O.J. Simpson is back in a Las Vegas courtroom to ask for a new trial in the case that sent him to prison in 2008.

The former football hero and a new set of lawyers hope to convince a judge during a hearing that began Monday that trial lawyer Yale Galanter had conflicted interests and shouldn't have handled Simpson's armed case.

Simpson appeared in court wearing a blue jail uniform. His hair was short and grayer than it was during a previous court appearance in 2008.

He entered the courtroom in handcuffs, flanked by guards and nodded toward people he recognized in the second row.

Simpson is serving nine to 33 years in a Nevada prison. He's due to testify Wednesday.

Galanter is scheduled to testify Friday. He is declining comment before then.

Simpson says that Galanter knew ahead of time about his plan to retrieve what he thought were personal mementoes from two sports memorabilia dealers at a casino hotel room in September 2007.

A lawyer for a Texas paramedic arrested on charges of possessing bomb-making material says his client will plead not guilty and had no connection to the fertilizer plant explosion that killed 14 people last month.

Waco attorney Jonathan Sibley said in a prepared statement Saturday that his client, Bryce Reed anxiously awaits his next court appearance Wednesday, which will include a detention hearing.

Authorities arrested Reed on Friday, but stressed that he has not been linked to the April 17 explosion in West.

The statement said Reed remained "heartbroken" about the explosion, in which he lost friends, and wants to continue to help his community rebuild.

A janitor has been found guilty of hiding a video camera in the girls' bathroom of an Orange County elementary school.

A jury found 25-year-old Angel Rojas guilty Thursday of misdemeanor counts of secret filming and child annoyance.

He could get 18 months in jail and a $6,000 fine at his Tuesday sentencing, and will have to register as a sex offender for life.

In July 2012, Rojas was working as a summer janitor at a Santa Ana grade school.

Prosecutors say he closed several campus restrooms to direct women and girls to one where he had hidden an iPod Nano with a video recorder.

A woman working in the summer school program found

Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi's tax fraud conviction and four-year prison sentence were upheld on the first appeal Wednesday in a case that could see him barred from public office for five years.

In Italy, defendants are legally considered innocent until all appeals are exhausted, and Berlusconi's lawyers are expected to appeal the case to the nation's highest Court of Cassation once the reasoning for the decision is published.

Still, the ruling, which comes just days before prosecutors wrap up closing arguments in his sensational sex-for-hire trial, raises the question of whether Berlusconi's days as a political force are numbered.

His center-right forces are allied with the Democratic Party in a grand coalition, and although Berlusconi holds no governmental posts he remains influential. It was his decision to head the center-right coalition, after initially saying he would move aside for younger leaders, that gave a boost to his forces in February's election campaign, finishing a close second to the center-left.

The Mississippi Supreme Court has indefinitely delayed Tuesday's scheduled execution of Willie Jerome Manning amid questions involving evidence in the case, intervening hours before he was set to die for the slayings of two college students.

Manning, who had challenged errors involving evidence analysis, was originally set to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. CDT at the state prison in Parchman. But with mere hours remaining, the high court blocked the execution until it rules further in the case.

Manning was convicted in 1994 in the shooting deaths of two Mississippi State University students, Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller. Their bodies were found in a rural area in December 1992.

The FBI has said in recent days that there were errors in agents' testimony about ballistics tests and hair analysis in the case.

Manning's lawyers had argued in recent filings before the Mississippi Supreme Court that the execution should be blocked based on the U.S. Justice Department's disclosures about testimony that it says exceeded the limits of science.

The court ruled 8-1 on Tuesday for a stay. The court had previously split 5-4 in decisions in the case.

Local governments in California's have legal authority to ban storefront pot shops within their borders, California's highest court ruled on Monday in an opinion likely to further diminish the state's once-robust medical marijuana industry.

Nearly 17 years after voters in the state legalized medical marijuana, the court ruled unanimously in a legal challenge to a ban the city of Riverside enacted in 2010.

The advocacy group Americans for Safe Access estimates that another 200 jurisdictions statewide have similar prohibitions on retail pot sales. Many were enacted after the number of retail medical marijuana outlets boomed in Southern California after a 2009 memo from the U.S. Justice Department said prosecuting pot sales would be a low priority.

However, the rush to outlaw pot shops has slowed in the 21 months since the four federal prosecutors in California launched a coordinated crackdown on dispensaries by threatening to seize the property of landlords who lease space to the shops. Hundreds of dispensary operators have since been evicted or closed voluntarily.

Marijuana advocates have argued that allowing local government to bar dispensaries thwarts the intent of the state's medical marijuana law - the nation's first - to make the drug accessible to residents with doctor's recommendations to use it.

The Colorado Court of Appeals has dismissed lawsuits against three companies in the deaths of five workers at a power plant in 2007.

The appeals court agreed Thursday with a judge that there was no evidence that the companies violated duties or failed to provide adequate warnings of a fire hazard.

The workers died after a fire broke out inside a pipeline at Xcel Energy's Cabin Creek hydroelectric plant near Georgetown, about 40 miles west of Denver. The men were inside the pipeline resealing it at the time.

The workers were trapped in the tunnel when a flammable solvent they were using to clean an epoxy paint sprayer ignited on Oct. 2, 2007.

Families of the men and four injured employees sued KTA-Tator Inc., Structural Integrity Associates Inc. and Graco, Inc., claiming the companies were negligent.

The court, however, noted that the sprayer used by the workers carried a warning that "flammable fumes, such as solvent and paint fumes, in (a) work area can ignite or explode" and offered safety options.

The workers communicated by radio for 45 minutes with colleagues and rescue crews. But reaching them would have involved using ropes or ladders to go down a 20-foot vertical section of tunnel then along a 1,000-foot section at a 55-degree slope, to reach the horizontal section where they were located.