The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to intervene in the Oklahoma lawsuit on behalf of HP. The case now goes back to an Oklahoma state court.

In 2005, the District Court of Cleveland County, Oklahoma, allowed the Grider lawsuit to become a nationwide class-action lawsuit. HP had appealed that decision.

Since 2000, several U.S. residents have filed similar lawsuits against Compaq and HP. The lawsuits alleged that Compaq sold computers with faulty floppy disk controllers, causing data loss or corruption.

The Texas Supreme Court in 2005 refused to allow a nationwide class-action lawsuit in a case that had been filed in the state in 2000. HP had argued that the facts in the Oklahoma case were similar.

An HP spokesman wasn't immediately available for comment Tuesday.

El-Masri was released in 2004 after he says U.S. officials realized he was not involved with terrorism.

The Bush administration argued that el-Masri's appeal should be rejected because allowing his lawsuit against the CIA suit to go forward in court would expose state secrets. Lower federal courts sided with the government and the Supreme Court effectively ended the case when it refused to consider it further.

El-Masri's case sparked outrage in Germany and mobilized civil and human rights groups on his behalf.

Sharon Bradford Franklin is an attorney with the Constitution Project, an organization that seeks to protect civil liberties during the war on terror.

"Well, we are very disappointed that the court decided not to take the case," said Franklin. "We really felt that this was an excellent opportunity for the court to revisit the scope of the state secrets privilege."

The Supreme Court formally recognized the government's right to protect state secrets in a 1953 ruling that allowed the U.S. military to keep secret the details of a plane crash.

The el-Masri case also drew attention to the CIA program of what is called extraordinary rendition in which terror suspects are sent from one country to another for questioning.

Human-rights groups have criticized the program and raised questions about the torture of terror suspects. They had hoped the el-Masri case would shed new light on the practice.

"The Bush administration has used what is known as the state secrets doctrine liberally to seek dismissals of cases that raise embarrassing issues for the government and perhaps would expose illegal activity," said Jennifer Daskal with Human Rights Watch.

The Supreme Court decision was welcomed at the White House. This is presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino.

"This is a country that is facing unprecedented threats that we have not dealt with before in terms of al-Qaida and other terrorists, and I believe that the Justice Department is judicious in applying the state secrets act," said Perino.

President Bush has repeatedly defended the administration's policies in the war on terror and just last week again rejected allegations that terror suspects are subject to torture.

"This government does not torture people," he said. "We stick to U.S. law and our international obligations."

Germany tried to extradite 13 suspected CIA agents to stand trial in the el-Masri case earlier this year but was rebuffed by the United States.

Sallie Mae's lawsuit seeks a declaration that the buyer group has reneged on the merger agreement, that no "material adverse change" has occurred, and that Sallie Mae may terminate the takeover and collect the $900 million.

A material adverse change is a condition that could cause a substantial reduction in earnings power and it can give buyers or lenders a "walk right" from their obligations.

The lawsuit is being seen by many as a hard-ball attempt by Sallie Mae to force the buyer group to stick to the original deal, in which the group offered $60 a share, or come up with something closer to it than its revised proposal of $50 a share, or $20.6 billion offer, plus extra payments depending on how the company performed.

"We are prepared to close under the contract the parties signed in April," said Sallie Mae chairman Albert Lord in a statement late on Monday. "Sallie Mae has honored its obligations under the merger agreement. We ask only that the buyer group do the same."

The original buyout agreement has a $900 million breakup fee. But if the buyers could prove the student lender has suffered a material adverse change, they would not have to pay it.

J.C. Flowers & Co said on Tuesday their revised buyout offer has expired and that the future of deal would be resolved in court.

"We regret that our offer to amend the terms of the Sallie Mae transaction was allowed to expire without discussion," J.C. Flowers said in a statement. "Instead, Sallie Mae filed what we firmly believe is a meritless lawsuit. We now look forward to having this matter resolved in the Delaware Chancery Court."

J.C. Flowers repeated its stance that a material adverse change has occurred and that Sallie Mae has misinterpreted the merger contract.

Joel Greenberg, co-chair of law firm Kaye Scholer LLP's corporate and finance department, said it would be difficult for J.C. Flowers to argue there has been a material adverse change, because the contract specifically addressed the question of new legislation.

"Is it so substantially worse than the company predicted that it is a material adverse change? It's a very hard argument," Greenberg added.

"Reid produced sufficient evidence that Google's (stated) reasons for terminating him were untrue or pretextual, and that Google acted with discriminatory motive such that a fact-finder would conclude Google engaged in age discrimination," Presiding Justice Conrad L. Rushing wrote.

The Mountain View-based search engine company has denied Reid's allegations but also refused to say why he was fired. In court documents, the company said Reid was fired when the program he managed was canceled.

