New York's top court ruled Tuesday that the state can use eminent domain to force homeowners and businesses to sell their properties for a massive development in Brooklyn that includes a new arena for the New Jersey Nets.

In a 6-1 ruling Tuesday, the Court of Appeals said the Empire State Development Corp.'s finding that the area was blighted was enough to justify taking the land.

A group of tenants and owners claim the seizure is unconstitutional. They argue that developer Bruce Ratner's proposed $4.9 billion, 22-acre Atlantic Yards project mainly enriches private interests, while the state constitution requires public use for taking land.

"The constitution accords government broad power to take and clear substandard and insanitary areas for redevelopment," Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman wrote for the majority. "In so doing, it commensurately deprives the judiciary of grounds to interfere with the exercise."

Ratner's proposed development includes office towers, apartments and a new arena for the NBA's Nets. A key element in his plan is selling majority team ownership to Russian entrepreneur Mikhail Prokhorov.

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 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.