A California court has ordered the state's Department of Public Health to establish a safe drinking water standard for the cancer-causing chemical made famous in the film "Erin Brockovich."

An Alameda County Superior Court judge directed the agency to propose a drinking water standard for hexavalent chromium by the end of August.

The ruling on July 18 came nearly a year after environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the state, claiming it was eight years late in setting the standard.

Results of state water quality testing conducted between 2000 and 2011 throughout California showed that about a third of the 7,000 drinking water sources tested had hexavalent chromium levels at or above a preliminary benchmark set by the California EPA. The chemical comes chiefly from industrial pollution, but also occurs naturally.

The U.S. Supreme Court is pushing South Carolina courts to quickly take up a custody case that will decide whether a Native American girl's life will be with her biological father in Oklahoma or the South Carolina couple who adopted her.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that federal law doesn't require that the girl named Veronica stay with her biological father, but also doesn't give her adoptive parents immediate custody of the now 3-year-old child.

The high court issued an order Friday speeding up the case being sent back to South Carolina's Supreme Court.

Melanie and Matt Capobianco of James Island had lost in South Carolina courts before the nation's highest court ruled the Indian Child Welfare Act didn't apply because the biological father never had custody of the child and abandoned her before birth.

Dusten Brown, a member of the Cherokee Nation, invoked the federal law to stop the adoption arranged by the girl's non-Indian mother when she was pregnant. The Capobiancos were was present at Veronica's birth in Oklahoma. Brown had never met his daughter and, after the mother rebuffed his marriage proposal, played no role during the pregnancy and paid no child support after Veronica was born.

But when Brown found out Veronica was going to be adopted, he objected and said the law favored the girl living with him and growing up with tribal traditions.

South Carolina courts sent Veronica back to Oklahoma at the end of 2011, even though she had lived with the Capobiancos for the first 27 months of her life.

A federal court in San Francisco Tuesday struck down Arizona's ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law violates a string of U.S. Supreme Court rulings starting with Roe v. Wade that guarantees a woman's right to an abortion before a fetus is able to survive outside the womb. That's generally considered to be about 24 weeks. Normal pregnancies run about 40 weeks

Several states have enacted similar bans starting at 20 weeks. But the 9th Circuit's ruling is binding only in the nine Western states under the court's jurisdiction. Idaho is the only other state in the region covered by the 9th Circuit with a similar ban.

A trial judge had ruled that the ban could take effect. U.S. District Judge James Teilborg ruled it was constitutional, partly because of concerns about the health of women and possible pain for fetuses.

But abortion-rights groups appealed that decision, saying the 20-week ban would not give some women time to carefully decide whether to abort problem pregnancies.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction of a former death row inmate in a 1998 slaying in Lexington.

The appeals court on Friday found that 40-year-old Gerald Young failed to prove his allegation that prosecutors put on false testimony at his trial.

Young is serving life in prison for complicity to commit murder in June 1997. Young was originally sentenced to death for hiring a hit-man to kill Osama Shalash in Lexington as part of a drug dispute.

The Kentucky Supreme Court in 2001 overturned the death sentence, finding no aggravating circumstances to warrant capital punishment. Young is currently challenging his resentencing. Two other men were also sentenced to prison in the slaying.

A Southern California doctor has agreed to plead guilty to charges of illegally prescribing drugs to his patients at nightly meetings in Starbucks stores.

Court documents show 44-year-old Alvin Mingczech Yee entered into a plea agreement earlier this week. He is expected to plead guilty to seven counts at a April 17 hearing.

Prosecutors say Yee saw up to a dozen patients nightly at Starbucks coffee stores across suburban Orange County at meetings that cost up to $600. Prosecutors say Yee barely examined them but prescribed drugs including OxyContin and Vicodin.

Yee was arrested in October 2011 at his Irvine office and has been free on bond.

New York's highest court ruled Thursday the state can collect sales tax from out-of-state retailers, rejecting claims by Amazon.com and Overstock.com that the tax law violates the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.

The Court of Appeals said in a 4-1 ruling that the 2008 amendment meets the U.S. Supreme Court test that the sellers have "a substantial nexus" with the taxing state. Taxes apply when the online retailers generate at least $10,000 in annual sales to New Yorkers from in-state websites that earn commissions by bringing in potential customers through links to the big retailers.

Amazon.com, with corporate offices in Washington state, has an "Associates Program" where others put such links on their websites. Overstock.com, based in Utah, suspended its similar "Affiliates" program in New York after the state statute was enacted.

New York's sales tax is 4 percent and all its counties and New York City add an additional tax ranging from 3 percent to near 5 percent. Both apply to applicable Internet sales, according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance.