The White House announced Thursday that Bush had nominated Glen E. Conrad to the Richmond, Va.-based appeals court, which has handled some of the country's biggest terrorism cases.

Conrad has been a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia since 2003.

If confirmed by the Senate, Conrad would fill the seat of H. Emory Widener Jr., who died last year.

Conrad, 58, a native of Radford, Va., is a 1974 graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Marshall Wythe School of Law. From 1976 to 2003, Conrad was a federal magistrate judge in the Western District of Virginia's Abingdon, Charlottesville and Roanoke divisions.

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.