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.

The detective accused the mayor of pushing another investigator while recently trying to serve a subpoena on a friend of Kilpatrick. The two counts of assaulting or obstructing a police officer are each punishable by up to two years in prison.

"In my almost 20 years, first as a prosecutor and now as an attorney general ... I cannot recall ever seeing let alone hearing of a situation where a police officer trying to serve a subpoena was assaulted," Attorney General Mike Cox said at a news conference.

Kilpatrick spent Thursday night in a one-man jail cell with no TV for violating his bond in a criminal perjury case that has dogged him for months. Then Wayne County Circuit Judge Thomas Jackson altered the ruling of the lower court judge who ordered the mayor to jail.

Jackson said District Judge Ronald Giles went too far by not attaching some kind of cash bond to his ruling.

In order to get out of jail, Kilpatrick must pay a $50,000 cash bond and wear an electronic tether. He won't be allowed to travel.

The trial of New York-based lawyer Emmanuel Zeltser, a specialist in Russian law and organized crime, was held behind closed doors. The verdict was announced by the defendant's lawyer, Dmitry Goryachko.

"My position is that he did not commit these crimes," Goryachko told Reuters. "We will, of course, be making an appeal."

Zeltser's secretary, Vladlena Bruskova, was jailed for a year.

The U.S. State Department has repeatedly expressed concern over his arrest and sought his release on grounds of ill health.

On Monday, the U.S. embassy said it could not judge whether the trial met international standards as it had not been present. It repeated calls to be granted access to Zeltser.

"We have not been granted consular access to him for more than two months," it said. "We ... call upon the Belarsussian authorities to provide him with all the medication which has been prescribed to him."

Zeltser was detained in March on his arrival in Belarus, where he was to represent the interests of Josef Kay, a relative of the late Georgian businessman Badri Patarkatsishvili.