Three High Court judges will sit in the tribunal, Law Minister Shafique Ahmed told reporters, without specifying when trials would begin. The government also appointed six retired civil, police and military officials to investigate war crimes charges.

The government has already barred about 50 war crimes suspects mostly belonging to the country's main Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, from leaving the country. Jamaat-e-Islami had sided with Pakistani troops against whom Bangladesh fought the independence war.

On March 26, 1971, Bangladesh — then East Pakistan — declared its independence from West Pakistan, following years of perceived political and economic discrimination.

Bangladesh official figures say Pakistani soldiers, aided by local collaborators, killed an estimated 3 million people, raped about 200,000 women and forced millions more to flee their homes during a bloody nine-month guerrilla war. With help from neighbor India, Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation on Dec. 16, 1971, with the surrender of the Pakistani army in Dhaka.

An amnesty was declared after the war for collaborators who were not directly involved in heinous crimes. It did not cover those who had specific charges or evidence of crimes against them.

A Law Ministry statement said the tribunal will conduct quick trials under a 1973 act outlining prosecution and punishment for people accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other crimes under international law.

An affidavit filed in U.S. District Court on Wednesday says the FBI and U.S. Marshals searched Frank Calabrese Sr.'s home Tuesday. The document says the stash was found in a basement wall, hidden behind a family portrait.

Calabrese is serving a life sentence and has been ordered to pay millions after being convicted in a racketeering conspiracy that included more than a dozen murders.

Calabrese's attorney says he doesn't know who stashed the items, and his client hasn't lived in the home since the mid-1990s. The U.S. Attorney's Office, FBI and U.S. Marshal's Service declined comment.

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.