Sandy Blunt was forced out as Workforce Safety and Insurance's director last December. He had been the agency's top executive since April 2004.

Blunt is accused of illegally spending $7,200 on bonuses for Jodi Bjornson, the top lawyer at Workforce Safety and Insurance; John Halvorson, the agency's chief of employer services; and Mark Armstrong, its communications director.

He also is charged with making $11,384 in unauthorized expenditures over a number of months for food, gifts, trinkets and other items for employee meetings and functions, and on meals for state legislators.

The money paid for grill rentals, trolley rides to a meeting at Fort Lincoln State Park, four cases of peppermint patties, Fourth of July holiday items, and candy and balloons for "Bring Your Kids to Work Day," among other items.

Prosecutors say the misspending on employee gifts is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Awarding the bonuses, they say, is a lesser felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

The Georgia Supreme Court acknowledged with its 6-1 decision that banishing convicted criminals from the state is illegal, but it upheld a tactic by judges who ban them from living in all but one of Georgia's 159 counties.

That's what happened to Gregory Mac Terry, who was restricted from living everywhere in Georgia except rural Toombs County after he pleaded guilty in 1995 to charges he assaulted and stalked his estranged wife.

Defense attorneys call the strategy "de facto" banishment. Prosecutors say the orders are a way to rid criminals from populated areas and protect victims from repeat offenses. In Terry's case, they said, the restrictions are needed to protect his wife.

Writing for the majority, Justice Harris Hines said judges can legally skirt the ban on banishment when they restrict convicts like Terry from all but one county.

The Jewish human rights organization on Friday said the Baden-Baden state court judge in charge of the case had disallowed German police requests on several occasions for telephone taps of Heim's relatives and an old friend who had been in contact with the fugitive.

But Heinz Heister, presiding judge and spokesman for the court, said that in the case of the friend, there had been no appeal of the court's decision, and that the only time a decision disallowing "investigative measures" was challenged, the Baden-Baden court's ruling was upheld.

"Investigative measures — even in the case of a person urgently suspected of many counts of murder — are held to certain boundaries by the constitution and the laws," Heister said in a statement.

Heim, 94, was known for his sadism as a doctor at the Nazi's Mauthausen concentration camp. He was able to flee before authorities came to arrest him in the southern town of Baden-Baden in 1962, however, and his whereabouts today remain unknown.

EBay countered that LVMH is trying to crack down on Internet auctions merely because it is uncomfortable with the business model, which tends to cut out the middleman.

"If counterfeits appear on our site, we take them down swiftly," eBay spokeswoman Sravanthi Agrawal said. "But today's ruling is not about counterfeits. Today's ruling is about an attempt by LVMH to protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers that eBay empowers every day." She said eBay hopes to appeal the ruling.

The case pit two pillars of their industries -- one old, one new -- in a country whose courts often challenge Internet companies on matters protected elsewhere by freedom of speech. For example, French courts have ordered U.S. auction sites to keep Nazi paraphernalia away from French eyes.

The ruling came down against eBay on two fronts. The court faulted the online company for "guilty negligence," for not doing enough to prevent fake goods from being sold on its site. The court also ruled that eBay was responsible for the "illicit sale" of perfumes from the LVMH empire, which can be sold only through the brands' "selective distribution networks."

High-end fashion companies like LVMH make their money by selling exclusive products, and fight a never-ending battle against cheap ripoffs and alleged affronts to their trademarks.

In an earlier instance of LVMH trying to protect its brands online, a Paris court in 2005 ordered Google Inc. to pay 200,000 euros (about $260,000 at the time) to Louis Vuitton for breach of trademark. In that case, Google had to stop displaying advertisements for Louis Vuitton's rivals when Web users typed Vuitton's name into the search engine.

The Motion Picture Association of America has helped convict an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, a peer-to-peer site, of felony copyright infringement and conspiracy, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday.

Daniel Dove, 26, of Clintwood, Va., was the first criminal conviction after jury trial for peer-to-peer copyright infringement and the eighth overall resulting from a federal crackdown called Operation D-Elite that targeted administrators and people who provided content that was distributed through the BitTorrents hub.

The case began in 2005, when federal agents raided and shut down the popular Web site that had distributed copyrighted music and movies, including Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. At that time, Homeland Security agents from several divisions served search warrants on 10 people around the country suspected of being involved with the Elite Torrents site, and took over the group's main server.

According to prosecutors, EliteTorrents attracted more than 125,000 members and assisted in the illegal distribution of about 700 movies, which were downloaded more than 1.1 million times. According to the Justice Department, Dove led a group of "uploaders" that supplied pirated content to the group, as well as recruiting members with ultra-fast broadband connections to become uploaders. Prosecutors also said Dove operated a high-speed server himself.

The MPAA "provided substantial assistance" to the investigation, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Dove faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in September, the Justice Department said.

Scott McCausland, who used to be an administrator of the EliteTorrents server before the raid, pleaded guilty in 2006 to two copyright-related charges over the uploading of Star Wars: Episode III to the Internet. As a result, he was sentenced to five months in jail and five months' home confinement.

A Tel Aviv-based banker with United Mizrahi Bank pleaded guilty to setting up secret bank accounts in Israel that, prosecutors say, helped charitable contributors to an orthodox Jewish group evade US taxes.

Joseph Roth, 66, pleaded guilty over the weekend to one count of conspiracy, US Attorney Thomas O'Brien in Los Angeles said in an official statement. A second defendant, Rabbi Moshe E. Zigelman, 60, of Brooklyn, New York, has agreed to plead guilty to his part in the scheme that defrauded the US out of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to the statement.

Ross and Zigelman were among eight people indicted in December for tax fraud and money laundering. The group was accused of soliciting millions of dollars for the "Spinka'' charities and secretly refunding 95 percent of the donations.

The money was funneled back to the contributors through a network of businesses in the Los Angeles jewelry district and through Israeli bank accounts, prosecutors said. Eric Dobberteen, a lawyer representing Roth, and David Willingham, a lawyer for Zigelman, didn't immediately return calls to their office. The case is US v. Naftali Tzi Weisz et al, 06-775, US District Court, Central District of California

Mark Dean Schwab, 39, is scheduled to die exactly 16 years after he was sentenced in the 1991 kidnapping, rape and murder of 11-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez.

Florida officials say they have resolved problems with the December 2006 execution of Angel Diaz when needles were accidentally pushed through his veins, causing the lethal chemicals to go into his muscles instead, delaying his death for 34 minutes — twice as long as normal. Some experts said that would cause intense pain.

Then-Gov. Jeb Bush stopped all executions after Diaz was killed, but Florida and other states were also held up as they waited for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule the three-drug method of lethal injection used by Kentucky was constitutional. Thirty-four other states, including Florida, use a similar method.

Florida's new procedure requires the warden to make sure the inmate is unconscious following the injection of the first chemical, sodium pentothal. Then the executioner will inject pancuronium bromide to paralyze his muscles and potassium chloride to stop his heart. It also requires people with medical training to be involved in the process.

Schwab and his attorneys aren't so sure the problems are fixed. An analysis done for Schwab's lawyers showed that nine of the 30 mock executions performed by Florida's Department of Corrections between September 2007 and May were failures, said one of his state-paid attorneys, Mark Gruber.

The corrections department said its mock exercises have included preparation for potential problems such as a combative inmate, the incapacity of an execution team member, power failure and finding a vein.