This is Ellison's latest effort to make his mark on voting rights issues.

Last month, the freshman congressman introduced legislation that would ban the ID requirement in federal elections.

Ellison filed the brief with the support of all of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including presidential candidate Barack Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois.

In the brief, Ellison argues that the tax violates the 24th Amendment's ban on poll or other taxes to vote.

Al-Masri has been charged with trying to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon, conspiring to take hostages in Yemen and facilitating terrorist training in Afghanistan.

He is already serving a seven-year sentence in Britain for fomenting racial hatred and urging his followers to kill non-Muslims.

Senior District Judge Timothy Workman, presiding at City of Westminster Magistrates Court, said the case would now be referred to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for a final decision.

Smith has two months to decide whether to surrender Al-Masri to the U.S. If she decides to hand the cleric over, he can then appeal to Britain's High Court, the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights.

Al-Masri, who lost both arms below the elbows and an eye fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, was arrested on a U.S. extradition warrant in May 2004, but the process was put on hold while he stood trial in Britain and then appealed his convictions.

In January, the House of Lords denied al-Masri permission to make further appeals, clearing the way for extradition proceedings.

A three-judge panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals expressed skepticism about the legal standing of Michigan's imperiled Jan. 15 presidential primary at a hearing Thursday afternoon. But the judges also indicated they need more time to decide whether to overturn a lower court decision to block it.

The judges closely questioned lawyers representing Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, the state's chief elections officer, about the justification for restricting access to voter lists generated by the election to the Democratic and Republican parties, a practice the Ingham County Circuit Court found to be unconstitutional.

Lawyers defending the primary law said the Legislature could restrict access if that was deemed necessary to make the election possible and secure the participation of several million voters who would not participate if the two parties used a caucus or convention nominating process.

The appellate trio -- Chief Judge William Whitbeck and Judges Patrick Meter and Donald Owens -- also pressed state lawyers, who had requested a decision by today, for a few more days to consider the case.

Elections officials said they need a decision as soon as possible so that absentee ballots can be ready for distribution 45 days before the election as required by law.

The lawsuit was filed by East Lansing political consultant Mark Grebner and a group of citizens and activists that included former Free Press political columnist Hugh McDiarmid.

After Thursday's hearing, Grebner said the plaintiffs have no objection to the primary, only to the method for handling the voter lists that was devised by party leadership and muscled through the Legislature.

"If some method can be devised which allows the primary to proceed, while rejecting the idea of election records as property of the two major parties, the plaintiffs would be very happy," he said.

Under the Oct. 25 settlement deal, Vonage was required to pay $120 million if its request for a court rehearing were denied, including $2.5 million to charity. Had the court granted Vonage a rehearing, Vonage would only have had to pay $80 million.

In seeking to overturn the lower court verdict, Vonage had argued that the judge who oversaw the trial misconstrued key claims in three of the patents at issue and gave the jury the wrong instructions on how to interpret technical terms.

However, in September the same appeals court upheld most of the verdict and reaffirmed an order barring Vonage from using Internet phone call technology related to two of the patents Verizon claimed had been infringed.

The Democratic Society Party, which won 20 seats in parliament in July, last week called for autonomy for Kurds living in the country's southeast. The call came amid tension over how to deal with separatist Kurdish rebels, with the military preparing for a possible cross-border offensive against their bases in northern Iraq.

Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya said in a statement "that speeches and actions by party leaders have proved that the party has become a focal point of activities against the sovereignty of the state and indivisible unity of the country and the nation."

He said a legal case was launched in an effort to shut down the party.

The prosecutor's office will send an indictment to the country's Constitutional Court for a trial. Several predecessors of the pro-Kurdish party were banned by Turkey's Constitutional Court on similar grounds and for alleged ties to rebels.

The party demanded more rights for the Kurdish minority and autonomy for Kurds living in the southeast during a party congress last week.

"It is envisaged that each autonomous section is represented with its own colors and symbols and creates its own democratic administration, although the national flag and official language remain valid for the entire nation of Turkey," the party said in a statement last week.

Selahatin Demirtas, a legislator from the pro-Kurdish party, said Friday that banning it would only aggravate the Kurdish problem, the Dogan news agency reported.

Turkish leaders have accused the pro-Kurdish party of having ties to the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. Turkish leaders insist the party should declare the PKK a terrorist organization to prove its allegiance to Turkey. Both the U.S. and the European Union have labeled the PKK a terrorist organization.

DEHAP, the predecessor of the present party, dissolved itself in 2005 as prosecutors tried to close it. The constitutional court closed down four previous pro-Kurdish parties.

Yalcinkaya accused leaders of the current party of dissolving DEHAP and establishing the new party under orders from imprisoned Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving life on a prison island near Istanbul.

"By implementing orders they received from the leader of a terrorist organization in prison, (they) have openly shown their allegiance to the terrorist organization and its leader," Yalcinkaya said.

The federal ruling keeping Dr. Alan Doerhoff from working on Missouri executions was eventually overturned, but state officials have said they would not use Doerhoff again.

Doerhoff was the target of more than 20 malpractice lawsuits and was reprimanded by the state for not disclosing them.

The federal government has hired Doerhoff as part of a team that executes condemned prisoners by injection at the federal prison at Terre Haute, Ind., according to a court pleading filed by six inmates sentenced to die there. The inmates challenged the government for relying on Doerhoff's help in performing execution duties.

Calls to Doerhoff and the U.S. Department of Justice were not immediately returned. His hiring was first reported Thursday in the Los Angeles Times.

A spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons said the agency could not comment and would not identify anyone on its execution team.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called Doerhoff's federal role "surprising and disturbing" and proof that "people are in the dark about much of this."

Last year, U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. called for reforms to Missouri executions and ruled that Doerhoff, 63, of Jefferson City, could not participate "in any manner, at any level" in the state's lethal injection process.

The doctor said in a deposition hearing that he is dyslexic, transposes numbers, and mixed and administered lethal drugs without a written lethal injection protocol, despite his lack of training in anesthesiology. A federal appeals court overturned Gaitan's ruling.

According to the newly revealed court records, Doerhoff was brought on at Terre Haute to develop execution procedures, place and monitor intravenous lines, assess a condemned inmate's level of consciousness after anesthesia is administered, and make a determination of death.

It's the only federal prison where executions occur, though executions there are on hold because the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the constitutionality of lethal injection in a Kentucky case.

It's not clear how long Doerhoff has been helping the federal government and whether he assisted in executions in the past, or in the planning for future ones. Some of the material in the court record was redacted, and attorney Paul Enzinna, who filed the inmates' pleading, declined to comment.

The justices discussed the case at their private conference on Friday, but reached no resolution.

Four justices must vote to grant an appeal. The court does not always reach a decision the first time it discusses a case.

At issue is the capital's 31-year ban on handguns, among the strictest gun-control laws in the nation. In March, a federal appeals court struck down the ban as incompatible with the Second Amendment.

The justices next meet on Nov. 20 to consider accepting appeals. Their decision could be announced then or when the court convenes for oral arguments on Nov. 26.