A Spanish manager, Felix Palacios de la Villa, took his company Cortefiel to court when he was notified of his pension two years ago, arguing it amounted to dismissal.

A court statement said that since it was part of national labor measures to promote employment "the legitimacy of such an aim of public interest cannot reasonably be called into question."

If the court had ruled against the pension system, it would have caused widespread disruption of social and economic policies throughout the 27-nation EU.

Americans Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson won the Nobel prize in economics on Monday for developing a theory that helps explain how incentives and private information affect the functioning of markets.

Hurwicz, 90, is the oldest Nobel winner ever, according to the academy. "I really didn't expect it," said the Moscow-born researcher, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

The three winners "laid the foundations of mechanism design theory," which plays a central role in contemporary economics and political science, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Essentially, the three men, starting in 1960 with Hurwicz, studied how game theory can help determine the best, most efficient method for allocating resources, the academy said.

Their research has helped explain decision-making procedures involved in economic transactions including, for example, what insurance polices will provide the best coverage without inviting misuse.

It has been used in everything from negotiations over labor issues to the auctioning of government bonds and has helped countries and companies better understand how markets function even when conditions are rocky.

Hurwicz told reporters he was surprised to have won the award.

"There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened I didn't expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off," he said.

Maskin, 56, is professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey; and Myerson, 56, is a professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

The 30 men, mostly Algerians, have been charged with membership of a terrorist organization, conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack and forgery.

The alleged mastermind Abderrahmane Tahiri, alias Mohamed Achraf, was extradited from Switzerland in April 2005.

Spanish authorities suspect Tahiri planned to ram a truck loaded with 1,100 pounds of explosives into the National Court in downtown Madrid.

"This was an organized and structured terrorist group, uncovered in November 2003, with radical Salafist tendencies, which defended the jihad (holy war) and intended carrying it out in Spain through violent actions such as that planned against the National Court and the persons within," according to the indictment.

"With that explosion, they hoped to kill the persons within (judges, clerks and public in general) and destroy the files held against the 'mujahedeen brotherhood' inside," the indictment said.

Investigating magistrate Fernando Grande-Marlaska said such an attack could have killed up to 1,000 people.

The prosecution is demanding sentences of between two and 46 years for the accused.

The trial is expected to last several months.

Police uncovered the alleged plot with the help of an unnamed informant who had lived with some of the accused.

In an initial investigation, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon claimed Tahiri set up a cell known as the "Martyrs for Morocco" while he served time in a Spanish prison for credit card fraud between 1999 and 2002.

Garzon said the cell had links with other Islamic terrorists, including the group believed to be behind the March 11 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people.

The latest salvo from those hoping Gore would reprise his 2000 run for the White House came in a full-page ad in The New York Times sponsored by draftgore.com, which says it is a group of grass-roots Democrats. Gore has said repeatedly, if not definitively, that he is not planning to seek the presidency.

"Your country needs you now — as do your party and the planet you are fighting so hard to save," said Wednesday's ad, which group founder Monica Friedlander of Oakland, Calif., said cost $65,000.

Despite no overt campaigning for the presidency, Gore was backed by 12 percent of Democrats in this month's Associated Press-Ipsos poll. That's down from 20 percent in June, but enough to tie for third with former Sen. John Edwards, well behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and just trailing Sen. Barack Obama.

"Doggone him," Pat Sutton, 69, a Gore supporter and homemaker from Lincoln, Neb., said of Gore's non-candidacy. "That's the kind of president I want, who's willing to stand up to the hard stuff. And there's a lot of hard stuff out there."

"He's far and away more intelligent than the others," said Jason Thompson, 36, an environmental health inspector in Fort Myers, Fla. "I like his environmental stand, I think he's the more sincere of the candidates, and I think he got hosed in his first election" when George W. Bush defeated him in 2000 in a disputed election.

Longtime political aide Roy Neel, who runs Gore's office in Nashville, Tenn., said the former vice president is focusing on prompting action against global warming. He said he has seen no signs Gore is contemplating a race.

"He's making no plans, and we're doing nothing," said Neel, adding, "He's not ruled it out in the future."

Asked what "the future" meant, Neel said, "Sometime later than today."

Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Gore's bitter 2000 loss to Bush, said she believes he will not run — this time.

"He's very comfortable and committed" to his work on global warming, she said, and to business pursuits that include Current TV, a cable network he helped found. She would not rule out a future presidential run.

"Al Gore should be viable for the rest of his life" as a candidate, she said.

Gore has been in the public eye this year, particularly in February when the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" about his efforts to educate about global warming won the Oscar for best documentary. Current TV also captured an Emmy.

Friends hope a crowning third award will come later this week, when the Nobel Prize for peace is announced.

The court, without comment, denied the bid by 44-year-old Khaled el-Masri, essentially upholding the Bush administration's argument that "state secrets'' would be endangered if the German man's lawsuit against the CIA was allowed to proceed.

