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.

A U.S. Navy serviceman was found not guilty Monday of sexually assaulting a prostitute at a brothel while on shore leave in Australia's biggest city.

A New South Wales District Court jury cleared Petty Officer Timothy Davis, 25, of a charge of sexual intercourse without consent, with the aggravating factor of causing the woman actual bodily harm. The charge carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

Davis was one of 3,000 Marines and Navy personnel on shore leave in Sydney after the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu and guided missile destroyer USS Halsey arrived in the port in October, 2008.

The woman told the court she had protected, consensual sex with Davis at the brothel where she worked, but said he became aggressive when she told him his time was up and forced her to have unprotected sex. The jury was shown police photographs of scratches on the woman.

A lawsuit in Wisconsin is bringing a fresh challenge to the practice of paying for keywords on Google and other search engines to boost one company's link over a rival's.

The practice has occasionally prompted a rival to file legal challenges alleging trademark infringement. Now a Wisconsin law firm is trying a new angle — accusing its competitor of violating privacy laws.

Habush Habush & Rottier is one of Wisconsin's largest law firms, specializing in personal-injury cases. But search for iterations of "Habush" and "Rottier" and a sponsored link for Cannon & Dunphy attorneys often shows up, just above the link for the Habush site.

Habush alleges that Cannon paid for the keywords "Habush" and "Rottier," in effect hijacking the names and reputation of Habush attorneys.

Cannon acknowledged paying for the keywords but denied wrongdoing, saying it was following a clearly legal business strategy.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Milwaukee, where Habush is headquartered. Cannon is based in nearby Brookfield.