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.

Lawyer William L. Robinson, who represents some of the companies sued, says the terms of the settlement are confidential.

He says the settlement involves all defendants, including Learjet, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and the plane's owners and contractors.

The former Blink-182 drummer was one of two survivors of a Sept. 19, 2008 plane crash that killed two pilots and two of his friends. Another survivor, celebrity disc jockey DJ AM, has since died of an accidental drug overdose.

Barker sued last November claiming the companies improperly operated and maintained the Learjet that overshot the runway and burst into flames.

An Indiana teenager accused of strangling his 10-year-old brother and dumping his body in a park has pleaded not guilty to murder.

Seventeen-year-old Andrew Conley showed no emotion during Friday's court appearance in Ohio Circuit Court in Rising Sun, the teen's hometown along the Ohio River about 90 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

His parents were at a viewing for his brother Conner Conley's body and did not attend the hearing.

Prosecutors say Conley confessed to police that he intentionally strangled his brother while they were wrestling at the family home on Sunday. They say Andrew Conley told investigators he had dreamed of killing someone since he was in eighth grade.

If convicted of murder, Conley could be sentenced to up to 65 years in prison.

A condemned Texas inmate is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court keeps him from the death chamber for the fatal slashing of an 11-year-old girl.

Bobby Wayne Woods is set for lethal injection Thursday evening in Huntsville for the April 1997 abduction, rape and slaying of Sarah Patterson, his ex-girlfriend's daughter.

But his attorneys contend his life should be spared because of a Supreme Court ban on executing mentally impaired people. Attorney Maurie Levin says his IQ hovers around 70 "the magical cutoff point for determining whether someone is mentally retarded."

State and federal courts repeatedly rejected Woods' mental impairment claims, though Texas' highest criminal court last year halted his execution hours before it was to occur.