The Second Amendment to the US Constitution provides: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." Senior Judge Laurence Silberman wrote for the majority:

...the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government. In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment’s civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.

In dissent Judge Karen Henderson, a Reagan appointee, countered that the Second Amendment did not properly apply to the case, as prior caselaw, statute, and the Constitution itself recognized that the District of Columbia is not a state subject to the jurisdiction of the Bill.

Mayor Frank Melton was released from jail Thursday after the Mississippi Supreme Court vacated his arrest and recused Judge Tomie Green from the case, according to court documents provided to The Associated Press.

Presiding Justice William Waller Jr. issued the orders without further comment.

Melton spoke to reporters at an impromptu news conference in front of the gates of his Jackson home after he arrived there from jail.

"It was quite a humbling experience," Melton said on Jackson news channel WAPT, noting he cleaned three bathrooms Thursday alongside other inmates.

"We're going to make this a great, great city," the 57-year-old mayor said. "I'm back on the job as of right now."

Melton had appointed Jackson City Councilman Frank Bluntson to be the city's interim mayor in an executive order late Wednesday.

The mayor turned himself in at the county jail Wednesday and was booked into the medical ward to await a hearing on whether he violated his probation on a misdemeanor weapons conviction.

Melton, who recently had heart surgery, checked himself into a hospital with chest pains a week earlier, the day Green issued a warrant for his arrest.

The mayor pleaded no-contest in November to a misdemeanor charge of carrying a pistol on a college campus and guilty to two other misdemeanor weapons violations. The plea deal spared him a felony conviction that would have forced him from office.

Melton was given a six-month suspended sentence on each count, one year of probation and fined $1,500.

Melton is a wealthy former TV executive and one-time state drug enforcement agency chief. He won a landslide election in 2005 on the promise of rooting out crime in Jackson.

He became a fixture on nightly newscasts, wearing fatigues, carrying guns and criticizing the district attorney's office for not putting away enough criminals. He cruised the inner city with police and often took troubled children back to his home in a gated community.

Separately, the mayor and his two former bodyguards are to stand trial April 23 on allegations they had roles in the use of sledge hammers to damage a building the mayor considered a drug haven.

Gasoline prices have jumped above $3 a gallon in some parts of California and Hawaii, and may hit that level other parts of the country when the busy summer driving season approaches.

''It kills me,'' said Gloria Nunez, 53, as she filled her Ford Explorer SUV at a San Jose gas station. Nunez, a clerk for a communications company, has started working a couple hours of overtime each week to help soften the blow.

''All of a sudden you kind of have to watch your pennies,'' she said.

Analysts say drivers should brace for more increases in the coming weeks. Crude oil, which makes up about half the price of gasoline, is trading above $60 a barrel. Higher demand, refinery maintenance and fears about springtime shortages are also driving up prices, particularly on the West Coast.

''The West Coast will certainly be the wild, wild West this year,'' said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. Extensive maintenance work at West Coast refineries has curtailed supplies and exacerbated the typical ''preseason rally'' spurred by jitters about tight supplies.

''In the rest of the country it's just petro-noia. They're worried that they won't have enough gasoline,'' Kloza said. ''But on the West Coast the concern might be warranted.''

However, analysts said it's unlikely other parts of the country would see $3 gasoline before summer without a major disruption in supply.

Average fuel prices are still below their historical highs -- most of which were set in 2006 -- but are inching higher weeks earlier than usual.

Wailuku, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, currently has the highest average price for a gallon of regular unleaded at about $3.20.

On the mainland, the title goes to San Francisco, where a gallon averages $3.10, a jump of about 34 cents from a month ago but still off the high of $3.36 set in May 2006, according to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report for Wednesday.

The California cities of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Oakland are also all above $3 a gallon. Most other areas of the state are just a few cents away from cracking that milestone, and motorists say they're cutting back to save money.

''I take the bus,'' said Hector Esqueda, an 18-year-old justice administration student from Los Angeles who has stopped driving his gas-guzzling, older-model Lincoln Continental to save money. ''Other people are doing the same thing. The bus is packed.''

Nationwide, the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded is up about 32 cents from a month ago, to $2.50, according to the AAA report. That's more than 55 cents shy of the all-time high recorded in September 2005, after hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged the Gulf of Mexico refinery infrastructure.

Part of the reason is rising demand. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said Wednesday that gasoline demand has averaged more than 9.1 million barrels per day over the past month, a 3.3 percent jump over the same period last year.

Oil prices jumped by more than $1 per barrel on Wednesday, settling at $61.82, after the agency also reported an unexpected drop in crude oil inventories as import levels reached their lowest point since 2005.

Across the country, drivers are grappling with how to manage the sudden spike.

Outside a Sunoco convenience store in downtown Philadelphia, T.J. Hawk, a 45-year-old retired Philadelphia police officer, recalled the good old days when it cost $5 to fill the tank.

These days, it takes at least $40 to fill his white Volvo. Most weeks, he only fills it three-quarters of the way to soften the hit to his wallet.

In Philadelphia, regular unleaded averaged about $2.57 a gallon early Wednesday morning, a 12 percent jump from a month ago but still well shy of the high of $3.358 a gallon set in September 2005.

Several customers at a Mobil station in St. Petersburg, Fla., were upset because there seemed to be no real reason for the price increase. Prices at the station range from $2.47 a gallon for regular to $2.69 for premium.

Lee Franc, a client manager from St. Petersburg, spent about $40 to put 16 gallons in her Toyota Highlander. She works at home and can go a week or two without filling up.

''Katrina, I can understand,'' Franc said. ''I didn't see a very good explanation this time. You hear so many excuses it gets to where you don't believe anything anymore.''