It was the first time a case of rendition, often referred to as the out-sourcing of torture, has reached the country's highest court.

El-Masri has maintained he was a victim of mistaken identity when he was picked up by CIA agents in Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003, then beaten, shackled, drugged and chained to the floor of a so-called "ghost flight'' and sent to a "black site'' prison in Afghanistan.

There he claimed he was tortured and abused for five months before being unceremoniously dumped on a hillside in Albania and told to find his own way home.

The White House has never acknowledged it rendered el-Masri, but his story has been documented in extensive media accounts, backed by European investigations and accepted by the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The only other rendition victim seeking redress in American courts is Canadian telecommunications engineer Maher Arar. Arar was shuttled to a Syrian prison, where he was tortured after being picked up by American authorities at New York's JFK Airport in 2002.

His U.S. lawyer said Arar's appeal of a lower court ruling would proceed in New York on Nov. 9 and pointed to differences in the two cases that could keep the Canadian's case alive.

Maria LaHood said in the el-Masri case, the government argued it cannot even reveal if the German was rendered.

But in the Arar case, the government has acknowledged the Canadian was removed to Syria, she said, but has argued it cannot reveal why.

Washington argues the reason Arar was sent to Syria is a "state secret,'' but LaHood said she will argue on appeal that the reasons are not relevant, only the rendition is at issue.

"This was a real disappointment that the court would not even hear the case and would just defer to the executive,'' she said.

The North Korea agreement, announced in Beijing on Wednesday, sets out the first specific timetable for the North to disclose all its nuclear programs and disable all facilities in return for 950,000 metric tons of fuel oil or its equivalent in economic aid.

The accord is the second stage of a six-nation pact reached in February, one that has continued to draw sharp criticism from conservatives who complain that the United States is rewarding North Korea for its test of a nuclear device last October. The agreement has not yet resolved the contentious question of when North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons.

The agreement calls on the United States to "begin the process of removing" North Korea from a United States terrorism list "in parallel" with the North's actions. Conservative critics said the United States should not take North Korea off the terrorism list until it gave up all its nuclear weapons, and argued that the pact was far too conciliatory toward a nuclear power with alleged ties to international terrorism.

But the Bush administration has been eager to show diplomatic progress, and Bush suggested that the deal should serve as an example to Iran, which has refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program. During a town hall meeting on Wednesday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Bush told a questioner that he might hold direct talks with Iran if it first froze enrichment of uranium.

"An appeal to morals today is all that we have left," Khodorkovsky wrote in the open letter posted on the Web site of the All-Russia Civil Congress, a rights group.

Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year prison sentence after being convicted of tax evasion and fraud in a trial seen by his supporters as punishment for his attempt to mount a political and economic challenge to President Vladimir Putin. His Yukos oil company, once Russia's largest, has been taken over by the state.

His open letter, which was dated Monday but only drew attention Thursday, was his first in more than two years.

It was directed at Russia's liberals, but contained his prescription for Russian society as a whole.

"Only by convincing people that they, deep in their soul, do not simply want to live in good conscience but cannot be happy living otherwise, will it be possible to lay the foundation for building a democratic, law-abiding state, our Russia," the letter said.

Khodorkovsky was ruthless in consolidating his control over Yukos in the rough privatizations of the 1990s, when Russia's prime resources were parceled out to the politically connected businessmen who became known as the oligarchs.

Once he had consolidated his control, he was among the first in Russia to push for Western-style business practices. He also began to support political parties that opposed Putin's policies and created a foundation to help strengthen civil society in Russia.

"He has stopped being a businessman not only in practice, but in his thoughts," Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of Russia's most respected human rights advocates, said Thursday on Ekho Moskvy radio. She said the transformation occurred even before his arrest in October 2003.

"The ordeal he went through has contributed to these reflections. This is a traditional path for people living a difficult life," Alexeyeva said. "This is a very true path, and it's a pity that very few businessmen or politicians take it."

In his last missive from prison, issued in August 2005, shortly after his conviction, Khodorkovsky had warned of a growing sense of social injustice over post-Soviet reforms that had enriched a few and plunged the majority of Russians into poverty.

In this week's letter, Khodorkovsky referred several times to the need for faith. He said morals were the strongest and most important argument against the presence of hundreds of thousands of homeless children and the lack of medicines in a country with a budget surplus.

Morals also were the only argument "against terror and revolution as a means of solving political problems and against the shutting up of all sorts of dissenters," he wrote.

In 2005, Khodorkovsky had called for liberals to create a broad "social-democratic" coalition with communists and nationalists to oppose the Kremlin.

Such a coalition, called the Other Russia, was formed in 2006. It has held a series of street protests called dissenters' marches, some of which have been violently dispersed by police, but has not succeeded in uniting Russia's squabbling liberals or in attracting communists.

On Sunday, the Other Russia chose former world chess champion Garry Kasparov to be its candidate in the March presidential election. Even if he were to be allowed to run, which is unlikely, he would have little hope of posing a significant challenge to the Kremlin's chosen candidate.