The United States has filed a suit in federal court in Raleigh seeking to bar Raymond A. Renfrow of Elm City, N.C., from preparing federal income tax returns for others, the Justice Department announced today. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, alleges that Renfrow prepared tax returns for customers that contained fictitious or inflated deductions. The suit alleges that Renfrow has prepared an estimated 993 returns since 2001 that have caused an estimated loss to the U.S. Treasury of more than $2.9 million.

The complaint further alleges that Renfrow prepared false and fraudulent federal trust returns based on a tax fraud scheme promoted by Trust Education Services and National Trust Services. Information on other court cases related to those schemes is available at: http://www.usdoj.gov/tax/txdv04081.htm and www.usdoj.gov/tax/prtax/txdv03332.htm. Misuse of trusts is included in the IRS's 2007 list of the Dirty Dozen tax scams. http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=167983,00.html

The lawsuit asks the court to order Renfrow to provide a list to the Justice Department of his customers' names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and Social Security numbers. Since 2001 the Justice Department has obtained more than 230 injunctions to stop the promotion of tax fraud schemes and the preparation of fraudulent returns.

The institute's "Jackpot Justice" study is the first to calculate both the U.S. legal system's direct and indirect costs, study author Lawrence McQuillan says.

Direct costs refer to damage awards, lawyer fees and defense costs -- as well as administrative costs from lawsuits arising after someone breaks a contract or violates a trust resulting in injury to another's person's body, property, reputation, legal rights and the like.

Indirect costs refer to the legal system's impact on research and development spending, the cost of so-called defensive medicine and the related rise in healthcare spending and reduced healthcare access, McQuillan says.

Lost sales of new products "from less innovation" amounts $367.1 billion, the study concluded.

The overseer of the Internet's addressing system rejected for the second time the creation of a ".xxx" top-level domain, supported by some as a way to isolate adult content on the Internet.

Nine board members for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted against the proposal on Friday at ICANN's 28th International Public Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. Five voted in favor, while one member abstained from voting, said Andrew Robertson, an ICANN spokesman. ICANN will hold a news conference on Friday afternoon to discuss the meeting's decisions.

Those rejecting a ".xxx" top-level domain said its creation could set ICANN up as a potential regulator of content on the Internet, which is not in its mandate. ICANN is responsible for the administration of the domain name system (DNS), the index that enables the translation of Web site URLS (uniform resource locators) into numerical IP addresses that can be called up into a browser.

In May 2006, ICANN also rejected creating the domain. Critics of the new domain said it could make adult content easier to find, but others argued that would also make it easier to filter out with software. The domain also raised concerned over free speech and how content on a Web site may be classified.

"I can tell you that the president has confidence in him," said Deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino. President Bush "believes the attorney general can overcome the challenges that are before him," she said.

On Thursday, former Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson told a Senate hearing that rather than merely signing off on the firings, as Gonzales has repeatedly stated, Gonzales was in the middle of things from the beginning.

"I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate," Sampson told a Judiciary Committee inquiry into whether the dismissals were politically motivated.

"I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign," Sampson said.

Sampson also told the panel that the White House had a large role in the firings, with one-time presidential counsel Harriet Miers joining Gonzales in approving them. And under questioning from Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Sampson said that looking back, he should not have advocated the firing of one prosecutor in particular, New Mexico's David Iglesias.

Congress began its spring break Friday, but there were intense activities taking place behind the scenes.

Michael Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, and three other Justice Department officials arrived on Capitol Hill Friday morning for what aides said would be a five-hour closed meeting with House and Senate Judiciary Committee officials.

McNulty in early February testified before Congress that seven of the U.S. attorneys were fired for performance reasons, and that one, Bud Cummins in Little Rock, Ark., was being moved out so that he could be replaced by a former aide to White House political adviser Karl Rove.

Gonzales was upset with McNulty's testimony afterwards and would have preferred that he said all eight were fired for performance reasons, according to Justice Department e-mails forwarded to the two committees. Bush has since criticized the department for not giving Congress an accurate account of the firings.

The Maryland Senate passed a bill Wednesday to ignore the US Electoral College in presidential elections, instead awarding the state's 10 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Currently, the state's 10 votes go to the candidate who won the popular vote in Maryland.

The Senate approved SB 634 by a 29-to-17 vote, and it now goes to the state House. The plan would only go into action if enough states representing a majority of the nation's 538 electoral votes adopt it, making it unlikely that it would be in effect by next year's presidential election.

Other states are also considering the plan as a way to avoid a situation where a candidate wins the popular vote but loses the election, as happened with Democrat Al Gore in 2000.

A Japanese court threw out a lawsuit by a group of Japanese abandoned in China as children after Japan's defeat in World War II, officials said Thursday. Plaintiffs had alleged that the government was responsible for delaying their return to Japan by decades and, upon their return, denying them adequate state support. They sought 5.54 billion yen in compensation, according to a court spokesman. Presiding Judge Nobuaki Watanabe held that attempts to bring Japanese children at the close of the war were indeed "insufficient," but that government policy toward the orphans could not be considered "extremely irrational."

In January, a Tokyo District court denied compensation to 40 war orphans, and a similar claim was rejected by an Osaka court in 2005. In December 2006, a group of 61 former war orphans won a suit demanding 468 million yen in compensation. Thousands of Japanese children were abandoned in China as their parents fled the country to escape the approach of former Soviet troops at the end of the war in 1945; many children were later adopted by Chinese citizens. In 1972, about 2,500 "war orphans" returned to Japan after after the country normalized relations with China. In 1994, the Japanese government passed legislation providing financial assistance to Japanese nationals who returned to Japan. The 168 plaintiffs were among 2,200 war orphans who have filed suits in 15 courts in Japan.

Environmentalists and Hinkley residents have filed a lawsuit to stop an open-air sewage sludge composting plant from being built near that town, made famous by the move "Erin Brockovich."

The lawsuit filed yesterday against San Bernardino County alleges that supervisors approved the plant without fully analyzing its potential impact on air quality and public health.

The suit also contends that the project doesn't adequately protect the threatened desert tortoise and the Mojave ground squirrel.

The groups behind the suit say they're not trying to stop the plant. They say they just want to force the county to enclose it and filter its odors.

But officials with Nursery Products, the company building the plant, says that option is too expensive and that the county did a thorough job in evaluating the open-air project when it cleared its construction.