The Vallejo City Council has voted unanimously to declare the city bankrupt. The council cited falling property values and tax receipts and a $16 million budget deficit for the fiscal year that begins in July. Residents of Vallejo, a town of 120,000 in Santa Clara County, have a median income of $56,505.

    Vallejo, 25 miles northeast of San Francisco, is the largest city in California to declare itself bankrupt, and the first major metropolitan area to do so since Orange County filed for bankruptcy in 1994 after a series of bungled investments.

    "With Orange County there were identifiable bad guys," John Quigley, an economics profession at UC-Berkeley, told The New York Times. "This is different. Near as one can tell, this is more of a low-level infection everywhere."

    Proposition 13 caps property taxes in California, and the Vallejo City Council was unable to wring salary concessions from its public employees, whose salaries account for 80 percent of the city budget.

Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of the US Eastern District of Louisiana ruled again Friday that the US Army Corps of Engineers cannot claim immunity from suit in connection with damages suffered by plaintiffs by virtue of alleged defects in the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO). Duval said that the outlet was a shipping channel and not a flood control outlet in connection with which the Corps would have been properly immune in tort. He rejected the Corps' argument that the MRGO was nonetheless part of a larger flood control system in the New Orleans area.

Duval made a similar ruling in February 2007 in the context of an earlier motion to dismiss. Three months before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, an expert at the LSU Hurricane Center predicted that the MRGO could amplify storm surges by 20-40 percent. After Katrina, the center determined through computer modeling that the presence of the MRGO also increased the speed of the surge, causing an even greater detrimental effect.

The 9th Circuit allowed two mothers to pursue their class action accusing Gerber Products Co. of deceptively dressing up sugar-loaded gummy treats as healthy snacks for toddlers.

The mothers claimed Gerber falsely touts its Gerber Fruit Juice Snacks as "nutritious" and "made with real fruit juice," and displays images of oranges, peaches, strawberries and cherries on the packaging. But a quick look at the label reveals the main ingredients are corn syrup and sugar, and the only fruit juice is concentrated white grape juice.

They also took issue with Gerber calling the saccharine product a "snack," saying "candy," "sweet" or "treat" was more appropriate. Gerber later changed the name to Fruit Juice Treats, but denied that the lawsuit had anything to do with the change.

A federal judge dismissed the case last year, ruling that a reasonable consumer could see through the packaging "puffery" by simply reading the ingredients.

But the appellate court found that on-the-go parents should not have to scour ingredient lists for labeling discrepancies.

"We do not ... think that a busy parent walking through the aisles of a grocery store should be expected to verify that the representations on the front of the box are confirmed in the ingredient list," Judge Pregerson wrote.

"We do not think that the FDA requires an ingredient list so that manufacturers can mislead consumers and then rely on the ingredient list to correct those misinterpretations and provide a shield for liability for the deception."

Convicted terrorism plotter Jose Padilla will serve his term at a Colorado federal prison known as “Supermax” for its strict, isolated conditions and roster of infamous inmates, prison officials said Friday.

Padilla, 37, was sent from a Miami prison to the high-security facility in Florence, Colo., on Thursday, said Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Felicia Pounce. Padilla was sentenced in January to about 17 years, but counting time already served and good behavior deductions his projected release date is Feb. 9, 2021 — or about 13 years.

At Florence, Padilla joins such well-known inmates as “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski, Sept. 11 attacks plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and Eric Rudolph, convicted of the 1996 Olympics bombing. Other neighbors among the 485 inmates are attempted shoe-bomber Richard Reid, FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen and Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols.

Padilla attorney Michael Caruso said in an e-mail Friday that Supermax is “a living hell” where inmates spend most days in 7-foot-by-12-foot cells and have little contact with the outside world. Caruso noted that others convicted of supporting terrorism, such as the “Lackawanna Six” group in upstate New York, were not sent to the nation’s toughest prison.

