24 appellate petition, said that the dispute could affect "potentially hundreds of pending and future asbestos personal injury and wrongful death actions in California."

"I definitely think this is something the defense and plaintiff's bar are going to watch very, very closely, and it will have very important ramifications regardless of whichever way it goes," said Alexandra Epand, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Nixon Peabody who handles asbestos litigation.

Hsu, 58 years old, pleaded guilty to five counts of mail fraud and five counts of wire fraud at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in Manhattan.

"I would use later investments to pay off earlier investments, so as to create the impression that my investment strategy was operating properly when, in fact, it was not," Hsu said. "I knew what I was doing was illegal,"

Jury selection is scheduled on the four remaining counts of campaign finance fraud in his case beginning Monday.

Hsu faces up to 20 years in prison on the mail and wire fraud charges.

Alan Seidler, Hsu's lawyer, said Hsu made the plea without having a plea agreement with the government.

Prosecutors had alleged Hsu falsely represented to investors that his companies - Components Ltd. and Next Components Ltd. - were in the business of extending short-term financing to companies and promised short-term, high-return investments.

Between 1997 and August 2007, the government claims Hsu convinced investors to entrust him with at least $60 million in a Ponzi scheme. After repaying some investors their principal and interest, Hsu allegedly swindled other investors out of at least $20 million, prosecutors said.

During his plea, Hsu said the scheme began in 1999.

Prosecutors also have alleged Hsu, in order to raise his public profile, pressured some investors between 2004 and 2007 to individually contribute thousands of dollars to candidates for president and Congress whom Hsu supported.

In some cases, Hsu allegedly reimbursed investors for making political contributions with proceeds from the scam, prosecutors said.