The United States accused Canada of misinterpreting the agreement to give its exporters an unfair advantage.

The ruling marked a victory for the Western Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta when the panel found against the U.S. claim that the provinces owed millions of dollars in export taxes aimed at limiting export surges.

Under the deal, Canadian lumber exporters can either pay export charges of up to 15 percent based on their selling price to the United States, or cap the charge at 5 percent along with an export quota that restrains volume.

British Columbia has traditionally produced about half of all the softwood that Canada exports to the United States.

However, the court found that Quebec and Ontario in Canada's east, which are also big producers and use the quota option to limit their exports, had sent too much lumber south.

"Under the panel decision, producers in the east of Canada will be penalized for over-shipping their allowable quota," said Zoltan van Heyningen, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, the U.S. industry group that has been driving the complaints.

Canada claimed at least partial victory and said the ruling was a healthy step for the bilateral 2006 agreement, which was designed to avert more years of long, expensive lumber lawsuits.

"While Canada believes that it has fully complied with the agreement, we respect the tribunal's ruling ... Today's decision provides clarity with respect to the implementation of the SLA (Softwood Lumber Agreement) in the future," said Canadian Trade Minister David Emerson.

The United States had argued that the starting point for calculating export charges and volumes should be the first quarter of 2007, while Canada argued it should be July 2007. The court sided with the United States on that issue.

The two countries have one month to propose possible remedies for the overshipping issue, which might entail docking future exports, Van Heyningen said.

The U.S. coalition said it disagreed with the findings on the western provinces, which it said "let Canada off the hook regarding past collections of 'surge mechanism' export taxes," which they estimated at up to about $85 million.

The Bush administration has filed a separate complaint at the court, alleging that certain Canadian provinces were improperly propping up their lumber industries.

Stanislav Shmulevich, 24, pleaded guilty as part of a deal in which he must complete 300 hours of community service. The business student was initially charged with two counts of criminal mischief as a hate crime, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison.

"There was no hate crime here," said defense lawyer Glenn Morak. "He accepts responsibility, and he is repentant."

Detective Faisal Khan said Shmulevich told him "he committed the acts out of anger toward a group of Muslim students with whom he had a recent disagreement."

Shmulevich, the lawyer said, is no longer at Pace, which has about 14,000 students in New York City and suburban Westchester County.

A deadlocked U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision against Pfizer Inc's Warner-Lambert unit over withdrawn diabetes drug Rezulin in a ruling announced on Monday, allowing the case to go forward.

By a 4-to-4 vote, the court affirmed a federal appeals court ruling that reinstated the lawsuit against the world's biggest drugmaker by Michigan residents who said their injuries were caused by the diabetes drug.

The split occurred because the court's ninth member, Chief Justice John Roberts, took no part in the case because he owns Pfizer shares. The court's one-sentence ruling does not address the merits of the dispute.

Rezulin, first approved in 1996, was pulled from the market in 2000 after about 100 people who took the medicine needed liver transplants or died. Pfizer has fought thousands of lawsuits claiming the drugmaker failed to warn the public about the drug's toxic effects.

The high court's action clears the way for the case to proceed in federal court in New York.

At issue in the Supreme Court case was a Michigan state law that provides pharmaceutical companies immunity from such suits except when it can be proven that the manufacturer defrauded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Gay rights advocates sued to overturn the ban four years ago after the court halted a monthslong same-sex wedding spree that saw thousands of couples marry at City Hall.

The justices were scheduled to hear three hours of arguments in six cases.

"I think I speak for everybody when I say that this has been a long time coming and a day that has been eagerly anticipated," said City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who is representing the city in a lawsuit supporting gay marriage.

The cases were filed after the court stopped the same-sex marriages in the winter of 2004. More than 4,000 couples exchanged vows at the direction of Mayor Gavin Newsom months before gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, although the high court ultimately voided the unions.

In briefs submitted to the court, same-sex marriage supporters argued that California's Constitution leaves no room for denying gays and lesbians the right to wed.

They say that while the state is one of a handful where gay couples are entitled to most of the same legal rights as married spouses, the institution of marriage is too important to allow for alternatives that are by definition inferior.

"We're very hopeful that California history will stay true today and we'll see the constitution vindicated for the thousands of families in California who depend on our equal place under law," said Jennifer Pizer, a lawyer with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund who is representing gay couples.

