An anti-abortion protester arrested in 2007 had a First Amendment right to demonstrate on a sidewalk near the entrance the building that houses the Liberty Bell, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The decision overturns lower-court rulings that upheld the arrest of Christian evangelical leader Michael Marcavage. Marcavage, who lives in suburban Lansdowne, had been sentenced to a year's probation for refusing a National Park Service order to move to a nearby designated demonstration area.

The appeals court tossed the two charges on free-speech and procedural grounds. The three-judge panel said Marcavage caused no more of a disturbance than other people near the Liberty Bell entrance, including a cancer-survivors group and the drivers of horse-drawn carriages hawking their services.

Marcavage founded a group, Repent America, that opposes abortion, homosexuality and the teaching of evolution.

He has been arrested repeatedly during protests up and down the East Coast. He successfully challenged a 2004 arrest for picketing at a Philadelphia street festival for gays and lesbians, but a Massachusetts court last year upheld a disorderly conduct conviction based on his refusal to stop using a megaphone at Salem's famed Halloween celebration.

St. James Anglican Church, a theologically conservative breakaway church, has waged a nearly six-year fight to keep the church property instead of returning it to the Diocese of Los Angeles.

St. James is one of several dozen individual parishes and four dioceses nationwide that voted to split from the national church after the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop.

State courts have sided with the Los Angeles diocese throughout the six-year legal case. The church lost its petition to have the case heard in the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

The sentence was more than the 40 years federal prosecutors had recommended for Rothstein, a disbarred lawyer who pleaded guilty to racketeering and fraud conspiracy charges in January.

He had faced up to 100 years in prison but his lawyer had asked U.S. District Judge James Cohn to give him no more than 30 years.

Rothstein, who turns 48 on Thursday, fled to Morocco as his fraud scheme collapsed in late October, apparently lured by the fact that the country has no extradition treaty with the United States. He voluntarily came back to Florida in early November and has been jailed since he surrendered to the FBI in December.

Upon his return, Rothstein cooperated with investigators unraveling his investment scheme, which prosecutors cited in asking that he be given a sentence of no more than 40 years. But Cohn tore into Rothstein for his "greed and arrogance" before handing down the tougher sentence, stressing that Rothstein had committed his fraud while serving as a licensed attorney.

Part of that fraud involved forging bogus court documents, making it especially egregious to a federal judge, Cohn said. "There can be no conduct more reviled," he said.

Omar al-Bashir was sworn in Thursday to another five-year term. Among those in attendance was a U.S. foreign service officer.

The State Department notes that the inauguration also was for a vice president, Salva Kiir, from the largest party representing southern Sudan.

Al-Bashir is sought by the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands for allegedly masterminding atrocities in Darfur.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Friday that al-Bashir should cooperate with the court and "should be held accountable."

China has kick-started a key process to frame its first immigration law to better manage immigrants as the world's fastest economy seeks to attract more foreigners to boost its development.

Experts on migration have advised the government to learn from other countries in regulating immigration, said Zhang Jijiao, researcher with the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

Zhang said in the era of globalisation, China needed to attract a variety of talents, investors, skilled workers, and in particular "seagulls" -- a Chinese term for foreign merchants who work with multinationals and must travel across the world -- to contribute to its development.

A sounder migration policy would definitely enhance China's appeal, Zhang said.

The Ministry of Public Security, the Beijing Law Society, the Chinese People's Public Security University and the CASS held a liaison meeting last year. But the discussions had yet to result in any concrete preparations, Zhang told state-run Xinhua news agency at a global forum on migration.

Unlike Western countries, which have special laws to regulate the management of transnational migrants, there were few Chinese legal instruments to regulate immigration and foreign investment.

"This reflects how China's transnational migration management has long been focused on the legitimacy of entry and exit out of economic considerations," said Zhang.

Attorneys for 28-year-old Ingmar Guandique (gwan-DEE'-kay) had argued he would not get a fair trial in Washington because of the extensive publicity. But Judge Gerald Fisher denied a motion Friday to change the venue of Guandique's trial in October.

Levy disappeared in May 2001 and her remains were found a year later in Rock Creek Park. Guandique faces a first-degree murder charge in her death.

The judge still has to rule on another defense request to suppress statements Guandique made to authorities in 2008.

A former enforcement attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission was sentenced Friday to eight years in prison for his role in a a series of multimillion dollar pump-and-dump stock fraud schemes.

Dallas-based attorney Phillip Offill Jr., 51, was convicted by a jury earlier this year on 10 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy. He testified that he was acting within the law, but the jury rejected his defense, and so too did U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady.

"Your testimony ... was an affront to justice," O'Grady told Offill at Friday's sentencing hearing. "It was one of the biggest pack of lies I've ever heard."

Offill, who worked at the SEC for 15 years before taking a job at the Godwin Gruber law firm in Dallas, aided schemes that by conservative estimates cheated more than 1,500 investors out of at least $2.4 million. The fraudsters would pump up the value of dubious penny stocks and then sell the shares at inflated prices to unwitting buyers.

Eight other coconspirators have already been convicted and sentenced in a case that has been under investigation for more than three years. Most of the illegal transactions took place in 2004.

The eight-year term imposed on Offill was one of the most severe. Prosecutor Ed Power said the tougher sentence was deserved because Offill lied on the witness stand and because his status as a respected attorney helped provide cover for the fraud.