The ad's reach -- it has received more than 1.7 million hits on YouTube in just a few days -- and the unmasking of its maker offer a glimpse of the changed media landscape of a nascent presidential campaign that is bitterly competitive 10 months before first voting.

The new popularity of web video allows broad distribution of clever political messages, which are often negative attack ads that may not readily be traced to their creators.

Phillip de Vellis, a strategist with the Washington-based consulting firm Blue State Digital, which hosts the Obama campaign web site, said he made the ad.

"I did it. And I'm proud of it," Mr de Vellis said in a response posted on a website site this week.

Mr de Vellis said he had acted on his own, without the knowledge of the Obama campaign or his employer.

P&G won the $19M lawsuit when the court concluded that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults.

The rumour had proved popular with evangelicals in the US. During the 1960s, a story began circulating that the corporation was controlled by Satan worshipers. A moon-star symbol was used by the company on many of its products from 1882 to 1985, which was considered suspect.

The stars in fact stand for the thirteen original American colonies. But the arrangement of stars in the symbol was said to secretly spell out the Revelation 13:18 "number of the beast": 666.

Without examining the facts, many people, most notably evangelicals, signed petitions against Procter & Gamble and boycotted their products in the 1980s and 1990s.

This latest case is one of several unfair competition suits P&G has brought refuting the Satanism slurs.

According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo - featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars - was a symbol of Satan.

"This is about protecting our reputation," said Jim Johnson, P&G's chief legal officer.

Amway pointed out that it had successfully defended itself in an earlier case brought by P&G that had been connected with the rumours.

It had also, it said, done everything it could to get the rumour stamped out.

The Community Rights Counsel (CRC) said Wednesday that the new Judicial Conference Policy on Judges' Attendance at Privately Funded Educational Programs has not yet produced any public disclosures of travel expenses on judicial websites. According to the Judicial Conference:

The Judicial Conference adopted a private seminars disclosure reporting policy that requires educational program providers and judges to disclose certain information relevant to judges' attendance at privately-funded educational programs.

The disclosure policy takes effect on January 1, 2007. This means that any organization covered by the policy that issues an invitation on or after January 1, 2007 (for a program commencing after that date), to a federal judge to attend an educational program as a speaker, panelist, or attendee and offers to pay for or reimburse that judge, in excess of $305, must disclose financial and programmatic information.

The policy requires disclosure within 30 days, but CRC, a judicial ethics watchdog group, conducted a review and found that "80 days after the January 1, 2007 effective date of the new policy, not a single junket has been reported." The CRC criticized the Administrative Office for the US Courts for "applying the policy in a way that seems designed to delay the reporting of information as long as possible" by determining that the policy only applies to invitations issued on or after January 1, 2007.

The Judicial Conference of the United States is the policy-making body of the federal court system and is led by Chief Justice John Roberts. A court spokesperson said Wednesday that effective implementation of the new system could take some time.

Inmate Kenneth Biros had waited for the decision hours past his 10 a.m. scheduled execution time at Ohio's death house.

Prisons director Terry Collins said the execution would not happen Tuesday.

The execution team had been waiting in a holding pattern while the court decided, ready to administer the lethal injection if the court had granted to the state's request to go ahead with the execution.

The justices' one-sentence decision agreed with two lower courts that had ruled to delay the execution, including the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that refused earlier Tuesday to allow a hearing before the full court to consider a state appeal.

A law firm that is suing the tobacco industry over the marketing of "light" cigarettes said Wednesday it will not oppose plans by Philip Morris USA''s parent company, Altria Group Inc., to spin off its Kraft Foods business.

The law firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld and Toll has filed a class action suit against several tobacco companies in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, alleging they deceived smokers about the safety of their "light" cigarettes.

Attorney Michael Hausfeld previously said he would consider filing an injunction to stop Altria from divesting Kraft if it would leave the company unable to pay the $200 billion in damages he is seeking for his clients.

Hausfeld''s firm said Wednesday that the spinoff could actually strengthen Altria financially, and thus "may prove in the best interests of our clients."
New York City-based Altria Group Inc. plans to spin off packaged food maker Kraft next week. Altria currently owns 88.9 percent of Kraft''s outstanding shares.

On Sunday, ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair may one day face war crimes charges before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. Moreno-Ocampo said that the ICC could investigate allegations of war crimes stemming from the conduct of coalition forces in Iraq, so long as Iraq agrees to ratify the Rome Statute and accede to ICC jurisdiction.

In an opinion piece in the newspaper El Pais, published on the fourth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon said the war was "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history".

"We should look more deeply into the possible criminal responsibility of the people who are, or were, responsible for this war and see whether there is sufficient evidence to make them answer for it," Garzon wrote.

"There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation and inquiry to start without more delay," he said.

Garzon, who became famous in 1999 when he tried to extradite Pinochet from Britain and try him for crimes against humanity, was particularly critical of the former Spanish government, a major backer of the Iraq invasion.

In February, Spain's former leader Jose Maria Aznar said he now knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction but "the problem was not having been clever enough to know earlier."

Garzon wrote: "If he didn't know enough, he should be asked why he didn't act prudently, giving United Nations inspectors more leeway instead of doing the opposite in total submission and fidelity to President Bush."

Gaspar Llamazares, head of the left-wing party Izquierda Unida, said he would present a motion to the Spanish parliament that leaders behind the war should face international tribunals.

"People cannot be allowed to make decisions that cause hundreds of thousands of victims, fail to recognise their errors and not have to answer to a court," said Llamazares, whose party is allied to the ruling Socialist party.

Garzon, who took a sabbatical last year to study international terrorism, said the Iraq war had helped incite hatred and garner more support for terrorist training camps.

"In some way, with a terrible lack of awareness, we have been and are helping this monster grow more and more and strengthen by the minute so it is probably invincible," he said.