In a case involving the Salt Lake City-based Summum, the court said that governments can decide what to display in a public park without running afoul of the First Amendment.

Pleasant Grove City, Utah, rejected the group's marker, prompting a federal lawsuit that argued that a city can't allow some private donations of displays in its public park and reject others. The federal appeals court in Denver agreed.

In his opinion for the court, Justice Samuel Alito distinguished the Summum's case from efforts to prevent groups from speaking in public parks, which ordinarily would violate the First Amendment's free speech guarantee.

Alito said "the display of a permanent monument in a public park" requires a different analysis.

Because monuments in public parks help define a city's identity, "cities and other jurisdictions take some care in accepting donated monuments," he said.

In a 7-2 vote, the court ruled that a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., wrongly threw out the conviction of Randy Edward Hayes. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia dissented.

The federal government, gun control groups and women's rights advocates worried that a ruling for Hayes would have weakened the federal law enacted in 1996 that applied the 40-year-old ban on gun possession by a felon to people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Hayes' favor because the West Virginia state law on battery under which he was convicted did not contain specific wording about a domestic relationship between the offender and the victim.

Nine other appeals courts rejected that interpretation.

The justices said that in court arguments set for this fall, they will consider throwing out an appeals court ruling that ordered the cross be torn down.

The American Civil Liberties Union and a former National Park Service employee have been challenging the cross' continued presence on national parkland for nearly eight years. A cross has stood on the site since 1934, when a local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars erected it atop an outcropping known as Sunrise Rock.

Congress has transferred ownership of the land on which it sits to a private party.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals twice said the cross must come down. It invalidated the 2004 congressionally approved land transfer, saying that "carving out a tiny parcel of property in the midst of this vast preserve — like a donut hole with the cross atop it — will do nothing to minimize the impermissible governmental endorsement" of the religious symbol.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning and ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to tell Anderson and provide him with transportation, if needed.

The judge has barred prosecutors from using key evidence, such as positive steroids tests, at Bonds' March 2 trial unless Anderson testifies.

Anderson has said through his attorney he will refuse to testify, and he may be sent to prison on contempt of court charges. Anderson was sent to prison after refusing to testify about Bonds before a federal grand jury in 2006.

The justices, in an order Monday, are refusing to hear FTC's plea to reinstate the commission's ruling that Rambus, based in Los Altos, Calif., violated antitrust law.

A federal appeals court in Washington overturned the FTC ruling last year.

The Bush administration had declined to back the FTC in its appeal to the high court.

The court said Monday that it will leave undisturbed the conviction of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, despite an appeals court finding that his constitutional rights were violated when a judge allowed jurors, but not Abu Ali, to see classified evidence against him.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond determined that the error made no difference to the outcome of the trial.

Abu Ali has challenged various aspects of the legal process, including that he was tortured by interrogators in Saudi Arabia. Federal courts have denied all his appeals.

Born in Houston, Abu Ali grew up in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Va., and was valedictorian of a private Islamic high school. He joined al-Qaida after traveling to Saudi Arabia to attend college in 2002. As a member of a Medina-based al-Qaida cell, Abu Ali discussed numerous potential terrorist attacks, including a plan to assassinate Bush and a plan to establish a sleeper cell in the United States.

He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, but the appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing after ruling that the trial judge ignored federal sentencing guidelines that called for life in prison.