In letters written to her mother, the woman charged in the 2002 kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart has sought forgiveness for any pain she has caused and says she expects to spend the rest of her life in prison.

Wanda Eileen Barzee, 63, however, makes just one reference to Smart in the 12 letters obtained by The Associated Press. And she doesn't provide details about the nine months the girl allegedly spent with her and her now-estranged husband Brian David Mitchell.

The couple is charged with multiple felonies in state court and last year was indicted by a federal grand jury.

But Barzee writes of repentance only when discussing her desire to be re-baptized in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In a June 21 letter, she recounts talking to a local church leader about the steps necessary to regain her membership, which includes making a full confession.

Proud of his religion and worried about its future, Chicago dentist Max Feinberg wrote a will with an unusual catch: His grandchildren wouldn't inherit a penny if they married someone who wasn't Jewish.

His decision led to family feuds, lawsuits, counterclaims and, on Thursday, a unanimous ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court that Feinberg and his wife were within their rights to disinherit any grandchildren who married outside the faith.

"Equal protection does not require that all children be treated equally ... and the free exercise clause does not require a grandparent to treat grandchildren who reject his religious beliefs and customs in the same manner as he treats those who conform to his traditions," Justice Rita Garman wrote in a ruling that overturned decisions by two lower courts.

One disinherited granddaughter had argued it was improper for a will to set up conditions that promote religious intolerance in people's marriage decisions or even encouraged couples to divorce.

"It is at war with society's interest in eliminating bigotry and prejudice, and conflicts with modern moral standards of religious tolerance," said Michele Feinberg Trull's brief to the Supreme Court.

The court's ruling was based partly on technicalities in the way this estate was arranged. The court did not provide a broad ruling on whether similar religious restrictions would be valid under other circumstances.

A federal appeals court on Thursday tossed out a $5 million verdict against protesters who carried signs with inflammatory messages like "Thank God for dead soldiers" outside the Maryland funeral of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the signs contained "imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric" protected by the First Amendment. Such messages are intended to spark debate and cannot be reasonably read as factual assertions about an individual, the court said.

A jury in Baltimore had awarded Albert Snyder damages for emotional distress and invasion of privacy. The 2006 funeral of Snyder's son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in Westminster, Md., was among many military funerals that have been picketed by members of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas.

Albert Snyder's attorney, Sean E. Summers, said he and his client were disappointed.

Property rights advocates who fought to keep the city of New London from taking homes by eminent domain say the city's failure to develop the land is poetic justice. But city officials say the land's fate was victim of the bad economy.

Susette Kelo and six other homeowners fought for years to keep New London from taking their homes. The city won the right to buy the land in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2005.

Officials hoped for more than 3,000 new jobs in the development. But today, there's only a state park and a handful of new jobs.

Federal prosecutors said Tuesday that a review of most accounts held by financier Bernard Madoff's customers when he was arrested shows that about half of the customers had not lost money because they withdrew more money than they originally invested.

Prosecutors made the revelation as they told a judge in court papers that there was no need to order restitution because all of Madoff's assets will be distributed to investors through forfeiture requirements.

As part of their filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, they summarized the findings of a court-appointed trustee who is calculating how much investors lost so it can be decided how to divide up assets that are recovered.

The government said a search of financial records, including microfilm records dating back to 1979, show that investors suffered net losses exceeding $13 billion. In all, 15,870 claims have been made to the trustee by those seeking a share of any recovered money.

The court document said there were approximately 8,094 customer accounts held by Madoff's private investment business from at least 2000 through December 2008. At the time of his Dec. 11 arrest, there were 4,902 active customer accounts, the government said.

Most of the customers who had current accounts have made claims with the trustee, prosecutors wrote. Of those, nearly 50 percent had a net loss, meaning they contributed more funds to their accounts than they withdrew, while about half had no net loss because they withdrew more funds than they contributed, prosecutors said.

A federal U.S. court has ruled in favor of critics of Monsanto Co's genetically engineered sugar beets, saying the U.S. government failed to adequately evaluate environmental and economic risks associated with the crop.

The U.S. District Court for the northern district of California ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) violated federal law by failing to prepare an environmental impact statement before deregulating genetically altered sugar beets.

Monsanto developed the biotech beets to be resistant to Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide Roundup, and promotes the sugarbeets as "Roundup Ready."

The plaintiffs include the Center for Food Safety, Organic Seed Alliance, Sierra Club, and High Mowing Seeds. The groups filed the lawsuit in January 2008.

About 1.1 million U.S. acres were seeded this year to Roundup Ready sugar beets in the fourth year of commercialized production.

Critics say the Roundup Ready beets are dangerous for the environment because they promote the emergence of "superweeds" or weeds that cannot easily be killed because they also develop a tolerance to weedkiller. They also say that organic and convential beet farmers are damaged because the genetically altered sugar beets are wind-pollinated and inevitably cross-pollinate related crops grown nearby.

The court found that USDA gave only "cursory" consideration to some of these concerns, failing to adequately consider the risks. The court has ordered the USDA to conduct a rigorous assessment of the environmental and economic impacts of the crop on farmers and the environment, and will evaluate other remedies in an October meeting of the parties.