Five men charged in the Sept. 11 attacks, including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are to appear Wednesday and Thursday for pretrial hearings in the Bush administration's special tribunal for terrorism suspects. Their trials have not yet been scheduled.

The suspects could get the death penalty if convicted of charges that include murder.

A judge is expected to hold hearings to explore defense allegations that Mohammed intimidated his co-defendants into refusing military lawyers.

Meanwhile, a judge in Washington is considering a challenge that could disrupt the first scheduled war crimes trial, on July 21, of Salim Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden.

Hamdan's lawyers say a recent Supreme Court decision has raised new legal issues that require U.S. District Judge James Robertson to delay the trial. The government says it wants to move forward.

Robertson has scheduled a July 17 hearing in Washington on the issue, just four days before Hamdan is to go on trial in a specially built courtroom on a former airstrip at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

A ruling in favor of the prisoner could also delay the trials for other men held at Guantanamo, and perhaps force the military to devise a whole new way to prosecute alleged terrorists.

Now, after the state Supreme Court threw out the first-ever jury verdict finding former lead paint companies liable for creating a public nuisance, at least one city says it's rethinking a similar lawsuit against the industry, and one of the lawyers in the Rhode Island case predicted the decision would have a "devastating" effect on national efforts to hold the manufacturers accountable for their products. Still, other lawyers with pending cases say they're not deterred.

"There's no question about it, that the Supreme Court of Rhode Island has stopped any progress nationally to get justice for lead-poisoned kids," said Jack McConnell, a lawyer who represented the state and is involved in other lawsuits over lead paint. "It has a devastating effect on progress nationwide."

The 2006 verdict against Sherwin-Williams Co., NL Industries Inc. and Millennium Holdings LLC had been the only victory against the industry. It gave advocates hope for future success even though courts around the country have more recently rejected similar suits against the companies.

But the Supreme Court's opinion last week seemed to underscore the difficulty in successfully suing the industry, and other states and communities tracking Rhode Island's case could be less inclined to take up a costly court fight with uncertain prospects of victory.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips.

The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user's real name or e-mail address.

Lawyers for Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data — equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books — would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users' privacy.

The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer.

Stanton ruled this week that the plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that the privacy concerns are speculative.

Stanton rejected a request from the plaintiffs for Google to disclose the source code — the technical secret sauce — powering its market-leading search engine, saying there's no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms to treat copyright-infringing videos differently.

The court ruled Thursday that Crist doesn't have the constitutional authority to enter into the agreement that allows Las Vegas-style slot machines, black jack and other card games at facilities such as the Hard Rock Casinos in Tampa and Hollywood.

House Speaker Marco Rubio challenged the agreement after Crist signed it in November. The tribe has already given the state $50 million as part of the deal that was expected to generate at least $100 million a year for the state.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ordered a federal evidentiary hearing for Michael Wayne Hall, who was sentenced to die for the 1998 slaying of a 19-year-old woman abducted as she rode her bicycle to work.

The panel criticized both the trial court and the state's highest criminal appeals court for relying on written arguments rather than holding an open evidentiary hearing in Hall's case.

"The facts before us are a core manifestation of a case where the state failed to provide a full and fair hearing and where such a hearing would bring out facts which, if proven true, support ... relief," the judges said.

The ruling late Monday reversed the findings of a federal district judge who upheld the state courts' rejection of defense attorneys' claims that Hall is mentally disabled. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that mentally disabled people may not be executed.

Sandy Blunt was forced out as Workforce Safety and Insurance's director last December. He had been the agency's top executive since April 2004.

Blunt is accused of illegally spending $7,200 on bonuses for Jodi Bjornson, the top lawyer at Workforce Safety and Insurance; John Halvorson, the agency's chief of employer services; and Mark Armstrong, its communications director.

He also is charged with making $11,384 in unauthorized expenditures over a number of months for food, gifts, trinkets and other items for employee meetings and functions, and on meals for state legislators.

The money paid for grill rentals, trolley rides to a meeting at Fort Lincoln State Park, four cases of peppermint patties, Fourth of July holiday items, and candy and balloons for "Bring Your Kids to Work Day," among other items.

Prosecutors say the misspending on employee gifts is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Awarding the bonuses, they say, is a lesser felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.