When Esther Elizabeth Reed was indicted last year, Brooke Henson's relatives said they hoped Reed could tell authorities where to find her.

"Of course at first, it was just giving us hope that Brooke was alive," Lisa Henson, Brooke's aunt, said Monday.

Investigators have since said they don't think Reed had anything to do with Henson's 1999 disappearance.

Reed is accused of stealing Henson's identity in 2003 and posing as her to obtain false identification documents, take a high school equivalency test and get into Columbia University.

She was indicted last year and made her first court appearance Monday on federal charges of identity theft, mail and wire fraud and obtaining false identification documents. If convicted on all four charges, Reed faces a possible $1 million fine and 47 years in prison, time Lisa Henson said she hopes Reed will serve.

"I just hope that she never gets to see the light of day again," she said.

Reed answered routine questions from U.S. Magistrate Judge William M. Catoe and showed no emotion during the brief proceedings. Catoe entered a not guilty plea to all charges.

Reed, who was arrested Feb. 3 outside Chicago, is 29; Brooke Henson would be 29 in April.

Reed began posing as Henson in October 2003, obtaining an ID card in Ohio using her name, date of birth and Social Security number, Assistant U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkins said.

Two months later, Reed took a high school equivalency test in Ohio using Henson's name and received a degree, Wilkins said. Again using Henson's information, she took a college entrance exam in California in May 2004, using her score to apply for admission to Columbia, the prosecutor said.

Reed attended the New York school for two years, beginning in August 2004, Wilkins said. She then applied for and received student loans in Henson's name, in amounts investigators have said exceeded $100,000.

Reed then applied to the state of South Carolina for a duplicate copy of Henson's birth certificate, which she received at an address in Massachusetts. In 2006, Reed also applied for a U.S. passport in Henson's name, Wilkins said.

Investigators have said Reed stole multiple people's identities and also was admitted to Harvard and California State University, Fullerton, though she has not been charged in those cases and Wilkins did not discuss them Monday.

Assistant Federal Defender Lora Collins, who was appointed Monday to represent Reed but did not appear with her in court, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

A message left at Columbia University's public affairs office after business hours Monday was not immediately returned.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York last year upheld their convictions on charges of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and bank fraud.

Lawyers for the two men argued that fraud charges should be thrown out because accounting terms were not explained to the jury and because the Rigases properly followed accounting rules during transactions that the government said were fraudulent.

Federal investigators began looking at Adelphia after it said in a footnote to a press release in 2002 that the company had approximately $2.2 billion in liabilities not previously reported on its balance sheet.

At trial, prosecutors said the Rigas family used the business for personal expenses, withdrawing millions of dollars to finance everything from 100 pairs of bedroom slippers for Timothy Rigas to more than $3 million to produce a film by John Rigas' daughter, Ellen, to $26 million on 3,600 acres of timberland to preserve the view outside the father's home.

Prosecutors said John Rigas once even spent $6,000 to fly two Christmas trees to New York for his daughter.

Last year, another son, Michael Rigas, was sentenced to 10 months home confinement after pleading guilty to a charge of making a false entry in a company record.

John Rigas, the son of Greek immigrants, created Adelphia from nothing when he bought the rights to wire the town of Coudersport, Pa., for cable television in 1952.

The problems arose after he took Adelphia public in 1986 and the company grew rapidly in the late 1990s.

Adelphia served more than 5 million customers in 31 states. It collapsed into bankruptcy in 2002.

It moved to Greenwood Village, Colo. Comcast Corp. in Philadelphia and Time Warner Cable, a unit of Time Warner Inc., have since bought Adelphia's cable assets.

The U.K. High Court said Nokia Corp., the world's largest mobile phone maker by sales, had not infringed two patents regarding GSM mobile phone standards.

Qualcomm Inc. has been trying to bring an injunction against Nokia that would prevent it from selling products using the GSM patents in the U.K. GSM, or Global System for Mobile Communications, is the world's dominant second-generation mobile phone technology standard.

Qualcomm, which has filed 11 lawsuits around the world against Nokia in the past two years, has failed to win over the courts in its fight the Finnish handset maker.

