New York's highest court ruled Monday that families forced to pay high phone rates to talk to relatives in state prison won't receive refunds for the cost.

The lawsuit was first brought by the inmates' families in 2004.

In a 5-1 decision, the Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's ruling that the families failed to assert legitimate claims under the state constitution.

The court found that the fee was bad public policy, but didn't qualify as being unconstitutional.

Defense organizations and relatives of inmates argued that the state had illegally collected millions of dollars through a prison telephone service contract. They said the state's contract with MCI Worldcom Communication violated the state constitution. The contract has since been taken over by Verizon.

"We're very disappointed," said Rachel Meeropol, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. The center has represented families in the case.

A veteran dissident was sentenced to three years in prison after casting a spotlight on poorly built schools that collapsed and killed thousands of children during China's massive earthquake last year — an apparent government attempt to squelch such information.

Huang Qi, founder of a human rights Web site, had been charged with illegally possessing state secrets, his wife Zeng Li said Monday by telephone. His detention in June 2008 came after several posts on his blog that criticized the government's response to the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province a month earlier and killed about 90,000 people.

Huang, 46, had alleged that state-controlled media provided skewed reports on relief efforts and accused the government of obstructing the work of non-governmental organizations responding to the disaster, according to reports at the time by Paris-based monitoring group Reporters Without Borders.

A Kentucky appeals court upheld a $6.1 million award to a former fast food worker who was forced to strip in a McDonald's restaurant office after someone called posing as a police officer.

The appellate court on Friday ruled that Illinois-based McDonald's Corp., knew about a series of hoax calls to restaurants around the country, but didn't warn employees before Louise Ogborn was strip searched and sexually assaulted as the result of such a call in 2004.

The appeals court ruled that to reverse the verdict would cut against the weight of the evidence.

Ogborn was 18 at the time of the call to the store about 20 miles south of Louisville. A Kentucky man, Walter Nix Jr., the fiance of a McDonald's assistant manager, served a prison sentence for sexually abusing Ogborn during the call. A Florida man, David Stewart, was acquitted of making the hoax call. Police have said similar calls stopped after Stewart's arrest.

McDonald's spokeswoman Danya Proud said the company doesn't dispute what happened to Ogborn, but is disappointed with the decision of the appeals court.

"However, it has been our position throughout these proceedings that she was the victim of a malicious hoax perpetrated by individuals not representing McDonald's," Proud said.

The Oregon Court of Appeals has rejected a request by a high school English teacher to carry a handgun at school, the latest legal setback for the teacher who says she needs the gun for protection from her former husband.

Shirley Katz had argued the Medford School District lacked authority to set a policy banning employees from carrying firearms.

But the appeals court on Wednesday upheld a Jackson County trial judge who ruled the school district could prohibit guns on campus. District officials said they were pleased with the decision because it affected work rules intended to ensure staff and school safety.

Katz has a concealed weapons permit and has said she needed her 9 mm semiautomatic pistol because her ex-husband made threats during their divorce in 2004.

Nortel, a maker of telecom equipment in bankruptcy, said Ciena prevailed in an auction and will pay $530 million in cash and $239 million in convertible notes due June 2017.

Ciena's purchase includes all products, contracts, patent and intellectual property, including the rights to technology that boosts the speed and capacity of fiber optic networks by as much as10-fold.

Nortel's optical networking business includes some of Nortel's most sought-after businesses units, intellectual properties and employees.

The deal is targeted to close in the first quarter, pending court approvals in the U.S., Canada, France and Israel. It has received regulatory approval in the U.S. and Canada.

Ciena is expected to hire at least 2,000 Nortel employees — or more than 85 percent of the workers in the businesses being sold. It would nearly double Ciena's workforce.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday said it will again hear arguments in the nearly 15-year legal battle over accusations that Exxon Mobil Corp. loaded abandoned wells with junk, sludge and even explosives to keep other companies from drilling there.

A small drilling company that tried to enter the wells near Corpus Christi, and the land owners, accused the world's largest publicly traded oil company of intentionally wrecking the wells.

The plaintiffs won at trial in 1999, but the Texas Supreme Court reversed the finding in March. That ruling from the state's highest civil court sparked a campaign to rehear the case led by the Texas land commissioner and state comptroller.

"At least I think that the Supreme Court recognized that they probably didn't rule the way they should've," said Glenn Lynch, former Emerald Oil & Gas president who says his company has lost millions fighting Exxon. "What I'd like to see them do is make it right. That's all we really ever asked them."

The man considered the father of lethal injection in the United States said it doesn't matter whether three fatal drugs are used or one — as his home state of Ohio has proposed — as long as the drug works efficiently.

Dr. Jay Chapman, who developed the lethal three-drug cocktail in the 1970s when he was the Oklahoma state medical examiner, said Ohio's decision to become the first state in the nation to use only one drug achieves that goal.

He said there was no particular reason he didn't propose a single drug, other than a concern that it might take a little longer to work. His three-drug method became widespread after states copied Oklahoma.

Now Chapman, semiretired in California at age 70, said he believes the system he helped create shows condemned inmates too much mercy.

"Their death is made much too easy by this sort of protocol for the crimes that they committed," he told The Associated Press last week.

But he said the hope was injection would avoid the pain-and-suffering arguments and allow executions to take place.

Under Ohio's new system, executioners would use a single large dose of thiopental sodium, an anesthetic, to put inmates to death, similar to the way veterinarians euthanize animals.