A 70-year-old civil rights lawyer was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison in a terrorism case by a judge who boosted her original sentence by nearly eight years after concluding she lied to a jury and lacked remorse.

"I'm somewhat stunned," Lynne Stewart told U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl after he announced the sentence for her conviction for letting a jailed Egyptian sheik communicate with his radical followers despite restrictions in place to prevent it.

The sentence, nearly four times longer than the two-year, four-month sentence she originally received in 2006, left Stewart sobbing in her prison uniform after Koeltl described his reasons for increasing the prison time significantly.

An appeals court had ordered a new sentencing, saying the terrorism component of the case needed to be considered, along with whether she committed perjury at her trial. The court said it had "serious doubts" whether her original sentence was reasonable.

The judge said public comments Stewart made after her first sentencing showed him that the "original sentence was not sufficient."

He said she showed "a lack of remorse for conduct that was both illegal and potentially lethal."

Outside court after her original sentence, Stewart said she could do the prison time standing on her head.

Koeltl found that Stewart "willfully testified falsely at the trial" on numerous points, including in telling jurors she did not make Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman available to his followers and did not violate government rules meant to silence the sheik because lawyers worked in a "bubble" in which the government understood the rules were relaxed.

Lawyers for Dole Foods and six Nicaraguan plaintiffs suing them have accused each other of fraud in heated closing arguments as a judge ponders whether to dismiss a $2.3 million award to purported banana workers.

The Dole defense team noted Monday that plaintiffs' lawyer Steve Condie never called the six plaintiffs to testify in the current hearing and has not even met them. Condie accused Dole of bribing whistleblower witnesses and conspiring to remove plaintiffs' lawyers from the case. He acknowledged there was fraud but said his six clients were "clean."

Judge Victoria Chaney threw out a similar case after testimony that plaintiffs pretended to be banana workers and faked lab tests to falsely show they were rendered sterile by pesticides on Dole banana farms.

"Die Hard" director John McTiernan pleaded guilty Monday to lying to FBI agents and a judge during the investigation of Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano in a wiretapping case.

McTiernan, 59, entered his plea to two counts of making false statements to the FBI and one count of perjury for lying to a federal judge while trying to withdraw a guilty plea. He could face up to a year in prison.

Attorney S. Todd Neal, who represents McTiernan, said the plea will allow his client to appeal certain pretrial rulings made by a federal judge.

"We continue to believe that the charges against him were developed in an unfair way," Neal said. "The FBI should not be in the business of ambushing citizens with surprise phone calls in which they ask 'questions' for which they already know the answers."

McTiernan previously pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents in 2006 about the investigation of Pellicano. The director later withdrew that plea, arguing he didn't have adequate legal representation.

Pellicano was convicted in 2008 of wiretapping film producer Charles Roven for McTiernan and of bugging the phones of celebrities and others to get information for clients.

A filmmaker who went to Nicaragua to make a documentary said Thursday he became an undercover operative for a Texas law firm that was suing Dole Foods on behalf of purported banana plantation workers who claim they were left sterile by pesticide exposure.

Jason Glaser testified about his transformation into a secret sleuth, saying he told none of the people he interviewed in Latin America about his dual role.

He was called to the witness stand by attorney Steve Condie, who represents six men claiming they were left sterile by pesticide exposure while working on Dole banana plantations from 1970 to 1980.

Dole investigators uncovered evidence that some Nicaraguans suing the company had lied, saying they were sterile when they had fathered children and vowing they worked on banana farms when they did not.

The first trial on the issue ended in 2007 with jurors awarding $2.3 million to Condie's clients. Dole is seeking to overturn the verdict. A second similar case was dismissed after testimony about fraud.

A mattress and furniture retailer here has won a $7.3 million emotional distress verdict against a law firm in a case involving the now-defunct Northern Mattress & Furniture Co. of Fairfield, Maine, according to a report in the Kennebec Journal.

Peter Redman, who now operates Priceless Mattress & Furniture in Augusta, Maine, said the firm Bernstein Shur Sawyer & Nelson was negligent in representing him in a sexual harassment claim brought by a co-worker at the former store in 2004.

He won the case at a jury trial three weeks ago, the Journal reported. An attorney representing the law firm said his client will ask for a new trial.

The European Union has approved a new chewable form of cholesterol blockbuster Lipitor for children 10 and up with high levels of bad cholesterol and triglycerides, a type of blood fat, Pfizer said Tuesday.

The approval includes children whose high blood fats are due to an inherited disease that causes extremely high cholesterol levels, familial hypercholesterolemia.

New York-based Pfizer Inc. won U.S. approval for Lipitor use in children 10 to 17 with that condition in 2002.

Lipitor is the world's top-selling drug, with 2009 sales of about $13 billion, but its U.S. patent expires at the end of November 2011. Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, will quickly lose most Lipitor revenue once generic competition hits, so the company has been trying to boost sales where possible before then.

Pfizer said last fall that it plans to apply for a six-month extension of its patent in European countries, after doing studies of Lipitor in youngsters.

As in the United States, the European Union allows drug makers to seek an additional six months of patent protection for medications if they test them in children, who generally are excluded from the drug studies performed to win approval for a new medication.