President Barack Obama on Tuesday said he would nominate a pair of Northeastern judges to appeals court positions.

Judge Denny Chin, a district court judge for the Southern District of New York, and Rhode Island Superior Court Justice O. Rogeriee Thompson were tapped for positions. If confirmed by the Senate, Chin would serve as a judge in the 2nd Circuit, based in New York, and Thompson would serve in the Boston-based 1st Circuit.

"Judges Chin and Thompson have displayed exceptional dedication to public service throughout their careers," Obama said in a statement. "They have served on the bench with distinction in New York and Rhode Island, and I am honored to nominate them today to serve the American people on the United States Court of Appeals."

Chin was born in Hong Kong and moved to the United States at the age of 2. A Princeton University and Fordham Law School graduate, he clerked in the Southern District of New York and worked in private practice. He was an assistant U.S. attorney for four years before returning to private law.

Supreme Court justices on Tuesday indicated that a federal law aimed at graphic videos of dog fights and other acts of animal cruelty goes too far in limiting free speech rights.

The court heard argument on the Obama administration's appeal to reinstate a 10-year-old law that bans the production and sale of the videos. A federal appeals court struck down the law and invalidated the conviction of Robert Stevens of Pittsville, Va., who was sentenced to three years in prison for videos he made about pit bull fights.

Several justices suggested that the law is too broad and could apply, for instance, to people who make films about hunting.

"Why not do a simpler thing?" Justice Stephen Breyer asked an administration lawyer. "Ask Congress to write a statute that actually aims at the frightful things they were trying to prohibit."

But the lawyer, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, said Congress was careful to exempt hunting, educational, journalistic and other depictions from the law. Katyal urged the justices not to wipe away the law in its entirety, but to allow courts to decide on a case-by-case basis whether videos are prohibited.

When Congress passed the law and then-President Bill Clinton signed it in 1999, lawmakers were especially interested in limiting Internet sales of so-called crush videos, which appeal to a certain sexual fetish by showing women crushing to death small animals with their bare feet or high-heeled shoes.

The Supreme Court has left in place a court ruling that the Obama administration says will cost taxpayers at least $19 billion in royalties on energy leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

The justices declined Monday to hear the government's appeal of a ruling in favor of the Anadarko Petroleum Corp. involving eight deepwater leases the company holds in the gulf. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the Interior Department could not collect royalties from the leases, even as oil prices rose and companies began posting huge profits.

The leases were obtained between 1996 and 2000 by Kerr-McGee Corp., which Anadarko later acquired.

The case revolves around a 1995 law that gave oil and natural gas producers a break from paying royalties at a time when energy prices were extremely low. The law waived all royalty payments until a specific amount of oil and gas was produced.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan told the court that the Interior Department has the authority to lift the royalty relief once prices reach a certain level.

The ruling could affect other leases and prohibit the government from collecting royalties from other producers.

Investor Jeffry Picower, described as the biggest beneficiary of Bernard Madoff's fraud, is now being sued for $7.2 billion, $2 billion more than the trustee in the case demanded in May.

Picower, newly listed as one of the 400 wealthiest Americans by Forbes magazine, was complicit in the fraud, trustee Irving Picard said in court documents on Wednesday responding to the investor's motion to dismiss his lawsuit.

"Picower makes the paradoxical argument that he could not have been complicit in the Ponzi scheme because he made too much money from it," Picard wrote in the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.

"The unusual, if not unlawful activity in his accounts, including one negative net cash balance of approximately $6 billion at the time of Madoff's arrest, was clear evidence that something was seriously amiss."

Picower, 67, of Palm Beach, Florida, was listed 371st and worth $1 billion on the Forbes list published this week.

Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation's most notorious eminent domain project.

There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne's lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot's towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.

But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues? They are noticeably missing.

Proponents of the ambitious plan blame the sour economy. Opponents call it a "poetic justice."

"They are getting what they deserve. They are going to get nothing," said Susette Kelo, the lead plaintiff in the landmark property rights case. "I don't think this is what the United States Supreme Court justices had in mind when they made this decision."

Kelo's iconic pink home sat for more than a century on that currently empty lot, just steps away from Connecticut's quaint but economically distressed Long Island Sound waterfront. Shortly after she moved in, in 1997, her house became ground zero in the nation's best-known land rights catfight.

New London officials decided they needed Kelo's land and the surrounding 90 acres for a multimillion-dollar private development that included residential, hotel conference, research and development space and a new state park that would complement a new $350 million Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility.

Kelo and six other homeowners fought for years, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2005, justices voted 5-4 against them, giving cities across the country the right to use eminent domain to take property for private development.

A money-market mutual fund that held more than $60 billion before it notoriously "broke the buck" a year ago said Wednesday it will hand out $1 billion in a fifth distribution to investors from the fund's remaining assets.

The $1 billion distribution, the smallest of five partial payouts since the Reserve Primary Fund's collapse, will be made to shareholders on or about Oct. 2, said New York-based Reserve Management Co., which ran the fund.

After that payout, the fund will hold about $3.5 billion. The final distribution and its timing is tied up in a pending civil fraud case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Reserve Management and its two top executives.

At a hearing in New York on Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Gardephe said he was inclined to set a Dec. 23 deadline by which the bulk of the remaining assets should be distributed to the fund's thousands of shareholders.

The fund had held more than $64 billion shortly before Sept. 16, 2008, when its net asset value fell below the $1 level needed to ensure investors a dollar-for-dollar return of their principal put into the fund. The fund declared $785 million that it held in Lehman Brothers debt worthless after the investment bank's bankruptcy filing. That sank the fund's net asset value to 97 cents, leading to the fund's collapse as institutional investors demanded cash back and fund managers were forced to sell assets at steep discounts amid plunging markets.

The doors are closed at the California Supreme Court, the tiny courthouse in Alpine County and every state courthouse in between in an unprecedented attempt to close a historic budget deficit.

The Judicial Council, which oversees California's courts, plan to shutter the courts on the third Wednesday of every month from September through July. The move is expected to save the state $84 million.

The closures will cost 20,000 court employees a day's pay each month.

The state's 1,700 judges are protected by state law from having their paychecks altered and are exempt from the cuts. Chief Justice Ron George says all seven high court justices have voluntarily given up a day's pay and that a large number of other judges have followed suit.