The Colorado Supreme Court has upheld a state ban on smoking by actors onstage, ruling that public health trumps actor's freedom of expression.

The court ruled 6-1 on Monday that a state indoor smoking ban applies to theaters. Observers called it the first decision by a state court upholding the extension of a smoking ban to theatrical performances.

Of 24 states with indoor smoking bans, 12 have exemptions or exemptions on a case-by-case basis for theatrical performances, according to the ruling.

The court said performances typically convey their message "by imitation rather than by scientific demonstration" and that there are alternatives to smoking on stage.

It also agreed with Attorney General John Suthers' argument that the state Legislature passed a narrowly tailored law to protect public welfare, not to limit speech.

Colorado's law bans using alternatives to tobacco cigarettes, such as cigarettes filled with cloves or tea leaves.

Erin Andrews plans to be in a Los Angeles courtroom when a man accused of secretly filming her nude enters an expected guilty plea to stalking.

A hearing is set for Tuesday afternoon for Illinois insurance executive Michael David Barrett to enter the plea. Andrews' attorney, Marshall Grossman, says the ESPN sideline reporter will attend and may call for a tougher sentence against Barrett.

Prosecutors have agreed to seek a 27-month prison sentence against Barrett, but he faces up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Barrett is suspected of renting hotel rooms next to Andrews three times and shooting two videos of her. He is accused of posting the videos online.

Andrews called the experience a nightmare in a September interview with Oprah Winfrey.

A teen who pleaded guilty to gang raping a South Florida woman and beating her young son has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Seventeen-year-old Avion Lawson pleaded guilty in August and testified against three other suspects in the 2007 attack. The others have all received life in prison.

Lawson, who was sentenced Monday, had faced a maximum 11 life sentences plus 50 years.

Lawson and the three other defendants were all teenagers when police say they barged into a 35-year-old woman's apartment, raped her repeatedly, beat her 12-year-old son and then forced her to perform oral sex on the boy.

The victims were doused in chemicals to clean the crime scene, and police say their attackers discussed setting them on fire before fleeing.

he Supreme Court said Monday it will decide how much privacy workers have when they send text messages from company accounts.

The justices said they will review a federal appeals court ruling that sided with Ontario, Calif., police officers who complained that the department improperly snooped on their electronic exchanges. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco also faulted the text-messaging service for turning over transcripts of the messages without the officers' consent.

Users of text-messaging services "have a reasonable expectation of privacy" regarding messages stored on the service provider's network, 9th Circuit Judge Kim Wardlaw said. Both the city and USA Mobility Wireless, Inc., which bought the text-messaging service involved in the case, appealed the 9th Circuit ruling.

The justices turned down the company's appeal, but said they would hear arguments in the spring in the city's case.

The appeals court ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Ontario police Sgt. Jeff Quon and three others after Arch Wireless gave their department transcripts of Quon's text messages in 2002. Police officials read the messages to determine whether department-issued pagers were being used solely for work purposes.

The city said it discovered that Quon sent and received hundreds of personal messages, including many that were sexually explicit.

Quon and the others said the police force had an informal policy of not monitoring the usage as long as employees paid for messages in excess of monthly character limits.

When it comes to peddling porn, Larry Flynt wants you to know his videos of people having sex are a cut above other smut on the rack.

So when a pair of nephews Flynt personally groomed for the porn business decided to launch their own company last year and use the family name, the creator of "Barely Legal," "Busty Beauties" and "Daddy Gets Lucky" wasted no time suing the upstarts for trademark infringement.

Flynt accused his brother Jimmy Flynt's sons in federal court of tarnishing his image by launching Flynt Media Corp. and producing a series of videos he says are nothing but cheap knockoffs.

"The junk they publish hurts my reputation, which in turn hurts my revenue," the gruff, gravelly voiced porn king testified in U.S. District Court this week, where a Flynt family feud is playing out before a stone-faced jury and a no-nonsense judge.

The four women and four men of the mostly middle-aged jury stoically viewed photos of some of the nephews' DVD boxes. Images of naked, well-endowed women on the front and people in all sorts of contortions on the back, were flashed on a giant-screen TV right next to them.

A federal appeals court overturned a lower court Thursday and ruled against an Oregon lawyer once wrongly suspected in a terrorist bombing.

Brandon Mayfield was arrested in 2004 and held for two weeks after his Portland home and office were searched and bugged. The FBI relied on a fingerprint from the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people.

It turned out the fingerprint didn't belong to Mayfield, who got an apology and $2 million from the federal government.

Mayfield wants to overturn two parts of the USA Patriot Act passed after 9/11 that ensnared him.

A district judge sided with him in 2007. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that Mayfield can't challenge the act because the settlement limited his legal options.

A court approved chicken producer Pilgrim's Pride Corp. plan for reorganization on Thursday, and the company said it expects to emerge from bankruptcy court protection this month.

Pilgrim's Pride filed for Chapter 11 protection last year facing high debt related to its buyout of rival Gold Kist Inc. in 2007 and rising feed costs that left much of the industry in a slump.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Northern District of Texas approved the reorganization plan Thursday, the company, based in Pittsburg, Texas, said in a news release.

The plan includes selling a majority stake worth $800 million to Brazilian beef giant JBS. The transaction includes paying off Pilgrim's Pride's creditors in full and distributing new shares to current holders.

The deal, which was announced in September, is unusual for a company in a bankruptcy case; more typically, creditors aren't repaid. The entire deal is valued at $2.8 billion.

Along with a deal to buy Bertin SA, one of Latin America's largest producers and exporters of milk products, beef and leather, buying Pilgrim's Pride would make JBS the world's biggest meat producer. The purchase of Gold Kist, worth more than $1 billion, had made Pilgrim's Pride the largest chicken producer in the U.S., with about 23 percent of the market before it filed for bankruptcy protection last year.