Galleon hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, accused of insider trading along with several associates, won a suspension of a court order to hand over wiretap evidence to U.S. market regulators, pending appeal.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York ordered a stay in favor of Rajaratnam and co-defendant Danielle Chiesi on Wednesday after a lower court order in February compelled them to disclose wiretap evidence gathered in the criminal case.

Lawyers for Sri Lanka-born U.S. citizen Rajaratnam and former New Castle Funds LLC trader Chiesi are seeking to suppress 18,000 recordings in what U.S. prosecutors describe as the biggest hedge fund insider trading case in the United States.

A trial on civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was set to start in August before U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff.

Rajaratnam's lawyers argued before a three-judge appeals court panel on Tuesday that the use of the recordings in the SEC case ignored "the plain text" of the wiretap statute and privacy concerns.

Lawyers for Bobby Cutts Jr. filed an appeal with the nation's highest court earlier this month. The Ohio Supreme Court declined to review Cutts' case.

The former Canton patrolman is serving a life sentence in the killings of Jessie Davis and the nearly full-term fetus she was carrying. Her disappearance in 2007 prompted a huge search that drew national attention.

Cutts' attorneys say the trial should have been moved because of all the publicity. Defense lawyer Fernando Mack says the Supreme Court should review the case because it has "uniqueness."

"This is a political exercise for too many on the other side of the aisle," said Sen. Dick Durbin. "We're going to tell our people back home, 'It's time to govern. It's time to lead.' "

Durbin appeared Wednesday on a nationally broadcast interview show with South Carolina's Jim DeMint, who had said last year he believed the health care overhaul would turn out to Obama's "Waterloo."

"America doesn't want a broken presidency," countered Durbin, D-Ill.

DeMint did not back down, saying "Americans are very angry," not only with the substance of the sweeping health care bill Obama signed into law Tuesday, but also with the process Democrats used to muscle it through Congress.

The pair swapped barbs on NBC's "Today" show as the Senate entered a second day of debate on a package of fixes to the new health law. These legislative adjustments were demanded by House Democrats as their price for passing the mammoth overhaul legislation that will extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans over the next decade.

Skinner is scheduled to die Wednesday in Huntsville. On Tuesday, he visited with his French-born wife as he waited for the U.S. Supreme Court or Texas Gov. Rick Perry to decide whether to stop his execution so DNA testing can be done. Skinner and his lawyers say test results could support his innocence claims.

Skinner was convicted of killing 40-year-old Twila Jean Busby, 22-year-old Elwin "Scooter" Caler and 20-year-old Randy Busby in the Texas Panhandle town of Pampa.

Prosecutors argue Skinner isn't entitled to testing of evidence that wasn't tested before his 1995 trial.

The decision Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit lifts the Federal Communications Commission's "cross-ownership" ban.

That restriction had remained in effect under a stay issued by the court in 2003 as it has tried to sort out legal challenges to attempts by two previous FCC chairmen, Republicans Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, to relax the rules.

The decision comes as the current FCC, now under Democratic control, gears up for its next congressionally mandated review of its media ownership rules. Those rules, which the agency must review every four years, include the cross-ownership ban and limits on the number of television and radio stations that one company can own in a market.

In the meantime, some media companies already own newspapers and television stations in the same market because they were grandfathered in when the rules were first put into place in 1974.

The current court case began when Powell tried to lift the cross-ownership ban in large media markets and raise the caps on TV and radio station ownership. That effort drew legal challenges from public interest groups that said he had gone too far and from media companies that said he had not gone far enough.

The Third Circuit sent the matter back to FCC, telling it to rewrite the rules. And that led Powell's successor, Martin, to try to ease the cross-ownership ban in big media markets — drawing more legal challenges from both sides.

With the stroke of President Obama’s pen, his health care overhaul — the most sweeping social legislation enacted in decades — became law on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama affixed his curlicue signature, almost letter by letter, to the measure, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, surrounded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and a raft of other lawmakers who spent the past year on a legislative roller-coaster ride trying to pass it. Aides said he would pass out the 20 pens he used as mementoes.

The ceremony included two special guests: Vicki Kennedy, the widow of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who had been a driving force for health care legislation before his death last year, and Connie Anderson, the sister of Natoma Canfield, the Ohio cancer survivor whose struggle to pay skyrocketing health insurance premiums became a touchstone of Mr. Obama’s campaign to overhaul the system.

Mr. Kennedy’s son, Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, was also there, carrying a gift for the president: a copy of a bill his father introduced in 1970 to provide national health insurance. On it, the younger Mr. Kennedy had written a personal message to Mr. Obama.

A court in Germany sentenced an 88-year-old former Nazi SS death squad member to life in prison Tuesday for the murder of three Dutch civilians in World War Two.

A spokesman for the court in the western city of Aachen confirmed the verdict against Heinrich Boere for the three killings, which were carried out in the Netherlands in 1944.

His defense said it would appeal, which could mean that the sentence is not legally binding for months.

Boere, who is on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted war crime suspects, had confessed to killing the three civilians when he was a member of an SS squad targeting anti-Nazi resistance, but argued that he was following orders.

The proceedings have attracted international interest, not least because they have coincided with the case of John Demjanjuk, 89, who is on trial in Munich on charges of helping to kill 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.

Boere was born in Germany but grew up in the Netherlands. He was captured there by U.S. forces after the war, but escaped to Germany before being sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949.