The Supreme Court is leaving in place a federal law that gives telecommunications companies legal immunity for helping the government with its email and telephone eavesdropping program.

The justices said Tuesday they will not review a court ruling that upheld the 2008 law against challenges brought by privacy and civil liberties advocates on behalf of the companies' customers. The companies include AT&T, Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.

Lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation accused the companies of violating the law and customers' privacy through collaboration with the National Security Agency on intelligence gathering.

The case stemmed from surveillance rules passed by Congress that included protection from legal liability for telecommunications companies that allegedly helped the U.S. spy on Americans without warrants.

Wednesday's ruling by Braunschweig state court in northern Germany appears to strengthen Porsche's position, which still faces other court battles in connection with the 2008 takeover bid, German news agency dapd reported.

Two investors in the Braunschweig case had sought $6.1 million in damages claiming that Porsche published misleading information while it was secretly trying to take control of the much-larger Volkswagen.

Porsche's bid failed amid an unsustainable debt burden and the collapse of financial markets following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, eventually leading Volkswagen to take full control of Porsche.

A man accused of ripping off storm victims in Ohio and Kentucky has pleaded guilty to nine counts of theft.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said Joshua Salyers entered the guilty pleas in Hamilton County court in southern Ohio Tuesday. He admitted stealing more than $43,000 from the victims.

DeWine spokesman Mark Moretti said the 39-year-old Salyers ran a storm damage restoration business and took money from homeowners in Butler, Hamilton and Stark counties in Ohio and in Campbell County, Ky., to repair their homes after storms in 2010 and in 2011.

But Moretti said Salyers never began the work and refused to refund the money.

The Minnesota Supreme Court has overturned a $1 million award against the University of Minnesota and men's basketball coach Tubby Smith over the hiring of an assistant coach.

Jimmy Williams quit his job as an assistant coach at Oklahoma State in 2007 because he believed Smith had hiring authority when he offered him an assistant coaching job. Minnesota later withdrew the offer because Williams had NCAA rules violations during a previous stint as an assistant for the Golden Gophers more than 20 years ago.

Williams sued, and a Hennepin County jury and the state appeals court sided with him. But the Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed those decisions, saying Williams was not entitled to protection against negligent misrepresentations from Smith about his hiring authority.

Backers of California's ban on same-sex marriages asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to overrule a federal appeals court that struck down the measure as unconstitutional, a move that means the bitter, four-year court fight over Proposition 8 could soon be resolved.

Lawyers for the coalition of religious conservative groups that sponsored the voter-approved ban petitioned the Supreme Court to review the lower court's finding that the 2008 amendment to the state constitution violated the civil rights of gay and lesbian Californians. The request had been expected since a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its 2-1 decision earlier this year.

If the high court declines to take the case, it would clear the way for same-sex marriages to resume in California. Gay couples could get married in the state for several months before Proposition 8 passed, a right the measure was designed to take away. Same-sex couples still have the rights and benefits of marriage controlled by state law if they register as domestic partners.

The divided appeals court panel cited those conditions, which were unique to California at the time, as grounds for striking down the ban as a violation of the U.S. Constitution's promise of equal protection. But it also went out of its way to state it was not saying similar bans in six other states it oversees were inherently unconstitutional.

A German who claims the CIA illegally whisked him to a secret prison in Afghanistan appeared before Europe's human rights court Wednesday in what could be the final chapter of a case that has shed light on U.S. practices in the war on terror.

Khaled El-Masri, who is of Lebanese descent, says he was brutally interrogated at a secret CIA-run prison in Afghanistan for more than four months after being kidnapped from Macedonia in 2003, apparently mistaken for a terror suspect. He says he went on a hunger strike for 27 days and was eventually flown back to Europe and abandoned in a mountainous area in Albania.

Having failed with previous legal efforts in Germany, Macedonia and the United States, el-Masri has turned to the European Court of Human Rights as a last resort in the hope that it will declare that Macedonia breached his basic rights, said his lawyer.

"Mr. El-Masri has spent the last eight years seeking legal redress for the crimes that were committed against him," James Goldston told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "There is abundant evidence including data on CIA flights to and from (Macedonia's capital) Skopje."

Authorities in Macedonia have denied any involvement in el-Masri's alleged kidnapping and sought Wednesday to have the Strasbourg, France-based court dismiss the case. A lawyer representing the small southeast European nation argued that el-Masri was too slow in filing his initial criminal complaint in Macedonia.