In Chicago, cab driver Nathan Michaels pays $25 each day to gas up his cab. That cost plus the $325 per week he pays to lease his cab makes it difficult to earn a living, even though he works six days a week.

He's been considering buying an SUV for personal use, but thinks with gas prices rising he'll start researching hybrid vehicles.

The rising gas prices also raise his anxiety in a more general way, he said. ''It contributes to an overall feeling of uncertainty about what's going on worldwide.''

"They lost track," said the official who like others interviewed late Thursday spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had not been released.

The errors are outlined by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in an audit to be released on Friday. The audit requirement was added to the Patriot Act by Congress over the objections of the Bush administration.

The FBI reported to Congress in 2005 that its agents had delivered a total of 9,254 national security letters seeking e-mail, telephone or financial information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents over the previous two years. That was the first year the Bush administration publicly disclosed how often it uses national security letters to obtain records. The numbers from previous years have been classified.

Fine's report, according to officials, says the numbers of national security letters, or NSLs, between 2003 and 2005 were underreported by 20 percent.

It was unclear late Thursday whether the omissions could be considered a criminal offense. One government official who read the report said it concluded the problems appeared to be unintentional and that FBI agents would probably face administrative sanctions instead of criminal charges.

The FBI has taken steps to correct some of the problems, the official said.

The Justice Department, already facing congressional criticism over its firing of eight U.S. attorneys, began notifying lawmakers of the audit's damning contents late Thursday. Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "commends the work of the inspector general in uncovering serious problems in the FBI's use of NSLs."

Gonzales has told FBI Director Robert S. Mueller "that these past mistakes will not be tolerated," Scolinos said in a statement early Friday. The attorney general also "has ordered the FBI and the department to restore accountability and to put in place safeguards to ensure greater oversight and controls over the use of national security letters," she said.

Mueller was to brief reporters on the audit Friday morning, and Gonzales was expected to answer questions about it at a privacy rights event in Washington several hours later.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees the FBI, called the reported findings "a profoundly disturbing breach of public trust."

"Somebody has a lot of explaining to do," said Schumer, D-N.Y.

Fine's audit also says the FBI failed to send follow-up subpoenas to telecommunications firms that were told to expect them, the officials said.

Those cases involved so-called exigent letters to alert the firms that subpoenas would be issued shortly to gather more information, the officials said. But in many examples, the subpoenas were never sent, the officials said.

The FBI has since caught up with those omissions, either with national security letters or subpoenas, one official said.

National security letters have been the subject of legal battles in two federal courts because recipients were barred from telling anyone about them.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Bush administration over what the watchdog group described as the security letter's gag on free speech.

Last May, a federal appeals judge in New York warned that government's ability to force companies to turn over information about its customers and keep quiet about it was probably unconstitutional.

"We come to celebrate a strategic partnership between the United States and Brazil ... A memorandum of understanding in the biofuels area was signed," Lula said. Lula said the agreement to promote the use of alternative fuels was important for mankind and should encourage other countries to diversify their energy sources.

Brazil and the United States would seek production partnerships with other countries in Central America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa.

San Francisco-based law firm Gordon & Rees has opened a Denver office.

The office will be overseen by co-managing partners Scott Cook and Miles Scully, both litigators, and will focus primarily on commercial litigation initially, though there are plans to add health care and employment law, among other practice areas, within the first year.

The office also will include Amy Darby, a senior associate with experience in complex business disputes, class action matters and other general business litigation. Darby specializes in franchisee/franchisor disputes. She also has experience in trademark litigation, product liability and negligence claims.

The firm said the expansion into Denver was driven largely by clients.

"The firm has enjoyed strong relationships with a number of clients either domiciled in Colorado or with legal and business needs in the area so this was a natural extension for us," Dion Cominos, managing partner for Gordon & Rees, said in a press release. "We also see many viable possibilities for new business in Colorado and expect to grow our ranks there significantly over the near term.

Gordon & Reese has offices in 14 cities, including several in California, as well as in Portland, Oregon; Las Vegas; Phoenix; Dallas; Houston; New York; Uniondale, N.Y.; and Newark, N.J.

China accused the US of numerous human rights abuses on Thursday in its Human Rights Record of the US in 2006, the Chinese state response to US criticism in Tuesday's publication of the 2006 US State Department Country Reports. The Chinese report, its eighth consecutive annual rebuttal to the US report, cites news stories from around the world as examples of US rights abuses both within the US and in other countries. China said the US uses its strong military to trespass on the sovereignty of other countries and violate the rights of those countries' citizens, drawing from sources such as a John Hopkins University study that estimates more than 655,000 Iraqi deaths since the Iraq war began in early 2003, and US troop actions in Haditha and Mahmudiya .

The report also cited alleged Geneva Convention violations, including the detention and alleged torture of prisoners both in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. On the situation within the US, the Chinese report looked at racial and gender inequality, overcrowding in the prison system, poverty, post September 11 government surveillance, political corruption including discussion of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the crime rate in general. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that the US has an imperfect human rights record when introducing the State Department's report Tuesday, saying "We do not issue these reports because we think ourselves perfect, but rather because we know ourselves to be deeply imperfect, like all human beings and the endeavors that they make. Our democratic system of governance is accountable, but it is not infallible. We are nonetheless guided by enduring ideals: the inalienable rights of humankind and the principles of democracy toward which all people and all governments must continue striving. And that includes us here in America."

The US State Department report on China was just as detailed as the Chinese response, saying that China's human rights record has been steadily declining over the years. The US report looked at China's restrictions on press and speech, Internet censorship, governmental corruption, racial and gender discrimination, and limitations on religious freedom, including the state crackdown on Falun Gong.