The 5-2 decision affects up to 20 universities, community colleges, school districts and governments in Michigan with policies covering at least 375 gay couples.

Gay rights advocates said the ruling was devastating but were confident that public-sector employers have successfully rewritten or will revise their benefit plans so same-sex partners can keep getting health care.

The ban, a constitutional amendment approved in November 2004, says the union between a man and woman is the only agreement recognized as a marriage "or similar union for any purpose."

The court ruled that while marriages and domestic partnerships aren't identical, they are similar because they're the only relationships in Michigan defined in terms of gender and lack of a close blood connection.

Senate Republicans strongly oppose those measures, which are widely viewed as having little chance of being enacted. Even then, they would almost certainly prompt a veto by President Bush.

The 25 percent windfall profits tax would apply only to oil companies that "fail to invest in increased (production) capacity and renewable energy sources," according to a summary of the proposals released by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office.

The energy proposals also seek to halt deliveries of oil into the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve until oil prices drop to $75 a barrel.

The former mental patient convicted yesterday of stalking actress Uma Thurman was ordered by a judge to be kept in jail for a month to undergo psychiatric examination before he is sentenced.

Jack Jordan, 37, of Maryland, showed no emotion as a jury in Manhattan State Supreme Court convicted him just before noon of stalking and aggravated harassment - both misdemeanors - for actions over a two-year period driven by his obsessive love for the "Pulp Fiction" star.

The panel of six men and six women, which had deliberated for about five hours since Monday, acquitted him of two other charges of aggravated harassment.

Assistant District Attorney Jessica Taub asked Judge Gregory Carro to immediately put Jordan in a Manhattan jail next to the courthouse pending his sentence, a move vehemently opposed by defense attorney George Vomvolakis.

Ness County prosecutors said Kory McFarren pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a misdemeanor charge of mistreatment of a dependent adult. The charge stemmed from police in February discovering McFarren’s girlfriend, Pam Babcock, physically stuck to the toilet.

McFarren said Babcock had refused to come out of the bathroom for two years. Medical personnel estimated she spent at least a month on the toilet. Babcock remains in a Wichita hospital. McFarren’s pretrial hearing is June 13.

McFarren also had his first appearance on a felony charge of lewd and lascivious behavior. He was arrested in March for allegedly exposing himself to a neighbor who was a minor.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is scrutinizing the secured funding activities of investment banks it supervises and is discussing the firms' longer-term funding plans, an SEC official told Congress on Wednesday.

Funding at the biggest U.S. investment banks has been in the spotlight since March, when Bear Stearns Cos Inc nearly collapsed from a sharp drop in its liquidity. Senior lawmakers such as Democrat Barney Frank, chairman of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, have called for stricter regulation of investment banks now that they have access to the Federal Reserve's discount borrowing window.

"We are discussing with senior management their longer-term funding plans, including plans for raising new capital by accessing the equity and long-term debt markets," Erik Sirri, the SEC's director of trading and markets, said in testimony prepared for delivery at a Senate hearing.

The SEC monitors investment banks Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Merrill Lynch & Co, Goldman Sachs Group and Bear Stearns as part of a supervisory program intended to respond quickly to any financial or operational weakness in the companies.

The SEC is also considering lengthening the firms' average term of secured and unsecured funding arrangements and discussing the amount of excess secured funding capacity for less-liquid positions, Sirri said.

"We are in the process of establishing additional scenarios, focused on shorter duration but more extreme events that entail a substantial loss of secured funding, that will be layered on top of the existing scenarios as a basis for sizing liquidity pool requirements," he said.

"This additional analysis is providing the basis for requiring firms to take steps such as increasing the term of secured funding and diversity of funding sources," he added.

In March, the Federal Reserve took the unprecedented step of opening its discount borrowing window to investment banks so they could shore up their capital levels after the Bear Stearns crisis.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to remove the gray wolf from the list in March, saying the species had recovered from near-extermination in the region. That transferred wolf management to Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, which are planning what would be the first public hunts in decades.

The lawsuit filed last week by 12 environmental and animal rights groups seeks to block the hunts, but the three states that filed paperwork with the court Monday and Tuesday hope to fend off the litigation so the hunts can proceed.

Officials from the states said Tuesday that they can be trusted to sustain wolves without federal oversight. The hunts, they said, are needed in part to control wolf packs that have been killing an increasing number of livestock.

"People have supported wolf recovery on the belief that being successful would mean a return of state authority over the animal," said Bob Lane, chief legal counsel for Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks.

At least 39 wolves already have been killed in the region since federal protection was lifted. Those deaths came under more relaxed rules for ranchers responding to livestock conflicts and a shoot-on-site designation for the predator across most of Wyoming.

An estimated 1,500 wolves now roam the three states. Federal biologists say that is much more than needed to sustain the species, but critics say only a larger population could prevent inbreeding and offset the impact of hunting.

Conservatives contend that federal judges have upset the constitutional balance of power among the courts, the Congress and the presidency by making far-reaching decisions, such as one in 2005 that let cities seize people's homes to make way for shopping malls.

"My nominees will understand that there are clear limits to the scope of judicial power, and clear limits to the scope of federal power," McCain said Tuesday in a speech at Wake Forest University.

McCain, the eventual GOP nominee, promised to appoint judges in the mold of Roberts and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, saying they would interpret the law strictly to curb the scope of their rulings. While McCain didn't mention abortion, the far right understands that such nominees would be likely to limit or perhaps overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

Obama, on the other hand, voted against Roberts and Alito. So did Obama's rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, but McCain focused on Obama.