He said he regrets that decision and made it hastily and without talking to an attorney.

He says he was under stress and pleaded guilty only to put the matter behind him.

Attorney William Martin specifically cited "tremendous pressure" from journalists as the reason for the guilty plea.

Martin said he's arguing that his client was under extreme stress from reporters hounding him about his sexuality.

Martin mentioned The Idaho Statesman by name, the Boise newspaper that spent months investigating whether Craig engaged in homosexual encounters.

Craig has flatly denied those suggestions on numerous occasions. In his first address to the public after the political journal Roll Call broke the story of the Minneapolis sting, Craig accused the newspaper of conducting a "witch hunt."

His chief spokesman said that Craig has dropped virtually all notions of trying to finish his third term in the Senate, but the Senator has shown signs of wavering on his announced plan to resign from the Senate at the end of September.

The documents filed Monday aim at undoing Craig's earlier decision to plead guilty to the lewd conduct charges in order to give him a chance to fight the accusations.

According to court documents, the senator "felt compelled to grasp the lifeline" - hoping that if he were to submit to an interview and plead guilty that none of the allegations would be made public.

"Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold over the two products ... that nearly all consumers use," Houck said during an antitrust compliance hearing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "Very little has happened in five years ... in those markets."

The California group of states -- the larger of two groups of states that sued Microsoft for antitrust violations -- will ask for an extension of all the middleware portions of the antitrust judgement, except for a section that governs the royalties Microsoft can charge PC manufacturers for the Windows operating system. Most of the antitrust judgment was scheduled to expire in November.

Microsoft lawyer Rick Rule said the company would need time to respond to Houck's proposal. Microsoft first heard of the plan to ask for an extension on Friday, he said, and the California group plans to file a formal extension request with the court in mid-October.

Rule seemed to suggest Microsoft would fight the five-year extension. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly declined to impose a 10-year judgment in 2002, he said. "We think the picture of the computer industry is much rosier," Rule added. "We think it's clear that the decree has done its job."

Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the company will respond in more detail after it has seen the extension request. "We're a bit surprised that a few states are now requesting an extension of the consent decree, since they indicated just last month that they're not too fond of it," Evans said.

In August 2006, Microsoft already agreed to an extension of the section of the judgment requiring it to make its communications protocols available to other software vendors. Microsoft's efforts to fix technical documentation for the protocols have run into several delays. Houck on Tuesday asked Kollar-Kotelly to extend the communications protocol section of the judgment until 2012.

The California group does not "have any confidence" Microsoft will continue to improve the communications protocol program without oversight, Houck said. An independent auditor's report just issued questions whether Microsoft has released all the protocols mandated in the judgment, he added.

The California group's extension proposal comes after the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York group of states filed briefs last month saying the antitrust judgment has done its job. "There have been a number of developments in the competitive landscape ... that suggest that the Final Judgments are accomplishing their stated goal of fostering competitive conditions among middleware products, unimpeded by anticompetitive exclusionary obstacles erected by Microsoft," said the report from the DOJ and New York group, which includes five states.

But Houck Tuesday disputed that assessment. At the time of the judgment, a handful of PC vendors were preinstalling a competing Web browser on PCs, he said. Today, no major ones are, he said.

Craig pleaded guilty by mail to disorderly conduct in August following his arrest in June. A police report alleged that Craig had solicited sex from police Sgt. Dave Karsnia, which the senator has denied.

After Craig's arrest was made public, the Idaho Statesman published its five-month investigation into previous allegations of homosexual behavior. Craig said he is not gay.

Statesman editor and vice president Vicki Gowler defended the newspaper's investigation. "From the start, it was important to us to do a thorough and responsible investigation, outside of deadline pressures. We did that," Gowler said.

At Monday's hearing, the court also urged the warring parties to continue to try to settle their differences out of court.

"We are very pleased with this decision, as we are keen to see this issue properly resolved with a minimum of further delay," said Tom Ehman, head of external affairs for the Golden Gate Yacht Club's team BMW Oracle.

Ehman said Oracle continued to support efforts to solve the dispute through mediation.

"Our strong preference remains to negotiate a solution. If this is not possible, today's decision provides for swift resolution through the courts," he said.

The GGYC of San Francisco launched its legal challenge arguing the new race protocol outlined by Swiss syndicate Alinghi for 2009 violates the historical "Deed of Gift" governing the race.

