A court in Hangzhou, a prosperous city in eastern Zhejiang province, sentenced Wang Rongqing on Wednesday on charges of subverting state power for organizing the banned China Democracy Party, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Wang was detained in June, two months before the Olympic Games started, the group said. Wang's brother, Wang Rongyao, confirmed the sentence. The Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court could not be immediately be reached for comment.

Wang has been repeatedly harassed and detained by police during his years of activism, which started in the late 1970s as China's hard-line Maoist era came to a close and some started calling for democracy. He was detained for two months in 1999.

"He was not in good physical condition and he stood in court with the assistance of the police, but he was in good spirits," said Zou Wei, a friend and fellow dissident of Wang who was in court Wednesday.

Founded by dissidents in mid-1998, the China Democracy Party was quashed just six months later by the Communist Party, which allows no challenge to its political monopoly. Dozens of activists were arrested and sentenced to up to 13 years in prison, most on charges of subverting state power.

Burris would be relying on a constitutional provision listing just three, easily met qualifications for the job and a 1969 Supreme Court decision rebuking the House for excluding an elected, though scandal-tarred, lawmaker.

So far, Senate leaders are unwilling to seat Burris because he was named by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, ensnared by allegations of corruption, to replace President-elect Barack Obama in the Senate.

Democrats and Obama have said the federal corruption charges against Blagojevich would strip credibility from anyone he appointed to the seat, although they do not question the integrity of Burris, a former Illinois attorney general. Blagojevich denies federal accusations that he tried to sell Obama's seat.

Senate Democrats are relying for the moment on a technicality — the refusal of the Illinois secretary of state to sign paperwork making Burris' appointment official. Burris' lawyers first are asking the state Supreme Court to take care of that problem.

But it is far from clear that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would then relent and welcome Burris as a new colleague.

Goldstein, 76, was among the thousands of investors who trusted Wall Street figure Bernard Madoff with their money while counting on federal regulators to protect the investing public from fraud.

"Somewhere inside of me was the thought that this was a regulated industry. It wasn't. The warning flags were just pushed aside," Goldstein told a House panel Monday.

Red flags were raised to the Securities and Exchange Commission over a decade but weren't pursued, and Republican and Democratic House members said that reflected deep, systemic problems at the market watchdog agency.

Goldstein, a retired New York fabrics distributor, was among the witnesses as the House Financial Services Committee looked into why the SEC failed to uncover what may be a swindle amounting to $50 billion.

Goldstein testified that "everything I worked for over a 50-year career is gone." He held an IRA retirement account with Madoff's firm for 21 years.

Now, he says, he's been forced to cash in life insurance policies to cover his mortgage, but "just can't make it" past April. The only choice he says he has is to sell his home — which he fears he won't be able to do in a housing market that has collapsed.

In a New York City courtroom Monday, a federal prosecutor asked that Madoff be jailed pending trial, saying the disgraced financier violated an agreement with the court by mailing watches, jewelry, cufflinks and mittens worth more than $1 million to relatives and friends. The judge said he would rule on the request after both sides submitted written arguments.

Kent was set to be arraigned Wednesday, a day after a federal grand jury in Houston added three new charges to the indictment it issued in August that accuses him of making unwanted sexual advances toward his former court case manager.

The new charges — aggravated sexual abuse, abusive sexual contact and obstruction of justice — allege Kent engaged in unwanted sexual contact with a second former court employee and later lied about it to investigators.

"There is a gag order in the case which prohibits the parties from making any sort of comment with the exception of stating without elaboration what the defense is to these new charges," said Dick DeGuerin, Kent's attorney. "They are untrue and we believe the product of intense pressure and threats brought against the complainant."

In a press release, the Justice Department only gave a brief description of the additional charges against Kent.

Kent, who was released on his own recognizance after last year's indictment, is still on the bench.

Jury selection in Kent's trial on the initial charges against him was set to begin Jan. 26. It was not immediately known if the new charges would delay the trial.

If convicted, Kent faces up to life in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He is the first federal judge to be indicted in the last 18 years.

Kent initially faced two counts of abusive sexual contact and one count of attempted aggravated sexual abuse following a U.S. Justice Department investigation into complaints by case manager Cathy McBroom.

Joel Tenenbaum, a 25-year-old Boston University graduate student, is accused by the Recording Industry Association of America of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network through 2004.

The recording industry's lawsuit against him is part of an aggressive campaign targeting people who share music online. The industry says it has lost more than $3 billion because of peer-to-peer networks that enable Internet users to share large numbers of songs online.

Record company lawyers believe Tenenbaum downloaded the songs on his parents' computer in Providence and urged a federal magistrate on Tuesday for permission to copy the machine's hard drive for proof of copyright infringement.

"The information on the computer is directly relevant and material to the underlying claims in this case," said attorney Daniel Cloherty.

But Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor representing Arthur and Judie Tenenbaum and their son, said the computer contains information protected by attorney-client privilege and holds other sensitive and personal material that has nothing to do with the case.

"You can hardly imagine anything more intrusive than asking anyone to disgorge a computer," said Nesson, who is also challenging in U.S. District Court in Boston the constitutionality of a federal copyright law that the music industry has used to target song-swappers.

Nesson also argued that the computer was not the one on which the alleged downloading took place. Judie Tenenbaum has said in an affidavit that the couple bought the computer after their son had left home, and that he had used it only occasionally to check his e-mail during visits.

The House impeachment panel is racing to complete its job, possibly by the end of this week. But the efforts of federal prosecutors to give the panel some of the FBI tapes face a potential obstacle course in court that could take up several weeks.

"These tapes are relevant evidence; we'd like to have them," said David Ellis, a lawyer for the impeachment panel. But he said the panel could wrap up its work as early as this week, and "we have already gathered a large volume of evidence."

Blagojevich, 52, a two-term Democrat, is charged along with former Chief of Staff John Harris with a scheme to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by Barack Obama's election as president.

Blagojevich is also charged with illegally plotting to use his power as governor to squeeze roadbuilders, a harness racing executive and the head of a children's hospital, among others, for hefty campaign contributions.

Prosecutors propose to provide the impeachment panel with a few minutes of the extensive recordings the FBI made of the governor talking with aides and others.

"The defendant's recent actions amount to obstruction of justice," Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt told a judge at a hearing in federal court in Manhattan.

U.S. District Magistrate Ronald Ellis asked the lawyers to submit written arguments and said he would rule later.

Madoff's lawyer, Ira Sorkin, described the items as heirlooms that included cufflinks and antique watches. He said they were not significant assets. The items were sent to Madoff's children and to unidentified friends vacationing in Florida.

"We maintain it happened innocently," Sorkin said. "He's not a threat to the community and there's no danger he's going to flee."

Madoff later left the courthouse, riding away in a silver sedan while surrounded by a swarm of cameras, and returning to his Upper East Side apartment.

The 70-year-old former Nasdaq stock market chairman was arrested Dec. 11 on securities fraud charges alleging he duped investors out of as much as $50 billion in a giant Ponzi scheme.

The prosecutor told the judge the case against Madoff "is strong and getting stronger."

Madoff, who owns yachts and mansions in New York's Hamptons and Palm Beach, Fla., has been confined to his Manhattan apartment under house arrest.