The Supreme Court won't stop a lawsuit that accuses the Vatican of transferring a priest from city to city despite repeated accusations of sexual abuse.

The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from the Holy See, the legal name for the Vatican.

The Vatican wanted the federal courts to throw out the lawsuit that seeks to hold the Roman Catholic Church responsible for moving the Rev. Andrew Ronan from Ireland to Chicago to Portland despite the sex abuse accusations.

Sovereign immunity laws hold that a sovereign state — including the Vatican — is generally immune from lawsuits.

But lower federal courts have ruled in this case that there could be an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act that could affect the Vatican. A judge ruled there was enough of a connection between the Vatican and Ronan for him to be considered a Vatican employee under Oregon law, and that ruling was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Sacramento.

According to court documents, Ronan began abusing boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in the Archdiocese of Armagh, Ireland. He was transferred to Chicago, where he admitted to abusing three boys at St. Philip's High School.

Ronan was later moved to St. Albert's Church in Portland, Ore., where he was accused of abusing the person who filed the lawsuit now under appeal. Ronan died in 1992.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is paying $755,000 to settle a lawsuit with a former staff lawyer who accused the agency of blocking his investigation of a prominent hedge fund.

The SEC settlement of Gary Aguirre's wrongful termination claim resolved a long-running controversy that prompted scrutiny in Congress and by the SEC inspector general. The settlement was announced Tuesday by the Government Accountability Project.

Aguirre was fired by the SEC in September 2005. He went public in 2006 with allegations of interference by SEC officials in the probe of Pequot Capital Management and improper deference to a Wall Street executive whom Aguirre wanted to interview. That prompted an investigation by Republican staff of the Senate Judiciary and Finance Committees.

The SEC initially took no enforcement action in the case, which was started in 2004 and closed in 2006. The agency reopened it in January 2009 after documents emerged in a divorce proceeding showing that Pequot began paying $2.1 million to a key witness in the case in mid-2007.

Last month, Pequot and its founder and chairman, Arthur Samberg, agreed to pay a total of $28 million to settle the SEC's charges of insider trading of Microsoft Corp. shares. The SEC alleged that the hedge fund traded Microsoft shares on confidential information provided by a former employee of the technology giant whom it later hired.

Pequot, whose core hedge fund was liquidated last year, and Samberg, a well-known money manager and philanthropist, neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

The $755,000 being paid to Aguirre represents his salary for four years and 10 months plus his attorneys' fees, according to the Government Accountability Project, a group that works with whistleblowers. The group said it may be the largest settlement of its kind.

Under terms of the settlement, which was approved by a judge at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, Aguirre agreed to drop two related cases against the SEC.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan says she considers recent high court decisions expanding gun rights to be "settled law."

Kagan was asked at her confirmation hearing about two recent decisions, including a 5-4 ruling Monday, which essentially guaranteed citizens' Second Amendment rights to have guns, no matter where they live.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California decried growing gang violence in her state, saying officials need leeway to deal with it.

Kagan responded that "once a court decides a case as it did, it's binding precedent." And she said judges must respect a precedent unless it proves unworkable or new facts emerge that would change the circumstances of a case.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday extended gun rights to every state and city in the nation in a ruling involving Chicago's 28-year-old handgun ban.

By a 5-4 vote and splitting along conservative and liberal lines, the nation's highest court extended its landmark 2008 ruling that individual Americans have a constitutional right to own guns to all the cities and states for the first time.

The right to bear arms, under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, previously applied to just federal laws and federal enclaves, like Washington D.C., where the court struck down a similar handgun ban in its 2008 ruling.

Gun rights have been one of the country's most divisive social, political and legal issues. Some 90 million people in the United States have an estimated 200 million guns.

The United States is estimated to have the world's highest civilian gun ownership rate. Gun deaths average about 80 a day, 34 of them homicides, according to U.S. government statistics.

The ruling, issued on the last day of the Supreme Court's term, was a victory for four Chicago-area residents, two gun rights groups and the politically powerful National Rifle Association.

It was a defeat for Chicago, which defended its law as a reasonable exercise of local power to protect public safety. The law and a similar handgun ban in suburban Oak Park, Illinois, were the nation's most restrictive gun control measures.

"We hold that the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the states," Justice Samuel Alito concluded for the court majority in the 45-page ruling.

A lawyer for Kwame Kilpatrick said Thursday that the ex-Detroit mayor would fight Wednesday's indictment.

"Mr. Kilpatrick will vigorously defend these allegations," Farmington Hills attorney Arnold Reed said at a news conference. He said an indictment is no evidence of guilt and that Kilpatrick committed no crime.

Reed, who said he serves as Kilpatrick's appellate lawyer, scoffed at the indictment.
"A federal grand jury will indict an empty glass of water if told to do so by the prosecution," he said.

He said he talked with Kilpatrick on Thursday and that the ex-mayor wants to do everything he can to fight the charges. Reed also said that the indictment is making Kilpatrick more focused.

Reed said he plans soon to appeal the probation violation sentence of 18 months to five years that Kilpatrick received May 25 for hiding assets to avoid paying $1 million in court-ordered restitution resulting from his 2008 perjury conviction. Reed wants Kilpatrick released on bond from state prison pending appeal.

The Supreme Court has sided with former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in limiting the use of a federal fraud law that has been a favorite of white-collar crime prosecutors.

The court said Thursday that the "honest services" law could not be used in convicting Skilling for his role in the collapse of Enron. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her majority opinion that the ruling does not necessarily require Skilling's conviction to be overturned.

During arguments in December and March, several justices seemed inclined to limit prosecutors' use of this law, which critics have said is vague and has been used to make a crime out of mistakes and minor transgressions in the business and political world.

The court, at the same time, rejected Skilling's claim that he did not get a fair trial in Houston because of harshly critical publicity that surrounded the case in Enron's hometown.

The court in this ruling also sided with former newspaper magnate Conrad Black, setting aside a federal appeals court decision that had upheld Black's honest services fraud conviction. But as in Skilling's case, the justices left the ultimate resolution of the case to the appeals court.

The justices also threw out an appeals court ruling against former Alaska legislator Bruce Weyhrauch, who is facing charges under the honest services law.

Thursday's ruling could affect the ongoing prosecution of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the convictions of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and ex-HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy.

A second man is expected to change his not-guilty plea in the arson fire that destroyed a predominantly black Massachusetts church hours after Barack Obama was elected president.

Thomas Gleason Jr. has a change-of-plea hearing scheduled Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Springfield. Gleason had been scheduled to go to trial on civil rights and other charges later this week.

His lawyer, Mark Albano, declined to comment when reached Monday.

Gleason is one of three white men charged with burning down the Macedonia Church of God in Christ on Nov. 5, 2008, the day after Obama was elected the nation's first black president.

Last week, Benjamin Haskell pleaded guilty in a deal that calls for him to spend nine years in prison.