"We are pleased with the Court's decision that the patent claims are invalid and believe it is consistent with and supported by the facts," said Nokia Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson. "This is the second court to conclude that Qualcomm does not have relevant and valid GSM patents."

Last week, the U.S. International Trade Commission turned down Qualcomm's petition for a review of an earlier decision, which said Nokia hadn't infringed on three patents, as claimed by Qualcomm.

The two mobile phone-technology giants have tussled in court over patent-licensing agreements that expired in April last year. Qualcomm charges patent royalties to mobile phone makers, which Nokia and some other companies say are excessive.

Richard Windsor, an analyst at Japanese investment bank Nomura said that the focus now shifts to a Delaware Court and a 3G patent dispute, where arguments are expected to begin this summer.

"Qualcomm is weak in GSM and we think it has been deploying a strategy of firing out legal long-shots," said Windsor. "The hope is that a victory in one of these cases will bring Nokia to the negotiating table, but, so far, it's not achieved this."

"The main focus now is going to be the Delaware case in July," said Windsor. "However, it's our view that Qualcomm is unlikely to prevail in that case either."

Andrew Gilbert, president of Qualcomm in Europe, said the British court's decision was "not devastating."

Supporters of same-sex marriage invoke the state's commitment to equality regardless of gender or sexual orientation, the needs of the children of gay and lesbian couples, the persistence of societal discrimination, and legal rights such as freedom of expression, association and privacy.

In defense of its law, the state cites a cultural tradition far older than statehood, the will of the people as expressed in a 2000 initiative, the steps California has already taken toward equal rights for gays and lesbians, and the power of lawmakers and voters to determine state policy.

Beyond those arguments, groups opposing same-sex marriage want the court to justify the state law on moral or scientific grounds, as an affirmation that limiting matrimony to a man and a woman is best for children and society.

A ruling is due within 90 days. The case combines four lawsuits - three by nearly two dozen couples who want to marry and the fourth by the city of San Francisco, which entered the dispute after the court overturned Mayor Gavin Newsom's order that cleared the way for nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings in February and March 2004.

The suits rely on the California Constitution, which state courts have long interpreted as more protective of individual rights than the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs invoke a passage in the 1948 ruling on interracial marriage - the first of its kind by any state's high court - in which the justices recognized a "right to join in marriage with the person of one's choice."

Judge Richard Kramer of San Francisco Superior Court echoed that language in March 2005, when he ruled that the state's ban on same-sex marriage violated "the basic human right to marry a person of one's choice." He also said the marriage law constitutes sex discrimination - prohibited by another groundbreaking California Supreme Court ruling in 1971 - because it is based on the gender of one's partner.

But a state appeals court upheld the law in October 2006. In a 2-1 decision, the court rejected Kramer's findings of discrimination and said California was entitled to preserve the historic definition of marriage while taking steps to protect the rights of same-sex couples who register as domestic partners.

Advocates crowd in

As the case reached the state's high court, the participants and the arguments multiplied. Conservative religious organizations, including sponsors of the 2000 ballot measure that reinforced the opposite-sex-only marriage law, accused the state of making a half-hearted defense of its law and sought to justify it as a pro-family measure. Marriage is for procreation, and children fare best with married fathers and mothers, they argued. They also said the definition of marriage is so deeply engrained in the law that judges have no power to change it.

The coalition of conservative religious groups warned that a ruling against the state law would "fracture the centuries-old consensus about the meaning of marriage."

An opposing assortment of liberal denominations counseled the court against a state endorsement of "the religious orthodoxy of some sects concerning who may marry."

The court also heard from hundreds of organizations representing psychologists, anthropologists and other professions, city and county governments, law professors, businesses, civil rights advocates and social institutions.

Judges and limits

Underlying all the arguments is a debate about the proper role of courts in a democracy, particularly on contentious social and political issues. It's the same question - how far, and how fast, judges should move to correct injustices they perceive in the actions of elected officials - that has confronted jurists pondering such issues as segregation, school prayer and abortion.

The subject was raised with unusual frankness in written arguments by Attorney General Jerry Brown's office, which is leading the defense of the marriage law that Brown signed as governor in 1977.

