Two men have pleaded not guilty to killing two Chinese graduate students who were shot as they sat in a parked car near the University of Southern California last year.

The Los Angeles Times says 20-year-old Javier Bolden and 21-year-old Bryan James entered the pleas Thursday to murder charges.

Prosecutors say the men killed engineering students Ming Qu and Ying Wu a mile from campus in April of last year while stealing their cellphones. Authorities say GPS data was used to track Wu's phone, leading to the arrests.

At a preliminary hearing last month, prosecutors played a recording of a wiretapped phone call between Barnes and Bolden, in which they apparently discussed the attack on the students.

The Supreme Court wrestled Wednesday with the appropriate role for religion in government in a case involving mainly Christian prayers at the start of a New York town's council meetings.

The justices began their day with the marshal's customary plea that "God save the United States and this honorable court." They then plunged into a lively give-and-take that highlighted the sensitive nature of offering religious invocations in public proceedings that don't appeal to everyone and governments' efforts to police the practice.

The court is weighing a federal appeals court ruling that said the Rochester suburb of Greece, N.Y., violated the Constitution because nearly every prayer in an 11-year span was overtly Christian.

The tenor of the argument indicated the justices would not agree with the appellate ruling. But it was not clear what decision they might come to instead.

Justice Elena Kagan summed up the difficult task before the court when she noted that "every time the court gets involved in things like this, it seems to make the problem worse rather than better."

The justices tried out several approaches to the issue, including one suggested by the two Greece residents who sued over the prayers to eliminate explicit references to any religion.