The decision from the Court of Appeals in Washington upholds a Federal Communications Commission ruling that banned the exclusive agreements as anticompetitive.

The deals involved a provider exchanging a valuable service like wiring a multiunit building for cable in exchange for the exclusive right to provide service to all the residents.

The commission said cable operators could no longer enter into such deals and existing ones could not be enforced.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association and a pair of affiliated real estate groups sued, saying the FCC did not justify the change in policy, consider the retroactive effects or have the authority to regulate the deals. But the appeals court sided with the FCC and said it acted well within the bounds of the law.

A spokesman for the cable association had no immediate comment on the ruling.

The high court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned the 1986 Michigan v. Jackson ruling, which said police may not initiate questioning of a defendant who has a lawyer or has asked for one unless the attorney is present.

The Michigan ruling applied even to defendants who agree to talk to the authorities without their lawyers.

The court's conservatives overturned that opinion Tuesday, with Justice Antonin Scalia saying "it was poorly reasoned, has created no significant reliance interests and (as we have described) is ultimately unworkable."

Scalia, who read the opinion from the bench, said their decision will have a "minimal" effects on criminal defendants. "Because of the protections created by this court in Miranda and related cases, there is little if any chance that a defendant will be badgered into waiving his right to have counsel present during interrogation," Scalia said.

The Michigan v. Jackson opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the only current justice who was on the court at the time. He dissented from the ruling, and in an unusual move read his dissent aloud from the bench. It was the first time this term a justice had read a dissent aloud.

"The police interrogation in this case clearly violated petitioner's Sixth Amendment right to counsel," Stevens said. Overruling the Jackson case, he said, "can only diminish the public's confidence in the reliability and fairness of our system of justice."

A California man has pleaded guilty to opening tens of thousands of bogus online brokerage accounts and then pocketing tiny test deposits made by companies like E-Trade Financial and Charles Schwab.

Michael Largent, 23, of Plumas Lake, Calif. pleaded guilty Thursday to computer fraud charges in connection with the scam, which ran between November 2007 and May 2008.

Largent's arrest was widely covered on the Internet last May, where it was likened to so-called Salami Slicing scams depicted in movies such as Superman III and Office Spaces.

According to prosecutors, Largent wrote a script that opened more than 58,000 online accounts at instructions such as E-trade and Schwab. He used fake names, including cartoon monikers such as Hank Hill and Rusty Shackelford to open these accounts and then profited when the brokerage firms would make tiny test deposits to make sure they were linked to his account.

Typically these deposits were between $0.01 and $2 but they added up. In total he made or tried to make more than $50,000 in the scam, the Department of Justice said.

Largent is also alleged to have received more than $8,000 in micro-deposits from Google, although he was not charged with this in his May 22 indictment.

He is set to be sentenced on Aug. 13 and faces up to five years in federal prison on two computer fraud charges, a U.S. department of Justice spokeswoman said Thursday.

The opinion issued Tuesday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Wallace Dixon recommended dismissing the lawsuit against Duke. Dixon used phrases such as "this shot also lands in the drink" in the decision, which now goes to a District Court judge.

Giuliani's attorney said Wednesday he wants the case to move forward.

Giuliani is the son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. His lawsuit claims that Duke's golf coach manufactured accusations against him to justify kicking him off the team.

A Duke spokesman said the opinion recognized there is no right to play on a team.

The high court, in a 7-2 ruling issued Monday, overturned a lower-court decision that said decades-old maternity leaves should count in determining pensions.

The court's decision "forces women to pay a high price today because their employers discriminated yesterday," said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families.

Four AT&T Corp. employees who took maternity leave between 1968 and 1976 sued the company to get their leave time credited toward their pensions. Their pregnancies occurred before the 1979 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which barred companies from treating pregnancy leaves differently from other disability leaves.

AT&T lawyers said their pension plan was legal when the women took pregnancy leave, so they shouldn't have to recalculate their retirement benefits now. Congress did not make the Pregnancy Discrimination Act retroactive, they said, so the women should not get any extra money.

The high court on Monday refused to hear appeals from San Diego and San Bernardino counties, which say the justices have never directly ruled on whether California's law trumps the federal controlled substances laws.

Supporters say marijuana helps chronically ill patients relieve pain. Critics say the drug has no medical benefit and all use should be illegal.

San Diego supervisors had sued to overturn the state law after it was approved by voters in 1996, but lower courts have ruled against them.

San Diego and San Bernardino counties argued that issuing identification cards to eligible users, as required by the 1996 state law, would violate federal law, which does not recognize the state measure.

A federal appeals court ruled that ID card laws "do not pose a significant impediment" to the federal Controlled Substances Act because that law is designed to "combat recreational drug use, not to regulate a state's medical practices."

The cases are County of San Bernardino v. California, 08-897 and County of San Diego v. San Diego NORML, 08-887.