The unanimous decision came in the cases of Shawqi Omar, taken into custody in Iraq for allegedly assisting a terrorist network, and Mohammad Munaf, whose death sentence by an Iraqi court was recently overturned. Munaf has been accused in Iraq of setting up the 2005 kidnapping of three Romanian journalists.

Held by the U.S. military at Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport, both men are Sunni Muslims who say they will be tortured if turned over to the Iraqi government.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that U.S. courts are not allowed to intervene in an ongoing foreign criminal proceeding and "pass judgment on its legitimacy."

The justices ruled that basic protections do extend to American citizens held overseas by U.S. military operating as part of a multinational force. At the same time, however, the court said those protections provide Omar and Munaf with no legal relief.

The Bush administration argued that U.S. courts lack authority to review the claims of Munaf and Omar because they are held abroad by a multinational force, of which the United States is only a part.

Nations including Iraq have criminal jurisdiction over those within their borders, said the Justice Department solicitor general's office.

Arrested in 2004 by U.S. soldiers at his home in Baghdad, Omar was to have been transferred to Iraqi courts for trial, but a U.S. district court blocked the move.

In a case that is continuing, an Iraqi court recently reversed Munaf's death sentence.

The trial comes two months after Lee's stunning resignation from the helm of South Korea's biggest industrial conglomerate.

"I am truly sorry for causing this trouble," the gray-suited Lee said in a calm voice in the packed courtroom. "I will take full responsibility for it and assume a sincere attitude in court."

The 66-year-old Lee also apologized in April when he announced he was stepping down days after he was indicted.

The charges followed a high-profile probe into the conglomerate, of which Samsung Electronics Co. is the flagship corporation.

Lee was indicted on charges of evading 112.8 billion won ($110 million) in taxes and breach of trust.

Prosecutors, however, dismissed the most explosive claim by the former employee — that Samsung maintained a massive slush fund to bribe influential South Koreans.

The tax evasion charge carries a possible sentence of between five years to life in prison, though Lee could serve no time in prison even if convicted because of the leeway given to South Korean judges.

A prominent Charleston law firm has filed suit against the company that produces Verizon's phone books, saying its ad was screwed up in the latest Charleston edition.

Richard Neely and Mike Callaghan filed the suit for Neely & Callaghan on June 10 in Kanawha Circuit Court.

The attorneys claim Idearc Media Corp. ran an incorrect ad for the firm. The ad mostly had copy for Neely & Hunter, Neely's former firm.

"What it does is paints our firm and us as individuals in a false light to the public," Callaghan said Wednesday. "If you look at what's in the book, the way it reads, it says Callaghan at top, but lists Hunter in the bottom. It puts me and our firm in a false light."

Neely is a former state Supreme Court justice and Yale Law School graduate, and Callaghan is a former Congressional candidate, former federal prosecutor, former state Secretary for the Environment and former chair of the state Democratic Party.

"Neely & Callaghan does not advertise in the greater Charleston area because the lawyers are well known," the attorneys claim in the suit. "The primary vehicle for connecting clients with Neely & Callaghan is the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory prepared by Defendant."

The suit says Neely and Roger Hunter's partnership ended in May 2007. Hunter now is with Spilman Thomas & Battle.

In November, according to the suit, Neely & Callaghan purchased an ad with Idearc. The correct version of the ad appeared in the Teays Valley edition of the Verizon phone book.

But the ad that ran in the Charleston edition was headlined Neely & Callaghan, but the ad included information about Neely and Hunter. That included misrepresenting services the new firm offers.

Neely & Callaghan's office manager asked to see a draft version of the ad, but was told that Idearc doesn't do that, according to the suit.

"Now, for an entire year, the staff of Neely & Callaghan must take calls for Roger D. Hunter and waste its time properly referring those calls to the correct firm," the attorneys claim in the suit.

The attorneys also say Idearc libeled the firm by filing a false statement to credit reporting agencies that they didn't pay for the ad when Idearc knew that it had breached its contract with them and no debt was owed.

The defendants "regular course of conduct is to extort money from wronged customers after [it] has breached its contract by threatening to refuse to publish further advertisements in its quasi-monopoly telephone directories if wronged customers fail to pay charges for contracts that were nonetheless breached," the suit states.

The lawsuit seeks a maximum of $75,000 in compensatory and punitive damages as well as court costs and interest.

"We will be quantifying damages, yes," Callaghan said. "Some are unquantifiable in respect to reputation. There's not a formula to say how much. But yes, we will be looking at those numbers.

"We are looking at our phone call volume to determine how much it's gone down. We are looking to see who has trouble getting a hold of us. It's me in particular. But it says we do work that we don't do. We're a top-shelf litigation firm. We defend people and sue people. It paints us falsely as saying we do things like structured business buyouts and securities.

"I hate that we had to file the suit, but that's life."

With office for Idearc located in the same building as his law firm, Callaghan said it has been awkward at times.

"We like them, and we get along with them fine," he said. "They messed up, and we asked them to help out. And now we're here where we are."

Anton Geiser's work as a guard meets the type of persecutory conduct banned under a 1953 federal law, the ruling said.

Geiser, 83, did not reveal his Nazi ties on his visa application, but he is not accused of lying about them. Files from the period have been lost and it is not clear what questions he was asked.

His lawyer, Adrian N. Roe, told the appeals court this year that guards not deemed war criminals were sometimes allowed in by the State Department. He complained that the Justice Department, in its efforts to expel former Nazis, was revisiting decisions made a half-century ago.

