Forty-7-year-old Scott Baldwin pleaded guilty to one count of felony insurance fraud. He was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and given a suspended jail sentenced.

The attorney general's office says in May 2004 Baldwin made a claim to Wausau Insurance Companies that he had injured a tooth while eating soup purchased from a supermarket. The claim, for $1,927, included a letter and treatment plan from a dental office. The attorney general says in fact, those documents were for an old injury of that tooth and not caused by the soup.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked Virginia's plans to kill Christopher Scott Emmett, 36, hours before he was to die by lethal injection. Courts in Nevada and Texas this week postponed executions scheduled before year's end, making 2007 one of the quietest so far for executions since the mid-1990s.

"Some courts are being prudent by waiting to see how the Supreme Court will go," said Lisa McCalmont, a consultant to the death penalty clinic at the University of California at Berkeley law school.

Fewer than 50 executions will take place this year, even if several states pushing ahead with lethal injections defeat legal efforts to stop them. The last time executions numbered fewer than 50 was in 1996, when there were 45.

Since executions resumed in this country in 1977 after a Supreme Court-ordered halt, 1,099 inmates have died in state and federal execution chambers. The highest annual total was 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

In 2007, 42 people have been executed.

Texas, where 26 prisoners have been put to death this year, plans no more executions in 2007 after federal and state judges stopped four death sentences from being carried out.

Executions also have been delayed in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas and Oklahoma since the high court announced Sept. 25 it would hear a challenge to Kentucky's lethal injection method. Courts in California, Delaware, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee previously cited problems with lethal injections procedures in stopping executions.

The last person executed in this country was Michael Richard, 49, who died by lethal injection in Texas the same day the Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of lethal injection procedures in Kentucky. A Texas state judge refused that day to accept an appeal from Richard's lawyers, saying it had arrived after office hours.

Kentucky's method of lethal injection executions is similar to procedures in three dozen states. The court will consider whether the mix of three drugs used to sedate and kill prisoners has the potential to cause pain severe enough to violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"The U.S. is clearly in what amounts to a de facto death penalty moratorium," said David Dow, a lawyer who runs the Texas Innocence Network out of the University of Houston Law Center and represents death row inmates.

Josh Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and a death penalty supporter, said executions should continue even while the Supreme Court looks at lethal injection.

The reprieves for the dozen or so men whose dates to die had been set are likely to be only temporary. Even the lawyers for the Kentucky inmates acknowledged there are alternative drugs and procedures available that lessen the risk of pain.

Justice Antonin Scalia also has suggested that people are reading too much into the court's decision to take up the Kentucky case. Scalia said Tuesday night he would have allowed Arkansas to proceed with the execution of Jack Jones.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier put off Jones' execution because of the high court review. That decision "was based on the mistaken premise" that the high court wants state and federal judges to intervene every time a defendant raises a court challenge to lethal injection, Scalia said in a statement accompanying the Supreme Court's order that kept the appeals court ruling in place.

State officials in Florida and Mississippi are continuing with plans to carry out death sentences despite the high court's review. In both states, high courts are considering pleas for a delay from condemned inmates.

Lawyers for Mississippi are arguing that there is no reason to wait for the Supreme Court's lethal injection ruling. Earl Wesley Berry has an Oct. 30 execution date for a 1987 killing.

In Florida, Mark Dean Schwab, 38, is scheduled to die Nov. 15 for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old. Executions had been suspended since December after it took twice as long as usual — 34 minutes — for a convicted killer to die. Gov. Gov. Charlie Crist ended the freeze in July by signing Schwab's death warrant.

The former wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger has lived in the rent-stabilized apartment for some 20 years and argued that it was her primary residence and her landlord should be barred from evicting her.

A British citizen who was born in Nicaragua, Jagger is in the United States on a B-2 tourist visa.

Her lawyer, Ryan Goldstein, had argued that a mold problem in the apartment had made it unlivable and that she had stopped paying the $4,614 a month rent in 2003.

Goldstein was not immediately available for comment.

The landlord, Katz Park Avenue Corp, countered that Jagger was in the United States on a tourist visa and, as a result, is not eligible to maintain permanent residence.

The 3-2 decision by New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division reversed a lower court's finding.

The decision, which noted that the environmental activist maintains a luxury apartment in London's Belgravia section, said Jagger will also have to pay back rent and other fees.

Tenants in rent-stabilized apartments are protected from sharp increases in rent. Once a tenant leaves a rent-stabilized apartment, the landlord is free to charge market rate.

Canada's biggest toy maker said it was awaiting a court ruling on Wednesday about its fight against claims in a consumer advice magazine that one of its products contained elevated levels of lead.

Mega Brands is seeking an injunction in Quebec Superior Court to stop distribution of Protegez-Vous magazine, which the company claims used the wrong test on its plastic toy building blocks and published misleading results.