Caruso called the decision “yet another example of Jose being treated differently and in a more punitive fashion than others who have been accused of similar crimes. I genuinely fear that Jose’s mental health will erode to an even greater degree.”

Padilla and two co-defendants were convicted in August of three terrorism-related charges after a three-month trial in Miami federal court. The other two men, 45-year-old Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, 46, remained in custody Friday at Miami’s downtown detention center.

The three were part of a support cell that sent money, recruits and supplies to Islamic extremist groups around the world, prosecutors said at trial. They had faced possible life sentences, but each was given lesser terms by U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke.

All three are appealing their convictions and sentences, and federal prosecutors are also appealing the sentences as too lenient.

Padilla was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on suspicion of plotting with al-Qaida to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the U.S., although those allegations were not made at his trial. Testimony showed that Hassoun recruited Padilla at a Florida mosque to attend an al-Qaida terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was held in military custody for 3 1/2 years and was the subject of numerous legal challenges to his continued detention. He also claimed he was mistreated and tortured at a Navy brig, but Bush administration officials denied that.

A former Italian secret services chief's defense lawyers requested Wednesday that Premier-elect Silvio Berlusconi testify in the trial of 26 Americans and others charged with kidnapping a terror suspect during a CIA operation.

Nicolo Pollari's defense also requested outgoing Premier Romano Prodi as a witness, said lawyer Alessia Sorgato, who represents some of the American defendants.

Berlusconi _ who won Italy's national elections Monday _ is considered a key witness because he was premier when an Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was abducted from a Milan street in February 2003.

The alleged kidnapping was part of the CIA's so-called extraordinary renditions program _ moving terror suspects from country to country without public legal proceedings.

Berlusconi's testimony in the Milan trial is being sought to clarify which evidence might be protected as classified and prove that Pollari was against the rendition, Sorgato said. Also among the requested witnesses are the defense ministers and undersecretaries in both Berlusconi's 2001-06 government and Prodi's 2006-08 government.

Judge Oscar Magi will decide May 14 on whether to allow their testimony. On the same day, Abu Omar's wife, Ghali Nabila, and Milan's lead anti-terrorism investigator, Bruno Megale, will also be heard.

The issue of classified documents has held up the trial, which opened in June, for months as the court awaited a decision by Italy's highest court on whether the indictments improperly relied on state secrets as evidence. It is part of the Italian government's request to throw out the indictments.

The high court still has not ruled, but the judge decided last month to resume the trial anyway. The Constitutional Court is set to hear the case July 8.

Italian prosecutors say the cleric was transferred to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being moved to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years. Nasr, who was released last year, said he was tortured.

All but one American suspect in the case have been identified by prosecutors as CIA agents. Seven Italians also were indicted in the case, including Pollari.

Pollari has denied any involvement by Italian intelligence in the abduction, and Berlusconi has publicly supported his military secret services chief.

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit brought by Kentucky high school student Timothy Morrison against the Boyd County Board of Education over a 2004 policy that banned Morrison and other students from expressing their opposition to homosexuality. Judge Deborah L. Cook, in a 2-1 ruling, said that Morrison failed to show he had been harmed by the policy prior to the school district repealing the policy and also that winning the lawsuit, which sought $1 in damages, would not rectify the issue. Morrison sued the school district over a now-repealed policy that required students to undergo anti-harassment training. The school district changed the policy to exempt speech that would ordinarily be protected under the First Amendment. Wednesday's ruling reverses an earlier decision by the same Sixth Circuit panel allowing the case to proceed.

In another student free speech case, the US Supreme Court held last year in Morse v. Frederick that public schools do not violate the First Amendment rights of students by sanctioning them for speech during a school-sanctioned activity that may be reasonably interpreted to promote the use of illegal substances. A high school student was suspended after he displayed a banner with the message "Bong hits 4 Jesus" during a televised parade on a school day. The student subsequently sued his principal, arguing that the principal unreasonably restricted his right to free speech.