In a strongly worded legal brief, the Obama administration has said the federal act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman was motivated by hostility toward gays and lesbians and is unconstitutional.

The brief was filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco in support of a lesbian federal employee's lawsuit claiming the government wrongly denied health insurance coverage to her same-sex spouse.

The Justice Department says Karen Golinski's suit should not be dismissed because the law under which her spouse was denied benefits — the Defense of Marriage Act — violates the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

"The official legislative record makes plain that DOMA Section 3 was motivated in large part by animus toward gay and lesbian individuals and their intimate relationships, and Congress identified no other interest that is materially advanced by Section 3," the brief reads, referring to the section in the act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Though the administration has previously said it will not defend the marriage act, the brief is the first court filing in which it urges the court to find the law unconstitutional, said Tobias Barrington Wolff, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic plans to boycott Monday's hearing at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, where he is scheduled to enter pleas to charges including genocide, his Serbian lawyer said.

Mladic is boycotting to demand the power to choose his own defense attorneys, lawyer Milos Saljic said.

"Mladic has decided not to attend the court session to insist on his defense team choice," Saljic told The Associated Press.

The court in the Hague, Netherlands has asked for more time to vet the list of lawyers Mladic has submitted to verify their qualifications and eligibility. Saljic said that Mladic wants him and a Russian lawyer.

Mladic was extradited to the tribunal from Serbia on May 31 after being captured following 15 years as a fugitive. He is charged with orchestrating atrocities committed by Serb forces throughout the 1992-95 Bosnian war. He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted.

A former lawyer intrigued by the global demand for energy says he chose to invest $100,000 in oil giant Chevron Corp. back in 2004, a smart stock bet that now would have doubled seven years later.

But Perry Christy has a big problem: He says Chevron's stock agent never deducted money from his bank account. As a result, he has no records to show he actually owns a certain number of shares.

So Christy, 69, is suing Chevron and Mellon Investor Services and seeking an extraordinary remedy. He wants a federal judge to declare that he should be credited with buying the stock at a June 2004 price, plus any additional shares that would have piled up by reinvesting dividends. Then he'll pay $100,000.

Based on the terrific rise in San Ramon, Calif.-based Chevron's stock, it would be like winning the lottery—and then buying a ticket.

"There was some kind of mix-up on the day I placed the order," Christy insisted in an interview at his home in the Detroit suburb of Northville. "Whether mechanical or electronic, I don't think we'll ever know. But it's their screw-up. When you deal with any large bureaucracy, people are focused on their own narrow niche."

After more than a year in court, Chevron and Mellon smell a scam and want the case dismissed, even suggesting that Christy's story of a genuine yet botched investment simply is a lie.

Bank of America Corp. is close to finalizing a deal to pay $8.5 billion to settle claims by a group of investors that the bank sold them poor-quality mortgage-backed securities that went sour when the housing market tanked, according to a person familiar with the settlement talks.

The Charlotte, North Carolina, bank was continuing talks late Tuesday with the group, which includes the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Pimco Investment Management, the world's largest bondholder, and Blackrock Financial Management. It is expected to announce an agreement as early as Wednesday, the person said on condition of anonymity because the matter was still developing.

The deal comes eight months after the group fired off a letter to Bank of America demanding that it repurchase $47 billion in mortgages that its Countrywide unit sold to them in the form of bonds. The investors have argued that Countrywide's practice of modifying loans found to have faulty paperwork or those written outside of normal underwriting standards breached signed agreements with the investors. By continuing to service bad loans rather than speeding up foreclosures, the group has claimed that Countrywide ran up servicing fees, enriching itself at the expense of investors. The New York Fed is involved because it took over assets held by American International Group Inc., which faltered under the weight of bad home loans that it insured.

Bank of America, which paid $4 billion for Countrywide in 2008, has dismissed suggestions that its handling of loan modifications and other efforts to prevent foreclosure have violated the terms of the mortgage-backed securities that the investors hold. In November, CEO Brian Moynihan said he was in day-to-day "hand-to-hand combat" with investors' demands.

Newly-unsealed court documents detail some of the early travels of James "Whitey" Bulger and his longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig following Bulger's 1995 indictment.

In an affidavit dated April 25, 1997, then-FBI Special Agent Charles Gianturco writes that Bulger and Greig spent time in New York on Long Island and in Grand Isle, La., in 1995 and 1996.

According to the affidavit, Bulger and Greig checked into a hotel under the names "Mr. and Mrs. Tom Baxter" in the fall of 1995, and that Bulger had also used that name when he befriended a man in neighboring Selden told him he was a merchant seaman.

The criminal complaint against Grieg was unsealed Thursday in Boston following the arrests of Bulger and Grieg in Santa Monica, Calif. It charges Greig with harboring and concealing Bulger.

The Supreme Court has ruled against the estate of Anna Nicole Smith in its quest to capture some of the $1.6 billion estate left behind by her late Texas billionaire husband.

The high court on Thursday ruled that a bankruptcy court's decision to give the now-deceased Playmate $475 million from the estate of oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall was decided incorrectly.

Smith and Marshall were wed in 1994, and he died the next year.

His will left his estate to his son, E. Pierce Marshall, and nothing to Smith. A California bankruptcy court awarded Smith part of the estate, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal said that a bankruptcy court could not make a decision on an issue outside of bankruptcy law.