But the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which focused on the language of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, said Geiser should have his U.S. citizenship revoked and be deported.

Wharton Aldhizer and Weaver, a Harrisonburg-based law firm, won the award for most food collected in the Blue Ridge region "Legal Food Frenzy," a food drive competition among the state's legal community.

Wharton Aldhizer and Weaver donated 25,338 pounds of food, 31 percent of all of the food donated to the food bank in this region.

Statewide, law firms gathered more than 1.36 million pounds of food for state food banks, enough for more than 1 million meals. This amount doubles last year's total of almost 679,000 pounds raised, and surpasses this year's goal of 1 million pounds.

More than 180 law firms participated in seven regions. The Blue Ridge region is served by the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, which includes Rockingham, Page, Shenandoah and Augusta counties.

Ira Isaacs readily admits he produced and sold movies depicting bestiality and sexual activity involving feces and urine. The judge warned potential jurors that the hours of fetish videos included violence against women, and many of them said they don't want to serve because watching would make them sick to their stomachs.

"It's the most extreme material that's ever been put on trial. I don't know of anything more disgusting," said Roger Jon Diamond — Isaacs' own defense attorney.

The case is the most visible effort of a new federal task force designed to crack down on smut in America. Isaacs, however, says his work is an extreme but constitutionally protected form of art.

"There's no question the stuff is disgusting," said Diamond, who has spent much of his career representing pornographers. "The question is should we throw people in jail for it?"

Isaacs, 57, a Los Angeles advertising agency owner who says he used to market fine art in commercial projects, calls himself a "shock artist" and says he went into distributing and producing films about fetishes because "I wanted to do something extreme."

"I'm fighting for art," he said in an interview before his federal trial got under way. "Art is on trial."

He plans to testify as his own expert witness and said he will cite the historic battles over obscenity involving authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.

One of his exhibits, he said, will be a picture of famed artist Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," a porcelain urinal signed by the artist in 1917.

Diamond said Isaacs also will tell jurors the works have therapeutic value for people with the same fetishes depicted on screen.

"They don't feel so isolated," Diamond said. "They have fetishes that other people have."

Isaacs makes a brief appearance in one of the videos he produced; others that he distributed were imported from other countries.

The business has been lucrative. At one point, he has said, he was selling 1,000 videos a month at $30 apiece. Then his office was raided by FBI agents who bought his videos online with undercover credit cards.

The government obtained an indictment against Isaacs on a variety of obscenity charges, including importation or transportation of obscene material for sale. Prosecutors have declined to comment about the case.

Jean Rosenbluth, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at University of Southern California, said such prosecutions were rare until the creation of the U.S. Department of Justice Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. Child pornography cases are handled by a separate unit.

"The problem with obscenity is no one really knows what it is," she said. "It's relatively simple to paint something as an artistic effort even if it's offensive."

The test of obscenity still hinges on a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which held that a work is not legally obscene if it has "literary, artistic, political or scientific value."

Jurors also are asked to determine whether the material in question violates standards of what is acceptable to the community at large.

"This task force was quite controversial and many in the Department of Justice felt that it was a waste of resources," Rosenbluth said. "Because of the pressure, they seem to have chosen the worst cases they can find to prosecute."

Each of the four counts against Isaacs carries a five-year maximum prison sentence. Prosecutors also are seeking forfeiture of assets obtained through his video sales. Two of the original six counts were dropped.

"A lot of this is about sending a message — `Don't make this stuff. Don't put it on the Internet. We don't want it here,'" Rosenbluth said.

Rosenbluth said prosecutors would be emboldened to pursue similar cases if Isaacs is convicted, though there would be lengthy challenges on appeal.

In an unusual twist, the trial is being presided over by the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Alex Kozinski, under a program that allows appellate judges to occasionally handle criminal trials at the District Court level. Kozinski is known as a strong defender of free speech and First Amendment rights.

Eight men and six women were chosen for the jury Tuesday. Two will be designated alternates later. The panel was to hear opening statements Wednesday before viewing the movies.

When jury selection began Monday, he urged prospects to be open about their opinions and incurred an onslaught of negative statements. Within the first hour, he dismissed 26 men and women who said they could not be fair to the defendant because they were repulsed by the subject matter. By day's end, half the panel of 100 had been excused.

"I think watching something like that would make me physically ill, nauseous," said one woman. "It's affecting me physically now just thinking about it."

One man fired angry comments at the ponytailed Isaacs.

"Hearing stuff about feces made me sick and the defendant looks like my ex-business partner who did some of these things. He looks guilty as sin to me," said the man. "It turns my stomach thinking about it."

Several prospects marched up to the judge's bench for private conferences when he told them that the films also involved violence against women. They, too, were excused, as were several who cited their religious beliefs.

Asked how long they would have to watch the movies, Kozinski told them it would be about five hours and "I will be there watching with you. This is part of the job we're doing."

The justices have twice struck down the award to the family of a longtime smoker of Marlboros, made by Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA.

Oregon courts have repeatedly upheld the judgment. The most recent ruling, in January, followed a high court decision last year that said jurors may punish a defendant only for harm done to someone who is suing, not other smokers who could make similar claims.

The justices will consider only whether the Oregon Supreme Court in essence ignored the U.S. high court's ruling, not whether the amount of the judgment is constitutionally permissible.