Trenton's city attorney has found pay-to-play problems with a $50,000 contract that the city recently awarded to an Atlantic City law firm with ties to Mayor Tony Mack.

Acting Law Director Marc McKithen voided the contract because he says Cooper Levenson gave money to a political action committee that supported Mack.

The Times of Trenton reported the firm gave $7,200 to the Partners for Progress PAC in June, three days before the PAC gave $7,200 to Mack's election fund.

Under the city's campaign finance laws, anyone who receives a city contract cannot give more than $500 to local PACs up to one year before they begin bidding.

Cooper Levenson says it didn't break the law but asked for the return of the contribution out of caution.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court is making it clear that not everyone who passes the bar exam gets to practice law.

The court has denied the appeal of a would-be lawyer who was shot down by its Committee on Character and Fitness.

The applicant - identified in the ruling by the initials G.W. - admitted it was a "bad joke" to pretend to be an armed robber at a North Conway convenience store on April Fool's Day 1993. He's also been convicted of drunk driving, violating a restraining order and criminal threatening and he has more than $130,000 in delinquent student loans.

When asked for positive traits, G.W. said it was an amazing accomplishment that he passed the bar exam in 2008 after 20 years and seven unsuccessful attempts.

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that state adoption laws were not followed in terminating the parental rights of a Guatemalan woman who was caught up in a 2007 immigration raid and allowing her son to be adopted by an American couple.

But the decision doesn't automatically return the now 4-year-old child to his birth mother, Encarnacion Bail Romero. The court instead ordered the completion of mandatory reports about Romero, the adoptive parents and the boy, and a new trial regarding Romero's parental rights.

Judge Patricia Breckenridge, who wrote the majority opinion for the seven-member court, said another hearing would be required because the evidence in the case suggested abandonment. In a footnote, Breckenridge expressed concern about how the case played out, and three other judges indicated they would have reversed the adoption.

"Every member of this court agrees that this case is a travesty in its egregious procedural errors, its long duration and its impact on mother, adoptive parents and, most importantly, child," Breckenridge wrote.

Romero was arrested during an immigration sweep at a poultry plant, and sentenced to two years in a federal prison after pleading guilty to aggravated identity theft. Since leaving prison last year, she has been seeking to regain custody of her son, Carlos, who has lived with Seth and Melinda Moser, of Carthage, since he was about 1 year old.

Another couple who had been helping Romero's family care for Carlos after his mother's arrest had contacted the Mosers about adopting him. The boy was born in the U.S. and is a U.S. citizen. Romero was not immediately deported after serving her sentence so she could challenge the adoption, according to her attorneys.

The publisher of The Wall Street Journal went to court Tuesday seeking to overturn a 31-year ban on the release of records about how much Medicare money individual doctors receive.

Dow Jones & Company Inc. filed papers in federal court in Orlando in an effort to end a prohibition that was implemented in 1979 following a successful lawsuit in Florida by the American Medical Association.

Dow Jones called the ban outdated and said it had limited the data reporters for The Wall Street Journal were able to obtain last year for a series of stories that examined abuses in the Medicare system.

"There is no legally supportable justification for maintaining a sweeping and obsolete injunction that for over thirty years has prevented the American public from knowing the true extent of Medicare waste, abuse and fraud," Dow Jones said in its filing.

The president of the American Medical Association said that members of the public could draw misleading conclusions from the data if it is released, given its complexity and "significant limitations."

"Physicians who provide care to Medicare patients are already subject to widespread governmental oversight," Dr. Cecil Wilson of Winter Park, Fla., said in a statement. "These federal agencies and contractors have access to the full range of Medicare data and are aggressively ferreting out improper claims."

The Supreme Court won't stop the class-action certification of a lawsuit against Pella Corp. over a purported defect in one of its windows.

The high court on Tuesday refused to hear an appeal from the window-maker.

The lower courts have certified a class-action lawsuit against Pella. The lawsuit alleges that Pella's aluminum clad wood "Proline" casement windows have a design defect that allows water to seep behind the aluminum cladding. They claim that allows the wood to rot at an accelerated rate, and that Pella committed consumer fraud by not declaring publicly the role that the purported design flaw had in the rot.

But Pella fought the class-action certification, saying consumer fraud claims are inappropriate for class treatment.

The Supreme Court won't overturn the convictions of a suburban New York City couple convicted of enslaving two Indonesian housekeepers.

The high court on Tuesday refused to hear appeals from Mahender and Varsha Sabhnani that sought to overturn their forced-labor convictions.

The couple was convicted of enslaving two domestic servants the couple brought from Indonesia by keeping their travel documents and having them perform forced labor on their behalf.

Prosecutors said Varsha Sabhnani was primarily responsible for inflicting years of abuse on the poorly educated servants. They said her husband let the abuse take place and benefited from the work the women performed in their $2 million Long Island home.

Varsha Sabhnani says pre-trial publicity prevented her from getting a fair trial, while her husband argues that he shouldn't have been convicted for aiding and abetting because he didn't stop his wife.

Former Harvard University classmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg want to throw out a $65 million settlement of their lawsuit that alleged the social network was their idea.

Lawyers for twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss argued their case before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday. They claim they were duped into agreeing to the 2008 settlement after Facebook lawyers and executives misrepresented the value of the company.

But the three-judge appeals panel appeared reluctant to reopen the case. According to the San Jose Mercury News, the judges noted that the Winklevosses were well-educated and had good legal advisers at the time, so they should have known what they were getting into.