The $20 billion that BP has set aside to pay for losses caused by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill will start making payments in early August.

Ken Feinberg, who is in charge of paying individuals and businesses for lost income, told a meeting of government officials in Louisiana on Thursday that he expected a seamless transition from BP management to his administration.

"My goal is to improve that system," Feinberg said. "I'm determined to come up with a system that is more beneficial to the people using it."

BP currently has 35 offices in the Gulf Coast area accepting claims. The oil company will turn the entire operation over to Feinberg and not be involved in any of the claims against the $20 billion fund, except to supply more money if it's needed, Feinberg said.

The offices will be open for three years, and claims can be filed at any time, he said. Once filed, they must be paid within 90 days, Feinberg said.

The fund has not been tapped yet, but Feinberg said by the end of the first week of August his group would be ready to make payments.

There are still some issues to settle, Feinberg said. One of them is how much transparency the fund should have. Data from the program will be available, but there is still debate on providing names of people applying.

A 70-year-old civil rights lawyer was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison in a terrorism case by a judge who boosted her original sentence by nearly eight years after concluding she lied to a jury and lacked remorse.

"I'm somewhat stunned," Lynne Stewart told U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl after he announced the sentence for her conviction for letting a jailed Egyptian sheik communicate with his radical followers despite restrictions in place to prevent it.

The sentence, nearly four times longer than the two-year, four-month sentence she originally received in 2006, left Stewart sobbing in her prison uniform after Koeltl described his reasons for increasing the prison time significantly.

An appeals court had ordered a new sentencing, saying the terrorism component of the case needed to be considered, along with whether she committed perjury at her trial. The court said it had "serious doubts" whether her original sentence was reasonable.

The judge said public comments Stewart made after her first sentencing showed him that the "original sentence was not sufficient."

He said she showed "a lack of remorse for conduct that was both illegal and potentially lethal."

Outside court after her original sentence, Stewart said she could do the prison time standing on her head.

Koeltl found that Stewart "willfully testified falsely at the trial" on numerous points, including in telling jurors she did not make Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman available to his followers and did not violate government rules meant to silence the sheik because lawyers worked in a "bubble" in which the government understood the rules were relaxed.

A former University of Kansas athletics official has admitted in court that he knew other school officials were involved in a lucrative ticket-scalping racket but concealed the crime and didn't alert authorities.

Former assistant director of ticket operations Jason Jeffries pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in Wichita to one count of misprision of a felony. He remains free on his own recognizance and was due back in court for sentencing Sept. 29.

The university has accused Jeffries and five other former employees of scheming to sell at least $1 million in basketball and football tickets to brokers.

Jeffries' attorney said outside the courtroom that Jeffries has accepted his responsibility and has nothing to hide.

A Pakistani man detained on an immigration violation in Maine while authorities investigated the attempted Times Square car bombing will continue to be held in jail because an immigration judge revoked his bail.

Mohammad Shafiq Rahman's family rounded up the $10,000 to secure his release only to learn the judge had revoked bail at the urging of immigration officials, said Barry Hoffman, Pakistan's consul general in Boston.

Rahman's attorney is seeking another bail hearing, Hoffman said. Rahman, a computer specialist who overstayed his visa, continues to be held in the Cumberland County Jail.

It was unclear why immigration officials urged the judge to reverse the June 30 decision to set bond.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement "has determined it is most appropriate he remain in custody," spokesman Richard Rocha said.

But Hoffman said it appeared ICE was spending too much of its resources going after someone like Rahman. "I'm sure there are real terrorists out there. Spending all their resources on this case has me mystified," he said.

A British court fined five companies a total of 9.5 million pounds ($14.6 million) Friday for a massive 2005 explosion at a U.K. oil depot that sent a huge smoke plume drifting across the European continent.

Total UK, a subsidiary of French oil company Total SA, was found liable for negligence and ordered to pay most of it — 6.2 million pounds ($9.5 million).

The explosion at the Buncefield oil depot, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of London, was triggered when tens of thousands of gallons of gasoline were released in a huge vapor cloud. The blast injured 43 people, caused more than 1 billion pounds in damage and registered a magnitude 2.4 on earthquake monitors.

The explosion was the costliest industrial disaster in British history, Britain's Health and Safety Executive said Friday. Worse casualties were avoided only because the explosion took place early Sunday morning when few people were at work.

Judge David Calvert-Smith said the companies involved — Total UK Ltd., British Pipeline Agency Ltd., Hertfordshire Oil Storage Ltd., TAV Engineering Ltd. and Motherwell Control Systems 2003 Ltd. — had shown "a slackness, inefficiency and a more or less complacent attitude to safety."

He said the problems at the site were so serious that the disaster could have happened "at almost any hour of any day" and said it was just "short of miraculous" that more people were not injured.

A judge was poised to decide whether the government and some fellow judges were right when they said a 70-year-old former civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case received too much leniency when she was sentenced to just over two years in prison.

U.S. District Judge John Koeltl was to resentence attorney Lynne Stewart on Thursday after considering the comments of appeals court judges who said he should review the role of terrorism in her case and consider if she lied when she testified at her trial.

Stewart, facing up to 30 years in prison, was sentenced to two years and four months after her conviction on charges that she let blind Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman communicate with a man who relayed messages to senior members of an Egyptian-based terrorist organization.

Abdel-Rahman is serving a life sentence for conspiracies to blow up New York City landmarks and assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Stewart represented him at his 1995 trial.

Stewart was sentenced in 2006 but was permitted to remain free until the appeals court ruled last November.

Initially, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a resentencing that did not seem to pressure Koeltl to boost the length of the sentence considerably. But it revised its decision a month later, saying it had "serious doubts" whether her sentence was reasonable.

The appeals court said Koeltl might have erred if he decided the terrorism enhancement should not be applied because of Stewart's personal characteristics.

A federal appeals court has overturned rulings allowing auto parts supplier Visteon Corp. to terminate its retirees' health and life insurance benefits.

In a ruling Tuesday, the appeals court in Philadelphia sided with attorneys representing some 2,100 retirees from two Visteon manufacturing plants in Indiana.

A Delaware bankruptcy judge concluded in March that the retirees did not have vested rights in the benefits, and that Van Buren Township, Mich.-based Visteon could terminate them unilaterally. That decision was upheld by a federal district court judge in Delaware.

But the appeals court agreed with the retirees that Congress, through the bankruptcy code, intended to restrict a debtor's ability to modify or terminate retiree benefits during a Chapter 11 case, regardless of whether it could terminate those benefits outside of bankruptcy.