That's because Spain's Spanish Nautical Yacht Club (CNEV) has been tabbed to house its challenger of record Desafio Espanol.

The Americans say the Deed of Gift stipulates such a challenger has to involve a traditional yacht club which holds annual regattas.

CNEV was formed just days before before it issued the challenge and has never held a major regatta.

Ehman has called it a "sham club" that has given Alinghi unwarranted control over an event in which the challenger is traditionally involved in setting the competition terms.

Oracle and GGYC took their case to the New York Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction because the Cup was given to the New York Yacht Club in 1887 under the terms of the Deed of Gift.

The legal squabble has raised shades of the America's Cup court battle of the 1980s between New Zealand banker Michael Fay and US yachtsman Dennis Conner.

In 1987, Fay sued defending champion Conner after Conner refused to consider his challenge to race in a 90-foot monohull.

The court ordered Conner to take the challenge or surrender the Cup, and Conner responded by beating Fay in a 60-foot catamaran.

Fay later won a court ruling that Conner's catamaran defense was illegal, but that ruling was overturned on appeal.

The Downtown Council is working to install more social "software" to complement the hard investment being made in the new arena, entertainment district and residential projects.

Four years ago, the property and business group started the Downtown Community Improvement District, an additional layer of privately funded services to make the area cleaner and safer. It's up for renewal and many people think it has been as much help reviving downtown as the major construction projects.

Now, the group is working closely with the Municipal Court to establish what is referred to as a community court. The concept got started in New York City in 1993 as a way to more compassionately and effectively deal with petty street crime and associated public safety issues.

It's intended to intervene in the futile cycle of having police pick up the same individuals repeatedly for misdemeanor crimes such as public intoxication and harassment, and then haul them to court where they'll perhaps serve a few days in jail before being released back to the street.

The community court approach identifies those individuals when they enter the criminal justice system. Rather than sending them off to jail, a case worker or similar professional shifts them to alternative programs such as drug and alcohol treatment or community service.

Say you're a chronic graffiti tagger. Rather than go to jail, a community court would return you to the neighborhood you trashed and require 40 hours of cleanup work.

"You don't solve crime, you come up with a better way to manage it and address quality of life issues," said Bill Dietrich, the president and CEO of the Downtown Council.

Sean O'Byrne, vice president of the council, said many people responsible for petty crime downtown often suffer from mental illness or addictions.

"The majority of individuals … end up anonymous on downtown streets, and downtown properties suffer as a result," he said. "This gives us a better tool to address the problem."

The community court approach also might help police do a better job keeping watch downtown and elsewhere.

Last December, Kansas City Police Chief Jim Corwin observed that homeless people contributed to downtown's image problem, and that, he said, was not necessarily a police issue.

"Am I supposed to arrest dirty people?" he asked at the time. "The homeless issue is a major downtown, urban problem. Cities that are successful have to take care of it holistically."

Corwin reaffirmed that idea last month when he decided not to enforce a new aggressive panhandling law approved by the Kansas City Council.

O'Byrne said a community court program would help police.

"They'll be able to spend less time booking people for the 20th time," he said. "We want them on the streets to protect people from more serious crimes. It's a time winner."

Dietrich and O'Byrne said Presiding Municipal Judge Elaine Franco is taking the lead on the issue. The judge could not be reached for comment, but last March she said a community court would work as well in Kansas City as other cities.

Franco supported a pilot community court program resolution being considered by the City Council.

"The consensus is that relatively low-level crimes that they are addressing in this resolution … should not be treated with a revolving-door concept approach," the judge said.

The council approved the resolution, but so far the program has not been implemented.

The ACLU sued on behalf of an anonymous internet service provider, which was served an NSL about one of the websites it hosted.  The ISP contested the order, which the FBI subsequently dropped, but the ISP remains unable to even acknowledge that it got a request, and the company's president said he's been forced to lie to his friends and girlfriend about it.

Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York ruled that the gag order and the strict rules about how to contest them amounted to prior restraint on speech and allowed the FBI to pick and choose which persons would be gagged, based on whether the feds believed the target might speak critically of the government.  Judge Marrero found, in a 106 page opinion, that the gag order provisions couldn't be struck down without affecting the rest of the statute so he found that the entire NSL provision was unconstitutional.  He also stuck down a provision that prescribed the standards courts should use in judging the FBI's arguments for keeping gag orders.  Marrero wrote that Congress had overstepped its bounds in setting out those standards.