A Scottish man who was branded unruly and disruptive by the flight crew on a Philadelphia-to-London jet that was diverted to Boston has been ordered held on $300 bail.

Prosecutors say Glasgow resident John Alexander Murray's arm was in a splint and he refused the crew's requests to keep it out of the aisle. They say he then became belligerent and demanded to be taken back to Philadelphia.

A spokesman for Boston's Logan International Airport says Murray was arrested after US Airways Flight 728 landed at around 11 p.m. Monday. The plane departed for London two hours later without him.

Murray pleaded not guilty to a charge of interfering with a flight crew at his arraignment Tuesday at East Boston District Court. The 50-year-old was ordered to return to court Dec. 1.

A federal appeals court is about to consider a lawsuit challenging Michigan's ban against racial preferences in public university admissions and government hiring.

Civil rights groups and University of Michigan students, faculty and applicants say the 2006 ballot measure approved by voters is unconstitutional.

Critics say the constitutional amendment has created an unfair process where universities give weight to geographical diversity and legacy status but not racial identity.

Supporters say the law reflects the will of the people.

Arguments will be held Tuesday morning at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. A district judge dismissed a challenge to the law last year.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered a disbarred civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case to go to prison and said a judge must consider whether her sentence of a little more than two years behind bars was too lenient.

Lynne Stewart, 70, has been free on appeal since she was sentenced in 2006. The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its nearly 200-page ruling almost two years after hearing arguments in the case.

Stewart was sentenced to two years and four months in prison after she was found guilty of passing messages between her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, and senior members of an Egyptian-based terrorist organization.

The appeals court suggested that the sentence was too lenient, especially when compared with the 20-month prison term given to her co-defendant, Mohammed Yousry, a translator who was working for her. The appeals court said the sentencing judge can also reconsider the sentences of Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a former postal worker, depending on what the judge decides with Stewart.

The court also ordered Yousry to begin serving his sentence. Sattar is already serving his 24-year sentence.

In its ruling, the appeals court said Stewart must be resentenced because Judge John G. Koeltl declined to determine at sentencing whether Stewart committed perjury when she testified at her trial.

Here are some states where there have been recent high-profile challenges to the lethal-injection death penalty method:

California: A federal judge has suspended executions until prison officials fix the deficiencies he identified in the lethal-injection process.

Maryland: Executions were halted in June as new execution protocols submitted by Gov. Martin O'Malley are examined by a legislative panel. O'Malley, a death penalty opponent, waited to submit the new rules in a failed attempt to give the Legislature time to repeal the death penalty.

Missouri: The execution process resumed this year for the first time in nearly four years but was stalled in June when the state's chief justice said the court was unlikely to schedule any future executions until legal challenges were resolved over the training and competence of the state's execution team.

Arizona: Executions have been on hold since 2007 as the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Kentucky's lethal-injection method. Kentucky's plan was approved, but the high court didn't rule on methods in other states. Federal public defenders in Phoenix then questioned Arizona's methods in state and federal court.

Tennessee: A federal appeals court delivered a victory for the state's lethal-injection method in July after executions had been held up for years by an inmate's lawsuit contending it inflicted unnecessary pain.

In courtrooms barred to the public, dozens of terror suspects are pleading for their freedom from the Guantanamo Bay prison, sometimes even testifying on their own behalf by video from the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Complying with a Supreme Court ruling last year, 15 federal judges in the U.S. courthouse here are giving detainees their day in court after years behind bars half a world away from their homelands.

The judges have found the government's evidence against 30 detainees wanting and ordered their release. That number could rise significantly because the judges are on track to hear challenges from dozens more prisoners.

Scooped up along with hard-core terrorist suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, these 30 detainees stand in stark contrast to the 10 prisoners whom the Obama administration targeted for prosecution Friday for plotting the Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of 9/11, and four of his alleged henchmen are headed for a federal civilian trial in New York; five others, including a top suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried by a military commission.

A Massachusetts man accused of plotting to kill Americans was portrayed by federal prosecutors Thursday as a jihadist who is too dangerous to be released on bail, but the man's lawyer said he was charged only after he refused to become an FBI informant against Muslims.

Tarek Mehanna, 27, of Sudbury, was arrested a year ago and charged with lying to the FBI. New, more serious charges were added last month, when Mehanna was accused of conspiring with two other men to shoot shoppers at U.S. malls, to kill two unnamed prominent U.S. politicians and to kill American soldiers in Iraq.

Authorities said he and the other men never came close to pulling off an attack, but did seek training at terrorist camps in the Middle East. The men allegedly told friends they were turned down for terrorist training because of their nationality, ethnicity or inexperience, or that they were unable to make contact with people they hoped would get them into such camps.

The men abandoned plans to attack malls because their weapons contact said he could find only handguns, not automatic weapons, prosecutors allege.

During a detention hearing in federal court on Thursday, Magistrate Judge Leo Sorokin heard arguments from prosecutors and Mehanna's defense on whether he should be kept behind bars until his trial. Sorokin did not immediately rule.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Aloke Chakravarty urged the judge to hold Mehanna without bail, saying he poses a danger to the community and is likely to flee before his trial because he faces a possible sentence of life in prison.