A San Diego-based defense contractor pleaded guilty Monday to offering bribes to a Navy official who, in return, placed $300,000 worth of orders from the company for military aircraft.

Jesse Denome, owner of JD Machine Tech, Inc., admitted that from June 2004 to September 2005 he gave a Navy official a bicycle worth nearly $2,500, a model airplane engine worth $449 and made $18,000 in payments on the official's personal credit card.

In exchange, prosecutors say the official placed over 100 orders from the company for a Navy's aircraft program.

The Navy is still investigating the official, identified only as D.V.

Prosecutors say Denome was trying to illegally win valuable Navy contracts over the competition.

According to court documents, Denome also filed false tax returns in 2005, 2006 and 2008, claiming $300,000 less than his income and passing off vacations and hobbies as business deductions. Prosecutors say as a result, he owes the government more than $80,000.

Denome, 47, faces up to eight years in prison and more than $500,000 in fines. He is scheduled to be back in court for sentencing in August.

The Supreme Court has declined to hear a dispute over whether students challenging a private Hawaiian school system's admissions policy must be identified.

The court on Monday left in place lower court rulings against four non-Hawaiian students who object to the Kamehameha Schools' policy that gives admissions preference to those of Hawaiian ancestry. Only a few non-Hawaiians have ever been admitted.

The challengers wanted to file their suit anonymously because of concerns about public humiliation and retaliation if they are identified.

A homeless single mother charged with intentionally enrolling her son in the wrong Connecticut school district asked prosecutors on Wednesday to drop the case so school officials can handle the matter administratively.

Tanya McDowell deserves to be treated the same as 26 other families who were caught this year for doing the same thing in Norwalk schools, said her lawyer, Darnell Crosland.

The other out-of-town children who were put into Norwalk schools were sent back to their hometown districts, but none of their parents were arrested.

McDowell's case and another mother's nine-day incarceration recently in Ohio have raised questions about uneven enforcement of school residency rules nationwide, particularly as many school districts are cracking down in tight budget times.

In the Ohio case, nearly 50 out-of-town parents were caught sending their children to a high-performing suburban school district, but only an Akron resident — like McDowell, a low-income, black single mother — was criminally charged.

Lawyers for the suspected al-Qaida mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole said Tuesday they have filed a case against Poland at Europe's court of human rights over alleged abuse against him at a CIA-run site in that country about eight years ago.

The Open Society Justice Initiative, a New York-based human rights group, and lawyers for Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri are challenging Poland for "active complicity" in the extraordinary rendition program carried out under then-President George W. Bush.

The case filed with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, seeks in part to press Poland to help block an "imminent risk" that al-Nashiri could face the death penalty.

The 46-year-old Saudi national was held at a secret CIA site in Poland between December 2002 and June 2003, and is now being held at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

U.S. military prosecutors re-filed terrorism and murder charges last month and requested the death penalty against al-Nashiri over the alleged planning and preparation for the attack that killed 17 sailors and injured 41.

The filing alleges that Poland's government violated the European Convention of Human Rights by enabling al-Nashiri's to face torture and helping his transfer, despite risks he faced in U.S. custody: further abuse, "a flagrantly unfair trial" and the death penalty, the group said.