Reid, a former associate electrical engineering professor at Stanford University, sued Google in July 2004, five months after he lost his job as its director of operations.

He alleged in his suit that his supervisors did not initially tell him why he was being fired. Director of Engineering Wayne Rosing, 55, eventually said he was not a good "cultural fit" at Google, where some colleagues referred to him as an "old guy" and "fuddy-duddy," Reid said.

Another supervisor, Urs Hoelzle allegedly said Reid, who is a diabetic, was too sluggish and "too old to matter" and his ideas were obsolete.

Reid is seeking back pay and punitive damages. He made $200,000 a year and lost stock options valued at millions of dollars when he lost his job.

Allowing investors to file class-action lawsuits in such cases would "threaten the safety and soundness of individual financial institutions and the nation's banking system," a coalition of business groups, including the American Bankers Association, said in court papers.

Firms and corporations that enabled companies such as Enron to defraud stockholders should now have to pay, lawyers for the investors say.

"The banks orchestrated the fraud; they weren't sideline viewers," said Patrick Coughlin, the lead lawyer for Enron shareholders. "So when the question comes up about who should be on the hook for Enron, it's the banks."

Meir Feder, a New York lawyer who defends companies in securities cases, said "everybody understands that the Enron shareholders are victims here, but there's a reason that Congress and the Supreme Court haven't allowed people to sue third parties."

He added, "In the real world, for every third party who actually had a role in a fraud, you're going to get lots of suits against other third parties who really didn't."

When the Supreme Court hears arguments on the issue Tuesday, Enron investors will be on the sidelines. The court is dealing with a suit by Stoneridge Investment Partners against Motorola Inc. and Scientific-Atlanta Inc., which Cisco Systems Inc. now owns.

Only eight of the nine justices will participate. Justice Stephen Breyer has withdrawn from the case; he gave no reason, but financial disclosure documents state he owned Cisco stock.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who did not participate in the court's decision to take the suit, has come back into it.

The Stoneridge case has strong parallels to the one pursued by Enron shareholders, which the high court has left alone. The Enron suit was up for consideration June 21 at one of the justices' regularly scheduled private conferences, but the court has neither accepted nor rejected it.

"It's easier to decide a legal issue in a noncharged atmosphere, which may have been what the justices had in mind by not taking on Enron," Coughlin said.

Stoneridge accused Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta of engaging in sham transactions with a cable television company, Charter Communications Inc. The alleged motive was to inflate Charter's revenue by $17 million, help meet Wall Street expectations and avoid a drop in the company's stock price.

Because of a number of deals including the ones involving Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta, Charter eventually restated its financial statements, reducing revenue by $292 million from 2000-2002. In addition, four former Charter executives pleaded guilty in the matter after the Justice Department investigated the deals.

Stoneridge's efforts to recoup investment losses from Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta were turned back by lower courts, which said that the allegations were nothing more than claims that the two companies aided and abetted the fraud by Charter. Neither Motorola nor Scientific-Atlanta was alleged to have engaged in any deceptive act, the courts said.

Enron investors got a similar ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that Enron had a duty to disclose financial problems to shareholders, but the company's banks did not.

In both cases, the issue comes down to the meaning of the word "deceptive" in federal securities law.

At stake in the Enron case is more than $30 billion sought by hundreds of thousands of investors from banks that allegedly helped the company, once the nation's seventh-largest, hide billions in debt and make failing ventures appear profitable.

The Enron case and the Stoneridge investors' suit are the latest chapter in the struggle between plaintiffs attorneys and the business world over class-action suits.

When lawyers who file such suits persuade a court to certify a large class of plaintiffs, companies almost always settle rather than risk going to trial. A 2002 study for the conservative Federalist Society found that three of every four federal securities fraud cases were settled, with the remainder thrown out of court.

Since 2000, investors filing federal class-action suits alleging securities fraud have settled for $42 billion, according to the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse.

So far, some banks have settled with Enron investors: Citibank for $2 billion; J.P. Morgan Chase for $2.2 billion; Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce for $2.4 billion.

Others are still fighting: Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.; Credit Suisse First Boston; Barclays Bank PLC; Pershing LLC, now a subsidiary of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. For investors, recent developments have gone against them.

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted to intervene in the Stoneridge case on the side of investors. But the Justice Department solicitor general, after pitches from President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, rejected the SEC's recommendation and filed a brief on the side of Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta.

Pasquarelli on the circumstances that could lead to a one-year penalty: "Under the two-year policy, which essentially wipes a player's slate clean, Henry was scheduled to rotate out of the substance abuse program on Oct. 1. But his lawsuit to block further testing of his urine sample was filed Sept. 20, indicating that the positive test occurred before Oct. 1."