The state and same-sex marriage opponents, however, maintain that limiting marriage to members of the opposite sex is reasonable — not only to uphold tradition but because California voters approved a ballot initiative eight years ago bolstering the gay-marriage ban that was in place at the time. To overturn that law, they say, would abrogate the rights of all Californians.

Jim Clark, who was the former governor's chief of staff, agreed to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy fraud in a filing in U.S. District Court in Anchorage. He was scheduled to enter his plea at an arraignment hearing on Tuesday.

Clark admitted to taking $68,550 in illegal contributions from the state's largest oil-services company, VECO Corp, for Murkowski's failed 2006 reelection bid in exchange for working on VECO's behalf to secure an industry-friendly version of tax legislation, according to the plea agreement.

He is the first official from the Murkowski administration to be charged in a federal criminal investigation that has so far resulted in convictions of three former state lawmakers, the indictment of a fourth and guilty pleas from two top VECO executives and one former lobbyist.

Murkowski, who was also a former U.S. senator, was soundly defeated in the 2006 Republican primary by Sarah Palin, Alaska's current governor who ran as an anti-corruption reformer.

Clark and VECO conspired to hide the illegal contributions "in a manner so that the public would be deceived and the payments would not be disclosed, as required by law," according to charging documents.

The federal investigation centers around a revision of an oil-tax law that passed the state legislature in 2006 at Murkowski's urging. Bill Allen and Rick Smith, two former VECO executives, pleaded guilty to bribing state lawmakers for a pro-industry version of the bill and other favorable actions.

Former state Senate President Ben Stevens, son of powerful U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, received much of that bribe money, Allen and Smith testified in court last year.

The name of the Bryan Cave law firm has come up in pretrial legal battles in the criminal case against politically connected entrepreneur Antoin "Tony" Rezko.

In a footnote to a motion last week seeking to exclude some government evidence against Rezko, his defense lawyers disclosed for first time that prosecutors have alleged that Rezko paid a $1.5 million bribe to Iraq's former electricity minister to obtain a contract in that country. The alleged bribe was paid from an escrow account held by Bryan Cave, prosecutors said.

Rezko's lawyers said that every aspect of the bribe claim is "demonstrably false."

The bribe allegation is unrelated to the federal influence-peddling and fraud charges against Rezko, whose trial began Monday with jury selection. Its disclosure shows the scope of Rezko's relationship with lawyers who have represented his real estate and restaurant businesses in civil matters.

Another law firm, Freeborn & Peters, was identified by prosecutors last month for its involvement in a $3.5 million overseas wire transfer to Rezko and his associates. The government did not suggest anything illegal on the law firm's part, but evidence of the wire transfer led a federal judge to revoke Rezko's bail in January.

Another one of Rezko's lawyers, Gene Murphy, was a partner in Bryan Cave's Chicago office from April 2004 to August 2005. When Murphy left Bryan Cave, the firm stopped representing Rezko, said Jeffrey Morof, the head of Bryan Cave's Chicago office.

Murphy, who has started his own law firm, said the claim that an alleged bribe came from a Bryan Cave account is "absolutely baseless." He declined further comment on Rezko, other than adding that he no longer represents him.

Morof also denied that the firm had any involvement in an alleged transfer of funds to the former electricity minister.

The bribe allegation came up in a private hearing held in the judge's chambers, according to Rezko's lawyers. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment.

Blogger unmasked: A vocal critic of some patent lawsuits who blogged anonymously under the pseudonym "Patent Troll Tracker" has revealed himself after being pressured by one of his frequent targets. The blogger is Rick Frenkel, an intellectual-property lawyer at Cisco Systems.

He recently disclosed on his blog that he faced an e-mail threat of being named. In his blog, he tracked lawsuits by companies that acquired patents solely to sue for infringement. Chicago lawyer Raymond Niro represents a number of these entities that have come to be known by the derogatory term of patent trolls.

Niro, tired of being criticized anonymously in the blog, had recently offered a $10,000 bounty for anyone who unmasked the blogger. Niro said no one has stepped forward to claim the reward.

On the move: Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Rubinstein has joined Greenberg & Traurig's Chicago office as a shareholder, the firm's equivalent of partner. He worked in the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago for four years, primarily in the complex fraud section. ... Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal hired Brian Lambert as its chief marketing officer. He most recently was at Wachovia Corp., where he was head of business development in the treasury services division. ... Jennifer Nijman, a former president of the Chicago Bar Association, has left Winston & Strawn to start her own firm with Susan Franzetti, a solo practitioner who previously worked at Sonnenschein. Their practice will focus on representing businesses in environmental matters.