The Navajo Nation’s high court has banned elected tribal officials from doling out public money until the tribe establishes rules on their financial aid program.

The court made the decision this week in a case that challenged the reduction of the Tribal Council from 88 members to 24.

Tribal lawmakers set aside $150,000 in public money to mount the challenge. The Supreme Court justices said the appropriation was unlawful and that tribal officials failed to adequately review it.

Some lawmakers have been criticized for discretionary spending. All but 11 of the 88 lawmakers and the incoming tribal president were charged in a probe of the spending.

One of the cases has been dismissed, but a judge hasn’t ruled on whether it can be refiled.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco has ruled that a strip search of a male inmate by a female guard was unconstitutional.

In a 6-5 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said the search of the inmate Charles Byrd at a minimum-security jail in Maricopa County, Ariz., in 2004 was a "humiliating event" that violated his rights.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a three-judge appeals court panel ordered Byrd's civil rights lawsuit dismissed in 2009.

In its ruling Wednesday, the court determined that cross-gender searches of intimate areas violate the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches.

Family members of imprisoned former Illinois Gov. George Ryan have gathered at the hospital bedside of his gravely ill wife while waiting for a federal appeals court to decide whether he should be allowed to join them.

Ryan's attorneys filed an emergency motion Wednesday asking that the 76-year-old former governor be let out of prison during daytime hours so he can be with his wife of 55 years, who they said was in intensive care suffering complications from chemotherapy.

One of Ryan's attorneys, former Gov. James Thompson, told The Associated Press that Lura Lynn Ryan's family was called to her side Wednesday morning. Family members did not address reporters who congregated outside Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee.

"Doctors have told the family that they have to go hour by hour," Thompson said.

An emergency motion filed with the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago says Ryan's wife went into septic shock, a complication of her treatment for what the motion describes as incurable cancer of the lungs, back, pelvis, ribs and liver.

The California Supreme Court ruled in San Francisco on Monday that police are entitled to search text messages on the cell phones of arrestees without obtaining a warrant.

The court, ruling in a Ventura County case, said by a 5-2 vote that warrantless searches of text messages are permitted under precedents set by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The panel upheld the drug conviction of Gregory Diaz, who was arrested for aiding in selling Ecstasy to a police informant during an undercover sting operation. 

Sheriff’s deputies seized Diaz’s cell phone along with six tabs of Ecstasy. One and one-half hours later, a detective, who did not have a search warrant, looked in the text message folder of the phone and discovered a coded message that referred to Ecstasy sales.

When confronted with the message, Diaz admitted to participating in the deal. He later pleaded guilty to transporting a controlled substance and was sentenced to probation, but he reserved his right to appeal the use of evidence from the text message.

The state high court majority said the search was permitted under U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have allowed warrantless searches of personal property such as clothing or a cigarette package that are “immediately associated” with a person who is arrested.

A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from taking over greenhouse gas permits in Texas.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued the stay Thursday, pending further action by the court.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott had asked the federal appeals court in Washington to block the EPA from taking over greenhouse gas permits starting Sunday until the court could review the case.

The appeals court noted that order issuing the stay "should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits" of Abbott's motion.

Earlier last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had declined to issue a stay that would delay the EPA's plans as Texas' lawsuit against the federal agency moved forward.

A federal appeals court reinstated a 2009 jury verdict Tuesday that Microsoft Corp. infringed on patents held by software maker Uniloc Inc., reversing a judge's decision to the contrary, but it also granted Microsoft a new trial on damages.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the jury's April 2009 verdict on patent infringement was supported by "substantial" evidence, so it reversed a federal judge's decision in September of that year that overturned the jury's verdict.

Irvine, Calif.-based Uniloc makes software that prevents people from illegally installing software on multiple computers. In a lawsuit filed in 2003, Uniloc argued that Microsoft's "product activation" system used in Windows XP, Office XP and Office 2003 programs infringed on several parts of a related patent, and that the software maker had copied Uniloc's technology rather than develop similar work on its own.

The jury in 2009 had found this to be the case, and awarded Uniloc $388 million in damages. On Tuesday, the appeals court agreed on the patent infringement but called the jury's damages award "fundamentally tainted," and granted a new trial on the damages.

In a statement, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel David Howard called the ruling an "an important and helpful opinion with respect to the law of damages, and it may signal the end of unreasonable and outsized damages awards based on faulty methodology."