The Supreme Court says the family of a police chief convicted of extortion doesn't get attorney fees from his victim, another police chief.

The high court ruled Monday for Vinton, La. police chief Ricky Fox, who doesn't want to pay lawyer fees to the family of former chief Billy Ray Vice. Vice was convicted of extortion after threatening to reveal damaging information about Fox unless he dropped out of the police chief's election. Fox won the 2005 election.

Fox later sued Vice, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the lawsuit was frivolous and ordered Fox to pay Vice's attorney fees. A unanimous high court overturned that decision. Vice died last year.

Ownership of a patent for technology to detect HIV levels in patients' blood was correctly split between Stanford University and the pharmaceutical giant Roche, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

By a 7-2 vote, the high court upheld a lower court's decision making the company and the university co-owners of a patent for technology in HIV test kits.

Stanford asserted it owned the technology because its discoverer worked there. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act allows universities to retain rights to research funded by federal grants.

But Stanford researcher Mark Holodniy also signed a contract that gave Roche the patent to anything that resulted from their collaboration. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit made Roche and Stanford co-owners, and the high court agreed.

"Nowhere in the Act are inventors expressly deprived of their interest in federally funded inventions," said Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion.

Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg dissented.

"I cannot so easily accept the majority's conclusion — that the individual inventor can lawfully assign an invention (produced by public funds) to a third party, thereby taking that invention out from under the Bayh-Dole Act's restrictions, conditions and allocation rules," Breyer said.

Months after Illinois' new senator took office, the Supreme Court says it will not consider overturning the election of President Barack Obama's replacement in the U.S. Senate.

The high court on Monday turned away an appeal from former Illinois Sen. Roland Burris, who was appointed to the seat but did not get chance to run for a full term.

The justices also refused to hear an appeal from state officials who objected to a court order to hold a special election as well as a regular election for Obama's old seat

The GOP-controlled House on Thursday passed a $42.3 billion budget for the government's homeland security efforts after a debate that demonstrated resistance for some of the spending cuts required under austere budget times.

The measure passed 231-188 after lawmakers eased cuts to popular grant programs for local fire departments and after GOP conservatives tried but failed in several attempts to add millions of dollars to a variety of border security initiatives.

It's the first of the 12 annual spending bills funding the day-to-day operations of federal agencies for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. It's also the first concrete step to implement the budget blueprint approved by House Republicans in April.

The homeland security measure bears a $1.1 billion cut of almost 3 percent from the spending levels for the ongoing budget year that were enacted in April in a compromise between House Republicans and President Barack Obama.

But far more stringent spending bills — they contain cuts to health research, student aid, food aid for low-income pregnant women and energy efficiency programs — will follow this summer.

Republicans focused the homeland security cuts on port and transit security grants, awards for high-risk cities, and grants to local fire departments to help them with salaries and equipment purchases, proposing to slash them by $2.1 billion below Obama's requests — cuts of more than half.

On Wednesday a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers restored $320 million in cuts to grants for fire departments by a sweeping 333-87 vote, but only by imposing an unrealistic cut on the agency's bureaucratic operations.

A former Vermont property manager admitted on Thursday that he's guilty of fraud in the collapse of a Montpelier company.

Sixty-four-year-old James Pumpelly, of Lake Charles, La., pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of fraud stemming from his work with Parkside Management and Rentals Co., which managed residential apartments in central Vermont on behalf of landlords.

Federal prosecutors say Pumpelly misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars in rent money - some of it federal rent subsidy money - that Parkside collected on behalf of the landlords, diverting it for his use and that of his ex-girlfriend, Julie Clemons.

Clemons, who owned Parkside Management, wasn't charged.

Sentencing was set for Oct. 11 in U.S. District Court in Brattleboro. He could get 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines on each count.