Election chiefs said last month Kasyanov could not run because signatures he submitted in support of his bid were forged. He accused the Kremlin of barring him to slant the vote in favor of front-runner Dmitry Medvedev.

Kasyanov, a former prime minister, had no chance of winning the March 2 election but his removal from the ballot has fuelled criticism that the Kremlin will brook little real opposition.

In a judgment after a one-day hearing, the Supreme Court said it had decided to leave the Central Election Commission decision to bar Kasyanov unchanged and to reject an appeal submitted by his lawyers.

Yelena Dikun, a spokeswoman for Kasyanov said: "The Central Election Commission ignored the views of citizens ... and now the Supreme Court, which is part of the same system, has also ignored the views of citizens."

Russian President Vladimir Putin is constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term. He has endorsed Medvedev, a 42-year-old first deputy prime minister, to replace him.

Yahoo epitomizes California cool; Microsoft is still trying to get over its competition-crushing past. But the culture clash may not be as big a stumbling block to the software giant's rich buyout bid as some critics may think.

Yahoo Inc. is still mulling over Microsoft Corp.'s offer, worth about $42 billion based on Microsoft's closing share price Friday. Even if Yahoo's board and shareholders approve the takeover, U.S. and European antitrust regulators must still sign off.

Google Inc. stirred that pot Sunday with a blog post that called a combined company "troubling" from an antitrust standpoint; Microsoft followed with a statement of its own that the deal would actually improve competition.

Yahoo might appear more laid back, but the two are culturally closer than one might expect. For instance, while Google Inc. foots the bill for employees' meals, Microsoft and Yahoo both make their work forces pay in the cafeteria. And while some associate afternoon soccer and cricket matches with Yahoo's startup ethic, Microsoft's campus is dotted with playing fields.

And their similarities extend far beyond the perks.

"Yahoo is not the sort of strapping startup it was 10 years ago. It's a corporate organization with its own bureaucracies," said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Microsoft, for its part, has had to tone down its competitive behavior after a decade of antitrust problems. Though its Windows operating system is on more than 90 percent of the world's computers, its perpetual lack of savvy online has also prompted it to experiment with Silicon Valley-style events, including inviting programmers to gather once a month in bean bag chairs to brainstorm and collaborate on cool Web projects.

Ali Diab, co-founder of a startup called Ripple TV, worked for both companies in the past. He said the talk of a culture clash is overblown, and noted similarities between Yahoo co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, and Microsoft founder and Chairman, Bill Gates, and its Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.

"David and Jerry, Bill and Steve — they're quite technical, quite astute technologists, and I think the cultures deep down still reflect that at both companies," he said. "Yahoo maybe a little more has a young, adolescent, college-like culture. But it's a third the age of Microsoft."

Diab, who reached the level of general manager when at Microsoft between 1998 and 2002, and vice president status at Yahoo between 2002 and 2006, said he didn't sense animosity toward Yahoo while at Microsoft, or vice versa — just a natural sense of competition.

But in spite of the fact that Yahoo shares its Stanford roots with Google, both cultures harbor a burning desire to beat the search leader.

"It wasn't, 'Yeah, we're just OK with being No. 2'" he said. "We were very much intent on being No. 1 in that market."

The two companies are also not complete strangers to working together. Until Microsoft launched its own ad-serving technology in 2006, it used Overture, a search marketing system Yahoo eventually bought in 2003.

More recently, Yahoo and Microsoft teamed up to make it possible for their respective instant messaging users to chat regardless of which service they were signed on to.

Yahoo has also been one of the only companies to make use of some new features built into the year-old Windows Vista operating system. Yahoo's latest instant messaging program was constructed with Microsoft's answer to Adobe Systems Inc.'s popular Flash, a technology called Silverlight that has otherwise been slow to catch on.

All that doesn't mean Yahoo will meekly agree to be swallowed up by Microsoft, even if the combination gets them part way to their goal of toppling Google.

It seeks sizable savings in government health care programs and puts the squeeze on much of the rest of government, but it would still generate near-record budget deficits over the next two years.