A ruling is expected at 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday, said Mega Brands spokesman Harold Chizick.

Protegez-Vous stood by the accuracy of its test results, several media reports said. A spokesperson for the magazine was not immediately available for comment.

Shares of Mega Brands sank to an all-time low of C$15.45 on the Toronto Stock Exchange, before reversing direction in early afternoon, to gain 5 Canadian cents to C$16.10.

Mega Brands said Protegez-Vous should not have used a total lead test on its molded plastic blocks, because that analyses paint or the coating on a product. It should have used a lead migration test, which the company called "the global standard" for uncoated plastic products.

"That's a test that simulates a child sucking on a plastic toy and how much lead will be transferred through the saliva," Chizick said.

The company wants to prevent the sale and further distribution of Protegez-Vous in advance of its scheduled newsstand distribution on Oct. 19. The French-language publication has already been mailed to subscribers, it said.

"While we respect and support Protegez-Vous' commitment to informing consumers about product safety, in this case, they made a very grave error," Mega Brands Chief Executive Marc Bertrand said in a statement.

There have been several high-profile recalls this year of toys made in China that contained excessive levels of lead in paint or involved small, easily ingested magnets.

Health Canada said on Wednesday preliminary results from its product safety lab indicate "no quantifiable total lead content" in the plastic. The toy was sampled from a retail location in Quebec late last week.

"Lead can be tested on objects in different ways and the results can vary greatly," said spokeswoman Joey Rathwell. "So we did our own testing, in the way that we test paint within hard plastic, and we found from our test that there was no lead in the product."

The company said the Canadian Toy Association has agreed the wrong test was used and that safety testing lab Bureau Veritas said the Canadian-made toy meets international safety standards.

Mega Brands is still recovering from an extensive, costly recall of some faulty Magnetix building sets. One child has died and 27 have suffered serious intestinal injuries after swallowing small, powerful magnets in the toys.

But in Monday's ruling, the court refused to apply that protection to hundreds of other paroled sex offenders, saying they needed to look to lower courts to get their own injunctions.

Parolees' attorneys said they are not immediately sure if they will ask a lower court for an injunction covering the affected parolees.

The state Supreme Court is considering whether the law is constitutional as it applies to the four parolees, meaning attorneys representing additional sex offenders could simply wait for a decision.

"We have to give it some time to figure what our next move is," said Don Specter, director of the San Rafael-based nonprofit Prison Law Office.

The group filed the lawsuit with another firm on behalf of the four parolees and sought the wider injunction.

Parole agents began the sweeps last week under the law, which sets strict residency requirements for recently released sex offenders to keep them away from children. About 850 parolees were in violation.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered agents to start revoking paroles despite the high court's decision to block the arrests of the four sex offenders who were violating the residency requirements.

The state corrections department could not immediately say how many offenders have been arrested since the crackdown began, spokesman Seth Unger said.

The state had said it had notified 1,800 parolees that they were in violation of the residency portion of the law, and gave them 45 days to move. As of Thursday, the state said, roughly 850 parolees were still in violation.

Jessica's Law, passed with 70 percent support from California voters last November, is named after a 9-year-old Florida girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender in 2005. It prohibits offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children regularly gather.

Critics say Jessica's Law is forcing sex offenders to become homeless or move from towns and cities into rural areas because they cannot find housing that meets the law's requirements in more populated areas.

Similar laws in Florida, Iowa and other states also have led to questions over where sex offenders can live once they finish serving their prison sentences.

Money laundering typically involves an effort to make it appear that money from an illegal transaction, often drug sales, is legitimate.

Several federal appeals courts have said that concealing money that is going across the U.S. border, without proving why, also is a crime under the federal law concerning international money laundering.

A three-judge panel reversed Cuellar's conviction on a 2-1 vote, saying that prosecutors had to show that the defendant's activities were designed to create the appearance of legitimate wealth.

Acknowledging that the money likely was drug proceeds and that Cuellar knew it, the appeals panel said the government did not prove that Cuellar was trying "to create the appearance of legitimate wealth." He could have been charged with smuggling cash, the judges said.

The full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that decision and affirmed the conviction, declaring that it makes no sense to say that Congress chose the word "conceal" to apply only in a certain way.

"Concealment of the funds during the U.S. leg of the trip is a vital part of the transportation design or plan to get the funds out of this country," the full appeals court said.

In asking the justices to take the case, Cuellar's lawyers said the appeals court decision incorrectly expands the scope of the money laundering law.

Defense lawyers who urged the court to hear Cuellar's case said the concealment provision — with its maximum prison term of 20 years and fine of $500,000 — has proven highly useful to prosecutors in forcing guilty pleas from defendants.

"The mere threat of a money laundering charge can be a powerful weapon in the prosecutor's negotiating arsenal," the brief for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said.

Had Cuellar been charged with smuggling, he would have faced up to five years in prison, the defense lawyers said.