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.

Congressional budget crunchers Thursday said the Democrats' latest health care plan would hold down federal red ink for at least a 20-year stretch, an assessment that boosted the bill's advocates as the Senate moved gingerly toward a historic debate.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Majority Leader Harry Reid's 10-year, $848-billion bill would produce a net reduction of $130 billion in federal deficits in its first decade. Perhaps more significantly, the legislation would continue to give back over the next 10 years and beyond, the budget umpires said, because "added revenues and costs savings would probably be greater" than the cost of covering uninsured Americans.

The budget office put a big asterisk on its forecast, using words like "imprecision" and "uncertainty" to describe the long-range projection. It noted that, overall, health care spending remains on an unsustainable path.

However, the bill would not make matters any worse, and maybe even a little better.

With President Barack Obama pledging to tamp down ruinous health care costs, Democrats took the new CBO estimates to the bank, while skipping over the caveats. Preparing for a noontime rally with supporters, Reid, D-Nev., said the legislation would "save lives, save money and save Medicare."

The CBO said Reid's bill would extend coverage to 94 percent of eligible Americans, after subsidies to make premiums more affordable start flowing in 2014. That's one year later than in the House Democratic bill — and well into the next presidential term. Postponing the subsidies by one year allowed Reid to offer somewhat more generous assistance to defray the cost of insurance premiums.

A Scottish man who was branded unruly and disruptive by the flight crew on a Philadelphia-to-London jet that was diverted to Boston has been ordered held on $300 bail.

Prosecutors say Glasgow resident John Alexander Murray's arm was in a splint and he refused the crew's requests to keep it out of the aisle. They say he then became belligerent and demanded to be taken back to Philadelphia.

A spokesman for Boston's Logan International Airport says Murray was arrested after US Airways Flight 728 landed at around 11 p.m. Monday. The plane departed for London two hours later without him.

Murray pleaded not guilty to a charge of interfering with a flight crew at his arraignment Tuesday at East Boston District Court. The 50-year-old was ordered to return to court Dec. 1.

A federal appeals court is about to consider a lawsuit challenging Michigan's ban against racial preferences in public university admissions and government hiring.

Civil rights groups and University of Michigan students, faculty and applicants say the 2006 ballot measure approved by voters is unconstitutional.

Critics say the constitutional amendment has created an unfair process where universities give weight to geographical diversity and legacy status but not racial identity.

Supporters say the law reflects the will of the people.

Arguments will be held Tuesday morning at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. A district judge dismissed a challenge to the law last year.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered a disbarred civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case to go to prison and said a judge must consider whether her sentence of a little more than two years behind bars was too lenient.

Lynne Stewart, 70, has been free on appeal since she was sentenced in 2006. The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its nearly 200-page ruling almost two years after hearing arguments in the case.

Stewart was sentenced to two years and four months in prison after she was found guilty of passing messages between her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, and senior members of an Egyptian-based terrorist organization.

The appeals court suggested that the sentence was too lenient, especially when compared with the 20-month prison term given to her co-defendant, Mohammed Yousry, a translator who was working for her. The appeals court said the sentencing judge can also reconsider the sentences of Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a former postal worker, depending on what the judge decides with Stewart.

The court also ordered Yousry to begin serving his sentence. Sattar is already serving his 24-year sentence.

In its ruling, the appeals court said Stewart must be resentenced because Judge John G. Koeltl declined to determine at sentencing whether Stewart committed perjury when she testified at her trial.

Here are some states where there have been recent high-profile challenges to the lethal-injection death penalty method:

California: A federal judge has suspended executions until prison officials fix the deficiencies he identified in the lethal-injection process.

Maryland: Executions were halted in June as new execution protocols submitted by Gov. Martin O'Malley are examined by a legislative panel. O'Malley, a death penalty opponent, waited to submit the new rules in a failed attempt to give the Legislature time to repeal the death penalty.

Missouri: The execution process resumed this year for the first time in nearly four years but was stalled in June when the state's chief justice said the court was unlikely to schedule any future executions until legal challenges were resolved over the training and competence of the state's execution team.

Arizona: Executions have been on hold since 2007 as the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Kentucky's lethal-injection method. Kentucky's plan was approved, but the high court didn't rule on methods in other states. Federal public defenders in Phoenix then questioned Arizona's methods in state and federal court.

Tennessee: A federal appeals court delivered a victory for the state's lethal-injection method in July after executions had been held up for years by an inmate's lawsuit contending it inflicted unnecessary pain.

In courtrooms barred to the public, dozens of terror suspects are pleading for their freedom from the Guantanamo Bay prison, sometimes even testifying on their own behalf by video from the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Complying with a Supreme Court ruling last year, 15 federal judges in the U.S. courthouse here are giving detainees their day in court after years behind bars half a world away from their homelands.

The judges have found the government's evidence against 30 detainees wanting and ordered their release. That number could rise significantly because the judges are on track to hear challenges from dozens more prisoners.

Scooped up along with hard-core terrorist suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, these 30 detainees stand in stark contrast to the 10 prisoners whom the Obama administration targeted for prosecution Friday for plotting the Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of 9/11, and four of his alleged henchmen are headed for a federal civilian trial in New York; five others, including a top suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried by a military commission.