Even before receiving the document Monday, Democrats were attacking it for slashing programs to help the poor while protecting tax cuts for the wealthy.

"This is a budget that sticks it to the middle class, comforts the wealthy and has a set of priorities that are not the priorities of the American people," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

Democrats saw the plan as a continuation of failed policies that have seen the national debt explode under Bush. A projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion when Bush took office was wiped out by the 2001 recession, the increased spending to fight terrorism and, Democrats contend, Bush's costly tax cuts.

Bush's spending blueprint sets the stage for what will probably be epic battles in the president's last year in office, as both parties seek to gain advantages with voters heading into the November elections.

Bush, who was the first president to propose a $2 trillion budget, back in 2002, will leave office as the first president to hit $3 trillion with a spending plan.

His blueprint for the budget year that begins next October projects huge deficits, around $400 billion for this year and next, more than double the 2007 deficit of $163 billion. Private economists believe the deficit could easily surpass the previous record in dollar terms of $413 billion set in 2004, especially if the country does go into a recession.

The sharp jump in the deficits reflects, in part, a proposed economic stimulus plan of around $145 billion. Bush is urging Congress to pass it quickly as a way of getting tax rebates to households this summer in hopes of preventing a full-blown recession.

As in past years, Bush's biggest proposed increases are in national security. Defense spending is projected to rise by about 7 percent, to $515 billion, and homeland security money by almost 11 percent, with a big gain for border security. Details on the budget were obtained through interviews with administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity until the budget's release.

The bulk of government programs for which Congress sets annual spending levels would remain essentially frozen at current levels. The president does shower extra money on some favored programs in education and to bolster inspections of imported food, following last year's high-profile recalls of tainted products coming from China.

Bush's spending proposal would achieve sizable savings by slowing the growth in the major health programs — Medicare for retirees and Medicaid for the poor. There the president will be asking for almost $200 billion in cuts over five years, about three times the savings he proposed last year. The savings would come from freezing payments for hospitals and other health care providers.

Congress rejected last year's effort and Democrats are predicting Bush's new proposal will meet the same fate.

Class Actions for Non-Class Action Lawyers is the title of a CLE seminar being offered by the Los Angeles County Bar Association (LACBA).

The program will take place on Thursday, February 21 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the LACBA Conference Center, 281 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m.

This program is designed for attorneys interested in helping individual and business clients understand when they have been victimized in a manner creating class-action claims, whether involving consumer-fraud schemes, price fixing or market allocations conspiracies, mass-tort injuries, or wage-and-hour schemes.

Speakers will include Alexander Barnett, The Mason Law Firm, LLP; Vincent J. Esades, Heins Mills & Olson, P.L.C.; Valerie G. Esch, Wells Fargo Bank; Gregg A. Farley, The Farley Firm, and Daniel R. Karon, Goldman Scarlato & Karon P.C.

For details on registration fees and available CLE credits, see the Bulletin Board on The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel website at www.metrocorpcounsel.com.

The Liaoning Provincial Higher People's Court turned down an appeal from Wang Zhendong, who was convicted of fraud and sentenced to death last February, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Wang, chairman of Yingkou Donghua Trading Group Co., had promised returns of up to 60 percent for investors who purchased ant-breeding kits from two companies he ran.

The insects were to be used in traditional medicinal wines, herbal remedies and aphrodisiacs.

Authorities, concerned about social unrest, have come down hard on fake investments and pyramid schemes, although Wang's sentence was harsh even by Chinese standards.

Communist leaders have sought to make examples out of businessmen and officials accused of fraud and corruption, and last year executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog for approving untested medicine in exchange for cash.

Wang attracted more than 10,000 investors between 2002 and June 2005, when investigators shut down his companies. The closure of his business set off a panic among small-time players who saw their life savings disappear overnight.

Investigators put the size of the fraud at $416 million. Only $1.28 million was recovered. Fifteen managers of the company were also fined and sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years.