BAY MINETTE (AP) – Nichole Bryars Kelsay pleaded guilty Wednesday to a charge of conspiracy to commit murder for her part in the 2004 slaying of a gay teenager and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Kelsay, 21, had no comment to the judge at sentencing, Baldwin County District Attorney Judy Newcomb said. Kelsay also didn’t respond when the victim’s mother asked her why she did it, Newcomb said.

The victim, Scotty Joe Weaver, 18, had been friends with Kelsay since first grade and at one point had asked her to marry him. Kelsay’s boyfriend, Christopher Ryan Gaines, objected.

The couple plotted Weaver’s death, according to Baldwin County prosecutors. They enlisted Robert Holly Lofton Porter in the murder scheme. Porter told authorities he didn’t like Weaver because of his homosexuality.

Prosecutors allege Weaver was robbed of about $80, strangled and beaten inside his Bay Minette trailer in mid July 2004. His burned and mutilated body was found in a field a few miles away.

Gaines, now 23, pleaded guilty in May to capital murder and received life without parole, avoiding a potential death sentence.

Last week, Porter, 21, pleaded guilty to intentional murder and first-degree robbery and was ordered to serve two consecutive life sentences.

Authorities have said that the three attacked Weaver when he returned from working the overnight shift at the Bay Minette Waffle House.

After the murder, Gaines, Porter and Kelsay went about their normal routines before Weaver’s body was discovered, Newcomb said in an earlier proceeding.

Gaines drove his car around with Weaver’s ID and bank card in the glove compartment.

“He didn’t really have any bad feelings about him, but he didn’t feel bad about killing him,” Newcomb said of Gaines.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – The state Supreme Court agreed to weigh in on a dispute over the ownership of three church buildings whose congregations split from the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles in a dispute over a gay bishop.

The justices voted unanimously Tuesday to review an appeals court ruling that the church buildings, prayer books and other property should be placed under control of the diocese, reversing lower court rulings in favor of the parishes.

St. James Church in Newport Beach, All Saints Church in Long Beach and St. David’s Church in North Hollywood pulled out of the six-county Los Angeles Diocese in 2004, following the ordination of a gay bishop in the Diocese of New Hampshire.

They announced they were placing themselves under the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in Uganda.

The Los Angeles Diocese sued the parishes to gain control of the property, arguing the congregations held their church buildings in trust for the diocese and the national Episcopal Church, and were not entitled to them.

Trial courts had ruled for the three parishes but in June, a panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana reversed those decisions in a unanimous decision.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Howard K. Stern says claims in a new book that he and Anna Nicole Smith’s ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead had a videotaped gay sexual encounter before her death are absurd and could psychologically damage Smith’s infant daughter.

“It’s ridiculous. I mean it’s absolutely absurd,” Stern told ETonline.com.

The Web site said it obtained the comments from Stern during a birthday party for Smith’s 1-year-old daughter, Dannielynn, in Louisville, Ky., last Saturday. The party was held by Birkhead who has custody of the girl after Stern, Smith’s lawyer and companion, initially claimed to be Dannielynn’s father.

“Dannielynn is gonna read this garbage and it’s almost like she’s gonna have to get counseling from the age of 3,” Stern said, according to a press statement from the Web site. The interview was scheduled to air Thursday on syndicated TV show “Entertainment Tonight.”

Birkhead and an attorney for Stern previously indicated they would sue over claims made in Rita Cosby’s book Blonde Ambition: The Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole Smith’s Death. Birkhead, who is Dannielynn’s father, also has denied any encounter occurred.

Smith, a former Playboy Playmate, gave birth to Dannielynn a few days before the death of her son, Daniel, 20, last September in the Bahamas. Smith died of an accidental drug overdose in Florida in February at age 39.

DES MOINES (AP) – A nonprofit group is calling for the impeachment of a district court judge whose ruling overturned Iowa’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Bill Salier, a 2002 candidate for U.S. Senate, says Polk County Judge Robert Hanson violated the state constitution by legalizing same-sex marriage. Salier is a founder of the group Everyday America.

