Judge Ronald Giles agreed Tuesday with the mayor's attorneys that a no-contact order didn't include Ayanna Kilpatrick. The mayor spent time with his sister during the weekend.

Last week, Giles had sent the mayor to jail last week in a separate perjury case.

Giles had put the mayor in jail Thursday after learning he traveled to Windsor, Ontario, in July without notifying authorities, a condition of his bond in the perjury case. Kilpatrick was released Friday.

A lawsuit against state Controller John Chiang was filed Monday in Sacramento County Superior Court. The suit says the state Constitution and several sections of law prohibit the state from paying full wages without approval of a budget.

The controller, a Democrat whose office is responsible for paying state employees, has balked at carrying out the Republican governor's July 31 executive order cutting employees' pay until a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 is approved. Lawmakers are divided over how to close a $15.2 billion deficit.

Schwarzenegger directed that the pay of nearly 140,000 rank-and-file employees be cut to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour. About 30,000 management employees would be paid $455 a week, and another 8,000 workers, mostly doctors and attorneys, would get nothing. All those workers would get the remainder of their normal paychecks after the budget is approved.

China Arnold, 28, is charged with aggravated murder in the 2005 death of her daughter, Paris Talley, and could face the death penalty if convicted. She has pleaded not guilty.

Her retrial in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court comes six months after a judge declared a mistrial in her initial trial, saying new evidence had surfaced to bolster Arnold's innocence claim.

Visiting Judge John Kessler declared the mistrial Feb. 11, just as closing arguments were to begin, after he privately heard testimony from a juvenile who said he was at Arnold's apartment complex the night the baby died.

The judge did not give details about the juvenile's testimony. The Dayton Daily News reported that a man had told defense attorneys his 5-year-old son claimed to have found the baby in the oven and pulled her out. The newspaper said the boy identified an older child as the person who may have put Paris Talley in the oven.

Assistant Montgomery County Prosecutor David Franceschelli called defense claims that someone else may have been responsible a "fanciful" account contradicted by evidence.

Both prosecutors and defense attorneys have been barred by the court from talking publicly about the case.

During Arnold's first trial, prosecution witnesses said she admitted killing the baby by putting her in the microwave.

Arnold did not testify, but defense witnesses said she told them she had nothing to do with the baby's death, didn't know how it happened and had expressed shock when told the child may have been burned in a microwave.

Defense attorney Jon Paul Rion said other people had access to the baby, that people questioned about the case had changed their stories, and that Arnold was intoxicated to the point of blacking out when the child died.

A U.S. district court judge in Massachusetts issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from demonstrating at the Defcon conference on Sunday in Las Vegas how to take advantage of the system's vulnerabilities to get free rides.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority says in a complaint filed Friday that the students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws.

Huron County prosecutor Russ Leffler had argued that a judge should not have dismissed falsification and perjury charges that were filed against Michael and Sharen Gravelle.

But on Friday the appeals court in Toledo agreed with the lower court judge and upheld his dismissal of the charges.

The Gravelles' attorney, Kenneth Myers, says it means one less potential hurdle to overcome as they appeal their child abuse and endangering convictions.

It can hardly come as a surprise that Barack Obama, Harvard Law Class of '91, is popular with lawyers. They've given him $21 million in donations so far, compared with a measly $7 million for Republican rival John McCain.

But like all things Obama, the picture is cloudier than it first appears. Most of Obama's lawyer money came from defense firms. He got the single biggest slug of cash from Kirkland & Ellis, the Chicago law firm that represents Marlboro merchant Philip Morris and asbestos manufacturers, among others. He also co-sponsored a bill designed to cut down on malpractice litigation in 2005, and voted for the Class Action Fairness Act, a law that made it harder for trial lawyers to file some of their most lucrative cases.

Those actions send pangs of doubt through die-hard supporters of the unfettered right to sue, such as Graham Steele, a staff attorney at consumer watchdog group Public Citizen.

If liberals are worried, however, conservatives should be terrified. Whether Obama or McCain wins in November, tort reform appears dead in Washington for at least the next two years. A catchall phrase for legislative measures designed to make it harder for individuals to sue businesses, tort reform has long been a pet project of Republicans. Not coincidentally, it reduces the earning power of plaintiff lawyers, some of the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party.