There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it."

A divided U.S. Supreme Court gave schools new authority to restrict students' speech today, saying pupils can be punished for statements that an administrator reasonably interprets as promoting illegal drug use. . . .  

In upholding the 10-day suspension of an Alaska high school senior for raising a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus'' at a school-sanctioned event outside campus, the court majority insisted it was not abandoning free-speech principles for students that the court established in 1969. In that case, the justices upheld students' rights to wear black armbands as a protest against the Vietnam War and said schools must allow free expression unless it disrupts education.  

"Our cases make clear that students do not 'shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech at the schoolhouse gate,' " Chief Justice John Roberts said in today's ruling, quoting from the 1969 decision.  

The difference in the Alaska case, he said, was that the school principal had reasonably interpreted the student's banner, though "cryptic,'' as promoting the use of bongs, or marijuana pipes.

America's large retailers, including Minneapolis-based Target Corp., are expected to feel the impact of a U.S. Surpreme Court ruling today that gives manufacturers more leeway to set minimum prices at the retail level.  

By a 5-4 vote, the justices overturned a 1911 Supreme Court ruling that minimum prices set by manufacturers on what dealers can charge customers for their products are unquestionably illegal.  

The decision is a victory for U.S. business groups that had argued the agreements are often pro-competitive. The groups had urged the high court to adopt a less exacting standard that examines each agreement on a case-by-case basis.  

Antitrust authorities at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission also had urged the top court to overturn the precedent, while 37 states and a leading consumer group had urged that the precedent be preserved.  

The ruling stemmed from an appeal the Supreme Court by a company called Leegin Creative Leather Products Inc., the manufacturer of the Bright brand of women's accessories.

It is the fourth antitrust ruling by the court in the last four months. In each instance, the court sided with defendants [business] that were sued for anticompetitive conduct, including Wall Street investment banks and an international forest products company. 

In recent decades, the Supreme Court has chipped away at what many economists traditionally regarded as vital consumer protections against anticompetitive conduct. For example, exclusive dealer territories and setting price ceilings are no longer automatically unlawful.

“The only safe predictions to make about today’s decision are that it will likely raise the price of goods at retail and that it will create considerable legal turbulence as lower courts seek to develop workable principles,” he wrote. “I do not believe that the majority has shown new or changed conditions sufficient to warrant overruling a decision of such long standing.”

In a landmark decision that will affect school districts across the country, a deeply divided Supreme Court Thursday struck down plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, Wash., that assigned students to schools based partly on the color of their skin.  

The cases sharply split the Court and produced five separate opinions. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority decision, which said the school districts failed to justify "the extreme means they have chosen -- discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments."

It was the Supreme Court that conservatives had long yearned for and that liberals feared. 

By the time the Roberts court ended its first full term on Thursday, the picture was clear. This was a more conservative court, sometimes muscularly so, sometimes more tentatively, its majority sometimes differing on methodology but agreeing on the outcome in cases big and small.  

As a result, the court upheld a federal anti-abortion law, cut back on the free-speech rights of public school students, strictly enforced procedural requirements for bringing and appealing cases, and limited school districts’ ability to use racially conscious measures to achieve or preserve integration.  

With the exception of four death penalty cases from Texas, where the state and federal courts remain to the right of the Supreme Court and produce decisions that the justices regularly overturn, the prosecution prevailed in nearly every criminal case, 14 of the 18 non-Texas cases.  

Fully a third of the court’s decisions, more than in any recent term, were decided by 5-to-4 margins. Most of those, 19 of 24, were decided along ideological lines, demonstrating the court’s polarization whether on constitutional fundamentals or obscure questions of appellate procedure.

Oil prices topped $70 a barrel for the first time since Sept. 1 as traders continued to react to an unexpected draw on inventories of gasoline and distillates such as heating oil. Gasoline demand typically surges in the summer driving months of July and August.  . . .  

Speaking of gasoline, Barclays Capital analyst Kevin Norrish said in a report that "strong demand, falling imports and flat output is not a great combination, and we continue to look for gasoline prices to push up toward their second peak of the driving season."

``Energy is one of those things that is holding back global growth,'' Treasury Secretary John Snow [has] said . . . . ``It acts as a tax on everyone because you have less disposable income available.'' – Bloomberg

Sales of existing US homes declined unexpectedly in May, dashing expectations that the struggling real estate market would show an uptick in sales, an industry survey showed Monday. 

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said existing home sales dropped 0.3 percent to an annualized pace of 5.99 million last month. 

May's sales pace defied Wall Street forecasts which had predicted a sales clip of 6.00 million units. 

The realtors' association blamed the sales decline largely on nervous buyers being reluctant to commit to a property purchase. 

Experts say tighter mortgage lending standards and mounting home foreclosures have also impacted the market. 

The report also showed that the number of homes for sale across the United States continued to rise last month, increasing five percent from April to a record inventory of 4.43 million properties. That represents an 8.9-month supply at the current sales pace, according to the NAR. 

The monthly snapshot showed that falling prices -- following a long boom in the property market that ended last year -- did not drum up improved sales last month. 

The median sales price fell 2.1 percent to 223,700 dollars compared with May 2006. 

The US property market has been in a slump for over a year, partly as consumers have been buffeted by spiking gasoline costs.

He expressed his opposition to the immigration bill in Congress and decried the flow of illegal immigrants from Cuba, saying: "I don't imagine they're coming here to bring greetings from Castro. We're living in the era of the suitcase bomb."

"I was appalled when one of the people running for or about to run for the Republican nomination talked about Cuban refugees as potential terrorists," Clinton told Hispanic elected officials. "Apparently he doesn't have a lot of experience in Florida or anywhere else, and doesn't know a lot of Cuban-Americans."