The orders were expected after the U.S. Justice Department last week concluded prosecutors improperly handled evidence in the 2007 trials of former Alaska House Speaker Pete Kott and former Rep. Vic Kohring, both Republicans.

U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick on Wednesday ordered U.S. marshals to transport Kott and Kohring from federal prisons to Anchorage as soon as is reasonable for bail hearings. Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had asked that the former lawmakers be released on their own recognizance.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier in the day granted Kott's request for bail, subject to terms set by Sedwick. The judges ordered the immediate release of Kohring, again with Sedwick setting conditions.

A female nursery worker has been jeered and spat at when she appeared in court charged with sexual assault and making and distributing child abuse images.

Vanessa George, who worked at the Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth, was remanded in custody amid angry scenes in the city's magistrates' court.

George, 39, of Douglass Road, Plymouth, faces three counts of sexually assaulting a girl under 13 and one count of sexually assaulting a boy under 13.

She also faces three separate counts of making, possessing and distributing indecent images of children.

The court heard the charges range from January 2007 to this month.

George, wearing a white T-shirt and black trousers, spoke only to confirm her name and address. She entered no pleas, no application for bail was made and she will now appear at Plymouth Crown Court on September 21.

She was jeered and hissed by people in the public gallery as she emerged into the court, and when the charges were read out, parents cried and yelled and one man ran from the court in tears.

A South Korean court ruled US software giant Microsoft breached fair competition rules but dismissed suits seeking compensation.

Two local software firms -- Digito.Com and Sanview Technology Inc -- filed suits requesting 30 billion won (24 million dollars) and 10 billion won respectively.

They insisted Microsoft had caused them financial damage by packaging its instant messenger programme and Windows Media Service with the main operating system.

The Seoul District Court decided that the US firm violated anti-trust regulations by abusing its market dominance but rejected the demands for compensation.

It said the plaintiffs lost market share either by lack of price competitiveness or overseas business failure.

"It has not been proven that the damages are linked to Microsoft," it said.

Microsoft in a statement welcomed the court's ruling that its actions did not cause any damage to the plaintiffs.

The company has in recent years been locked in a string of costly disputes with industry rivals in the United States, South Korea and Europe.

South Korea's Fair Trade Commission ruled in 2006 that Microsoft had breached anti-trust laws and ordered it to pay a 32.49-billion-won fine.

In 2007 a European court backed the European Commission's ruling that Microsoft abused its dominant position for personal computer operating systems.

Citigroup expects to convert into common stock a total of $58 billion of preferred stock and trust preferred securities, assuming full participation in the swaps.

Citigroup said in late February that it wanted to offer investors the option of exchanging preferred stock into common stock as a way to boost its capital reserves. As such, the government agreed to convert about $25 billion of its $45 billion preferred investment in the bank to common stock, which will give it a 34 percent stake in the New York bank.

The deal boosts Citi's common equity -- a benchmark the government is using to measure a bank's ability to absorb losses.

Citigroup has been one of the most troubled banks throughout the financial crisis. Investors have long criticized its board and management for allowing the bank to make big investments in the risky housing market -- actions that led to Citigroup reporting billions in losses.

Four Illinois riverboat casinos failed to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their challenge to a law requiring them to share their profits with the state's ailing horse racing tracks.

The court's Monday decision means Illinois tracks expect to share in an estimated $80 million -- money set aside under a 2006 law requiring state riverboat casinos that gross over $200 million annually to give 3 percent of their take to the horse racing industry.

The boats -- in Aurora, Elgin, and two in Joliet -- asked the high court to review whether the law violated the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on unwarranted seizure of assets. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled last year that the "takings" clause applies to government acquisition of private land, not taxes.

The casinos had paid the fee in protest and money was set aside in a special state account during the three-year life of the law. About $79 million was in the account at the time of last June's state court ruling.

Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat who represented parts of New Orleans until losing his bid for re-election last year, goes on trial Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on allegations that he received more than $400,000 in bribes in return for using his influence to broker business deals in Africa.

Defense attorneys are expected to attack the credibility of a witness who frequently wore a wire for the government. They have to hope a jury will accept a fairly legalistic distinction that Jefferson's conduct wasn't bribery, but was more technically akin to influence peddling. And there's the money in the freezer — $90,000 wrapped in aluminum foil, found by federal agents in August 2005 in Jefferson's Washington home.

Just days earlier, agents videotaped him at a northern Virginia hotel accepting a suitcase stuffed with $100,000 cash from a cooperating witness.

The freezer funds became such a headline that Robert Trout, Jefferson's lawyer, suggested at a recent hearing that potential jurors need to be reminded during the jury selection phase of the trial that the Jefferson case is the one about "the money in the freezer" to try to weed out jurors exposed to pretrial publicity.

The lawsuit filed in bankruptcy court Friday in Manhattan said six longtime investors wiped out by the scandal together lost life savings of $9 million — the amount on fictitious statements issued by Madoff's defunct firm in 2008.

It challenges rules that could disqualify the plaintiffs from collecting up to $500,000 in government-backed compensation because over the years they withdrew more money — believing it was profit — than they originally invested.

By law, trustee Irving Picard has an obligation "to protect a customer's legitimate expectations of what the broker held in his account — even if the broker never purchased any securities in the first place," the suit argues.

Among the plaintiffs named in the suit filed last week: a 73-year-old New Jersey widow who's been forced to take a part-time job at Macy's to cover basic living expenses; a 76-year-old California man who had to sell his home and move in with his daughter; and an 88-year-old Manhattan woman who lives with her ailing husband of 69 years and has stopped paying medical bills because they need the money for food.