The Supreme Court says a credit card company legally increased the interest rate on a man's card without telling him.

The high court on Monday ruled for Chase Bank USA and against James A. McCoy.

McCoy complained that Chase increased his interest rate due to his delinquency or default, and applied that increase retroactively. He says credit card regulations make that illegal because Chase did not notify him until after the increase went into effect.

The lower court had thrown out his lawsuit. Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed, saying the Federal Reserve Board's interpretation of the regulations said Chase did not have to inform him of the rate increase.

Congress changed the law in 2009 to require credit card companies to give a 45-day notice before raising interest rates.

A federal judge has rejected a challenge to Iowa's judicial nominating and retention system.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pratt on Wednesday granted Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller's request to dismiss the lawsuit filed by four conservative activists who claimed the system gives too much power to attorneys who elect members of the state's Judicial Nominating Commission. That panel recommends judicial appointments to the governor.

The lawsuit was filed after voters ousted three state Supreme Court justices for their role in a decision that legalized same-sex marriage in Iowa.

Iowa voters approved the nominating and retention system in 1962 but an attorney for the activists who filed the lawsuit claims it gives too much power to seven commission members who are elected by licensed attorneys.

In his decision, Pratt says the argument is "fatally flawed" and does not demonstrate a constitutional violation.

Authorities say two Mississippi lawyers, who are also brothers, have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and bank fraud.

U.S. Attorney John M. Dowdy says in a news release that 57-year-old Charles H. Evans Jr. and 53-year-old Jon Christopher Evans pleaded guilty Tuesday. Both are from Jackson.

Prosecutors say the brothers secured mortgages from banks by providing false. They contracted to purchase tracts of land, then falsely subdivided tracts on paper and created phony records and shell companies to secure mortgages on the individual plots from multiple banks.

The Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments on whether Anna Nicole Smith's estate should get part of the fortune left behind by her elderly Texas billionaire husband.

Lawyers for the deceased former Playmate plan to tell justices Tuesday her estate deserves some of the $1.6 billion estate of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall.

Marshall's will left nearly all his money to his son, E. Pierce Marshall, and nothing to Smith, who said her husband of 14 months promised to leave her more than $300 million.

But a federal appeals court sided with a Houston jury that said Marshall was mentally fit when he left his estate to his son and nothing to Smith.

A New York City landlord has a message for the collector who recently sold the suit John Lennon wore on the cover of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album: You never give me your money.

The seller's former landlord has sued the gallery that auctioned the late Beatle's suit for $46,000, trying to get at the proceeds to satisfy a rent debt.

Braswell Galleries was told before the Jan. 1 sale that a court had determined in 2009 that seller Biond Fury — a psychic and memorabilia collector — owed more than $21,000 in rent for his former Manhattan apartment, according to landlord Mark Arrow's lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a Manhattan state court. Arrow's lawyers say they told the Norwalk, Conn.-based gallery not to go through with the sale, and that the gallery should now have to fork over at least $21,463.

Arrow had been unable to collect the rent debt from Fury, but the prospects brightened when he learned of the coming auction from a newspaper report last month, said Arrow lawyer Adam Leitman Bailey.

A panel of federal appeals court judges expressed doubts Thursday that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and three former military officers can be sued for allegedly allowing torture in U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In courtroom arguments, two of the three judges were skeptical that Rumsfeld and three U.S. military officials could face damage claims for exercising command responsibility over subordinates accused of torturing prisoners. Nine prisoners have filed suit.

"You are turning two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence on its ear," David Sentelle, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, told an attorney for the detainees.

Sentelle and Judge Harry Edwards suggested that the defendants should be immune from the suit because it wasn't clear that the U.S. Constitution applied overseas when the detainees say they were tortured.

Rumsfeld and the officers shouldn't be allowed to escape accountability, Cecillia Wang, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney for the prsioners, told the judges.

There is no question that Rumsfeld knew that permitting torture violates the U.S. Constitution and he should have to answer the accusations in the lawsuit, said Wang.