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LOS ANGELES -- A federal appeals court on Monday overturned the 22-year prison sentence for Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian national known as the Millennium Bomber, who plotted to set off explosives at Los Angeles International Airport on Dec. 31, 1999. The court deemed the sentence too lenient. In a review of an earlier decision by the appeals court, an 11-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled 7 to 4 to send the case back to the district court for a tougher sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lawyers routinely battle each other, representing the conflicting interests of plaintiffs and defendants. But lately in the vast tangle of federal litigation over last year's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, lawyers on the same side -- for the plaintiffs -- are fighting one another. The current conflict pits members of the steering committee and their allies against a dissident faction of lawyers, many of whom are looking to settle their cases before trial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A federal judge on Monday blocked a Food and Drug Administration requirement that tobacco companies put big new graphic warning labels on cigarette packages by next September. In a preliminary injunction, Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court in Washington ruled that cigarette makers were likely to win a free speech challenge against the proposed labels, which include staged photos of a corpse and of a man breathing smoke out of a tracheotomy hole in his neck. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kaplan Inc., a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, agreed Friday to pay $1.6 million to bring an end to investigations and charges relating to the surgical technology program at its CHI Institute in Broomall, Pa. A whistle-blower suit relating to the program was unsealed on Friday by the Federal District Court in Philadelphia. The lawsuit, filed in 2007 by David Goodstein, the former director of education at Kaplan's CHI Institute, charged that Kaplan continued to enroll students in the Broomall surgical technology program even though it did not have enough of the clinical placements the students needed to graduate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- By the numbers, President Obama is beating opponents of his signature health care bill two to one in federal court. Of the three district court judges who have ruled on the merits of constitutional challenges to the landmark Affordable Care Act, two have sided with Mr. Obama. But from a political standpoint, the only case that really matters is the one Mr. Obama lost on Monday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]