"One unintended and unfortunate consequence of too radical a change is the possibility of backlash," said Deputy Attorney General Christopher Krueger. Same-sex marriage may someday be legalized in California, he said, "but such a change should appropriately come from the people rather than the judiciary as long as constitutional rights are protected."

Brown said last week he wasn't asking the court to sacrifice principles to politics, only observing that rulings that "ride roughshod over the deeply held judgments of society" can have unintended consequences.

He noted that the court majority swung from liberal to conservative after three of his appointees, including Chief Justice Rose Bird, were unseated in a 1986 election that centered on their votes to overturn death sentences.

"The deal makes sense with the price and structure we announced. We hope it becomes reality," he told reporters at the annual CeBIT technology fair in Hanover. "There is a lot of merit for Microsoft and Yahoo, for Yahoo shareholders and for Microsoft shareholders, for advertisers and for consumers."

Analysts have debated whether Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp.'s proposed $40 billion acquisition of Yahoo is worth it, given its two-year earnings slump.

Yahoo contends it is worth even more money given the reach and breadth of its sprawling Internet franchise.

Ballmer said his company's original offer is good, adding that "there is a range of dialogue" for both companies about the proposed takeover.

Two days after D.C. super-lawyer Bob Bennett released his new memoir, yet another VIP client landed in trouble -- John McCain, with the New York Times' controversial story about his friendship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman-- and suddenly Bennett was on every TV channel holding forth.

Fortunate timing for a new author? Actually, the opposite: The well-connected Bennett said he had already scored the airtime to flack his book; he then used his moments on camera to defend the GOP front-runner and shift the debate to media ethics.

"I've always said: It's better to be lucky than good," he said with a laugh at a party in his honor Friday night at the Hay-Adams.

He's the Other Bennett: Big brother to conservative pundit Bill and a former federal prosecutor turned go-to guy for bigwigs in peril -- Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case, Paul Wolfowitz in the World Bank ethics scandal, Judy Miller in the CIA leak investigation. In "In the Ring: The Trials of a Washington Lawyer," he writes: "I have often felt that being born in Brooklyn and having a few hundred street fights under my belt was better preparation for practicing law here than receiving law degrees from Georgetown and Harvard."

But he was a big softy Friday night, doting on wife Ellen, his daughters and new grandchild, greeting a crowd heavier on friends and neighbors ( Esther Coopersmith, Steve Trachtenberg, Mac McLarty, a whole lotta lawyers) than former clients. He told us that all trial lawyers are deeply superstitious (in court, he always makes a point of mentioning his girls and their favorite storybook character, Alice in Wonderland) and that he was reluctant to write about his childhood. But then he realized how much his parents' divorce, his mother's drinking and his role as a big brother molded him as a lawyer: "What really turns me on in the law is when I have an individual to protect."

The first fully implemented year of Medicare's recovery audit contractors in Florida was a costly one for health care providers.

They returned nearly $125 million to the government last year, a report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid showed.

The pilot program in Florida, New York and California ends on March 27. Then, CMS will select four regional auditing companies to run the national program starting later this year.

Of the $371 million in improper Medicare payments the RAC program identified in fiscal 2007, which ended Sept. 30, they found $128.7 million in Florida. Statewide, the auditors collected $124.6 million in overpayment from health care providers and paid them back $4.1 million for Medicare underpayments.

Florida inpatient hospitals returned $115.1 million in overpayment, outpatient hospitals returned $3.4 million and physicians returned $5.1 million. All of the money returned went to inpatient hospitals.

According to CMS, almost half of the improper payments were the result of incorrect billing coding. One-third were ruled medically unnecessary -- a category that has frustrated Florida hospitals because of the auditors second-guessing decisions of clinical staff. Starting last summer, CMS required the RAC programs to have medical directors to review claims.

Heart failure and shock was the most common type of claim where RAC found overpayment in Florida, with $9.5 million collected.

In the state, 14 percent of RAC overpayment claims were appealed, with 8.9 percent of all claims being overturned on appeal.

Many Florida hospitals executives said the RAC filed too many baseless cases because the auditors receive their fee even after the claim is overturned by an administrative law judge. In the national program, the auditors will lose their fee if the claim is overturned on appeal.