In a statement, the organization says Iowans must stop officials from overstepping the constitution to change society as they see fit.

Hanson ruled in August that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

Impeaching a judge takes an act of the Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (AP) – Sen. Larry Craig’s foot-tapping and hand movements in an airport bathroom amounted to speech protected by the First Amendment, the American Civil Liberties Union argued in court papers on Monday.

The Idaho senator pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct after an undercover officer at the Minneapolis airport alleged that Craig solicited him for sex. Craig has denied that, and his attorneys have asked a judge to let him withdraw the guilty plea.

Craig was accused of moving his foot next to a police officer’s foot and tapping it in a way that indicated he wanted sex. He was also accused of sending a signal by swiping his hand under the divider between the stalls, and of peering into the officer’s stall before Craig took his own stall.

Even if he did those things, they’re not a crime, the ACLU argued. And even if Craig solicited sex, it would only be a crime if police could prove he was seeking illegal bathroom sex and not a legal liaison somewhere else.

The ACLU also argued that the disorderly conduct statute is too vague to be enforceable in Craig’s case.

The ACLU asked the judge to accept its arguments as a friend-of-the-court brief in Craig’s case.

Chuck Samuelson, the executive director of the ACLU’s Minnesota branch, said other police departments have prevented bathroom sex by posting signs and patrolling with uniformed officers.

Samuelson said the airport undercover work “is the kind of sting operation that at the very best borders on entrapment.”

A Hennepin County District Court judge is scheduled to hear arguments on Craig’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea on Sept. 26.

(AP) – A homeless man was charged with participating in an anti-gay attack on a former “Top Chef” reality show contestant outside a bar police said.

Matthew W. Walli was in a group of about 12 people involved in a confrontation with chef Josie Smith-Malave, who is a lesbian, and three other women who had just been thrown out of the bar over Labor Day weekend, Nassau County police said Thursday.

Walli’s group made derogatory statements about the women’s perceived sexual orientation, spat on them and hit them, police said. Walli stole a video camera from one of the women, causing her to fall and hurt her knee, they said.

Smith-Malave, who was featured on Season 2 of the Bravo channel show and had been on Long Island to attend a friend’s birthday party, suffered bruises, her lawyer said. Her sister, who is heterosexual, also was beaten, and another woman hurt her head.

Walli, 20, was arrested Wednesday afternoon. Walli was charged with robbery as a bias crime, which is punishable by as many as 15 years in prison upon conviction, and was to be arraigned Thursday, police said.

He is from Oregon but is homeless in New York and was being held at the county jail, they said. A woman who answered the telephone at the jail said that only the sheriff, who was out of his office, could grant permission to speak to an inmate by phone.

Police, who didn’t say what led them to Walli, said they were still investigating the attack.

Smith-Malave, a 32-year-old Miami native, is a former sous chef for the Marlow and Sons restaurant in Brooklyn. She has played for the New York Sharks of the Independent Women’s Football League.

NEW YORK (AP) – Infection rates for the virus that causes AIDS rose during the past six years among gay men under 30, reported city health officials.

New diagnoses of the human immunodeficiency virus among gay men in that demographic increased by 33 percent during the past six years, from 374 in 2001 to 499 in 2006, said a report released Tuesday by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Gay males aged 13 to 19 also saw an increase in HIV rates: from 41 new cases six years ago to 87 in 2006.

The majority of new cases were among black and Latino gay men; more than 90 percent of young gay men under age 20 diagnosed with HIV were from either group, the report said.

Every borough except Staten Island saw an increase in infection rates.

The report from the health department did not offer explanations for why rates among young gay men under 30 or teens between the ages of 13 and 19 have increased.

Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, said that minority teens may feel they have to hide their sexual orientation.

“The pressure of covering up means you put yourself in riskier situations than if you could go on a date and ask out who you like,” Futterman said.

Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden urged young men to reduce the number of partners they have and to protect themselves and their partners by using condoms more consistently.

He said that a generation of young men is growing up without having seen their friends die of AIDS, which may be giving them a false “impression that HIV is not such a terrible infection.”