In an order issued late Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit says the slot auction cannot be held until a federal court rules on objections from New York airport officials and airlines.

Transportation Secretary Mary Peters called for the auction as a way to reduce air traffic at John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports. Peters' decision to auction slots followed widespread complaints last year about lengthy flight delays.

Airlines and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey filed suit saying the proposal would add new costs and make a mess of day-to-day airport operations.

The court did not comment on its order Monday rejecting the call by Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, N.J., to intervene in the presidential election. Donofrio says that since Obama had dual nationality at birth — his mother was American and his Kenyan father at the time was a British subject — he cannot possibly be a "natural born citizen," one of the requirements the Constitution lists for eligibility to be president.

Donofrio also contends that two other candidates, Republican John McCain and Socialist Workers candidate Roger Calero, also are not natural-born citizens and thus ineligible to be president.

At least one other appeal over Obama's citizenship remains at the court. Philip J. Berg of Lafayette Hill, Pa., argues that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii as Obama says and the Hawaii secretary of state has confirmed. Berg says Obama also may be a citizen of Indonesia, where he lived as a boy. Federal courts in Pennsylvania have dismissed Berg's lawsuit.

The Moscow City Court set bail for Vasily Aleksanian, who faces embezzlement and money-laundering charges, at 50 million rubles ($1.8 million), spokeswoman Anna Usachyova said.

Aleksanian, a 36-year-old U.S.-trained lawyer who's been jailed since 2006, was moved to a clinic in February, while lawyers demanded that he be released from custody given his state of health.

His trial was suspended earlier this year due to major health problems.

The court's ruling represented a rare victory for defendants in cases against Yukos and its jailed founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Aleksanian had been a vice president at Yukos and served as a lawyer for Khodorkovsky, who is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian prison on fraud and tax evasion charges.

Once Russia's largest oil producer, Yukos was broken up and sold off in auctions in what was seen as the Kremlin's punishment for Khodorkovsky's political ambitions. Most of its assets were purchased at bargain prices by state-owned corporations.

Aleksanian's lawyers and supporters protested what they described as inhumane treatment and unsanitary conditions in the prison and the hospital.

The treatment of another Yukos lawyer, Svetlana Bakhmina, has also attracted wide attention. Bakhmina became pregnant while in custody and her supporters had called on President Dmitry Medvedev to grant her amnesty.

She was recently transferred to a clinic near Moscow and gave birth to a girl last month.

The 63 defendants in the first-known group lawsuit stemming from the scandal, including the parents of two children who died, were seeking nearly 14 million yuan ($2 million) in compensation from state-owned Sanlu Group Co., Beijing-based lawyer Xu Zhiyong said.

The dairy based in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang was at the center of China's worst food safety crisis in years, in which six babies are believed to have died and nearly 300,000 became sick with urinary problems after drinking infant formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Three of six defense lawyers presented the suit to the Hebei Supreme Court's registry office on Monday but were told it could not be accepted because government departments were still investigating.

It was Michael Schumacher and Kelly Layne Lau's first court appearance since their arrest following the boy's escape in nothing more than boxer shorts and a chain around his ankle. The teen was in search of help after allegedly spending more than a year in captivity.

The boy's one-time guardian, Caren Ramirez, also was charged with similar allegations Thursday. She remained under psychiatric evaluation awaiting her court appearance, expected as early as Monday.

Schumacher and Lau were charged with 13 felony counts, and Ramirez, whom the boy called an aunt, was charged with 10 counts. Among the charges are corporal injury to a child, child abuse and aggravated mayhem, which the San Joaquin County District Attorney's office said could yield life sentences.

Superior Court Judge Franklin Stephenson ordered Schumacher and Lau to be held in lieu of $2.2 million bail. They did not enter pleas.

The abuse at the couple's home in Tracy, about 60 miles east of San Francisco, started in July 2007, prosecutors said. The boy escaped from the home on Monday and fled to a nearby fitness center. He appeared emaciated and was covered in soot.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved the practice in its ruling for the case of an illegal gun dealer who got two years in prison, which was six months more than federal sentencing guidelines recommended.

When he imposed the sentence in 2004, U.S. District Judge Charles P. Sifton in Brooklyn said there was a "crying need" to deter gun trafficking into large metropolitan areas.

A three-judge appeals panel initially had overturned Sifton's ruling. The judges then reheard the case and ruled in Sifton's favor Thursday.

The panel said Sifton's ruling was justifiable given the high payoff available to gun smugglers who target big cities.

"Where the profits to be made from violating a law are higher, the penalty needs to be correspondingly higher to achieve the same amount of deterrence," the majority opinion said.

Gerard Cavera, the convicted gun dealer in the case, was an Army veteran with residences in New York and Deerfield Beach, Fla. The appeals court said evidence in the case indicated that he likely knew 16 firearms he sold in Florida for $11,500 were destined for New York City.

Cavera's lawyer, Jeffrey Rabin, said he was "somewhat disappointed" and was considering an appeal. He argued the case would contribute to a return to the disparate sentencing that occurred before the creation of sentencing guidelines.