An upstate New York town violated the constitutional ban against favoring one religion over another by opening nearly every meeting over an 11-year span with prayers that stressed Christianity, a federal court of appeals ruled Thursday.

In what it said was its first case testing the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled the town of Greece, a suburb of Rochester, should have made a greater effort to invite people from other faiths to open monthly meetings. The town's lawyer says it will appeal.

From 1999 through 2007, and again from January 2009 through June 2010, every meeting was opened with a Christian-oriented invocation. In 2008, after residents Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens complained, four of 12 meetings were opened by non-Christians, including a Jewish layman, a Wiccan priestess and the chairman of the local Baha'i congregation.

Galloway and Stephens sued and, in 2010, a lower court ruled there was no evidence the town had intentionally excluded other faiths.

A town employee each month selected clerics or lay people by using a local published guide of churches. The guide did not include non-Christian denominations, however. The court found that religious institutions in the town of just under 100,000 people are primarily Christian, and even Galloway and Stephens testified they knew of no non-Christian places of worship there.

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.

A judge threw out "Octomom" Nadya Suleman's bankruptcy claim Tuesday after she failed to file the proper paperwork to show she can't pay as much as $1 million in debt.

That means creditors can move to collect what they say they're owed, and a pending foreclosure can go ahead against the La Habra, Calif., house Suleman lives in with her 14 children, according to The Orange County Register.

Suleman's case was thrown out because she didn't file a dozen financial documents and statements required to prove bankruptcy. In her initial filing April 30, Suleman estimated that she owed as much as $1 million that she is unable to repay.

Suleman had sought protection from her debts under Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which means a court-appointed trustee would have liquidated her assets to pay off creditors before she is discharged from most of her debts. According to the filing, she owed money to more than 20 parties, including utility companies, her father and a Christian school.

A Guatemalan mother who says her child was stolen and later turned over to a U.S. couple for adoption said Tuesday that she will go to a Missouri court seeking to get her daughter back now that the U.S. State Department has said it doesn't have jurisdiction to help return the girl.

The State Department confirmed Tuesday that it has informed Guatemala's government that it can't help return Anyeli Hernandez Rodriguez because the U.S. and Guatemala had not signed the Hague Abduction Convention at the time of the alleged kidnapping in 2006.

"We're obviously deeply concerned about allegations regarding stolen children and inter-country adoptions wherever these cases come up," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a statement. "We consider the appropriate venue in the United States for pursuing this case is in the state courts. They're the competent organ for holding a full hearing on the merits and the best interests of the child."

A human rights group that has pursued the case in Guatemala's courts on behalf of the child's biological mother, Loyda Rodriguez, said the next step will be to find a U.S. law firm to file a civil suit charging immigration fraud.

The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. today announced that it has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of investors who purchased the securities of Houston American Energy Corp. between March 29, 2010 and April 18, 2012.

To join the Houston American class action, visit the firm's website at http://rosenlegal.com, or call Phillip Kim, Esq. or Laurence Rosen, Esq., toll-free, at 866-767-3653; you may also email pkim@rosenlegal.com or lrosen@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action.

The Complaint asserts violations of the federal securities laws against Houston American for failing to adequately disclose problems with its Tamandua #1 well, and the well's C7 and C9 formations. Namely, that the Company failed to disclose that: (i) the continued investment in testing and completing the C7 and C9 formations in Tamandua #1 well was unproductive and not commercially viable; (ii) the Company lacked adequate internal and financial controls; and (iii) as a result of the foregoing, the Company's statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

www.rosenlegal.com

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Monday halted an effort to grant "personhood" rights to human embryos, saying the measure is unconstitutional.

The state's highest court ruled unanimously that a proposed amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution that would define a fertilized human egg as a person violates a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a Pennsylvania case and "is clearly unconstitutional." Supporters of the personhood amendment are trying to gather enough signatures to put it before Oklahoma voters on the November ballot.

Opponents contend the measure would ban abortions without exception and interfere with a woman's right to use certain forms of contraception and medical procedures, such as in vitro fertilization.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights filed a protest with the state Supreme Court on behalf of several Oklahoma doctors and residents. They asked the court to stop the group Personhood Oklahoma from gathering signatures.

The nine-member court determined the initiative petition "is void on its face" and struck it down.

"The only course available to this court is to follow what the United States Supreme Court, the final arbiter of the United States Constitution, has decreed," the court said.