James Battista told a judge in federal court in Brooklyn he hatched a scheme in late 2006 with another old friend of Donaghy, Thomas Martino, to pay the referee thousands of dollars for the information while Battista was "engaged in the business of sports betting."

Battista's lawyer had notified the court last week that his client wanted to go to trial rather than plead guilty to charges of defrauding the NBA, as Martino did earlier this month. But he changed his mind after prosecutors offered a last-minute deal allowing him to instead plead guilty to a lesser charge of conspiring to make illegal bets, said the lawyer, Jack McMahon.

"He's a gambler, and he bet," McMahon said. "We never really contested that."

The deal spares Donaghy from having to testify as the government's star witness at a high-profile federal trial. It also means Battista, 42, will face only 10 to 16 months in prison at sentencing on July 11. By contrast, Martino faces 12 to 18 months.

Donaghy, of Bradenton, Fla., pleaded guilty last year to charges he conspired to engage in wire fraud and transmitted betting information through interstate commerce.

The referee said he made NBA bets for four years, even wagering on games he worked. He also admitted recommending bets to high-stakes gamblers and collecting $5,000 if his picks hit.

Donaghy, 41, is scheduled to be sentenced May 22. By law, he faces up to 25 years in prison, though the term could be much lower under sentencing guidelines.

The three men attended high school together in Springfield, Pa

The South San Francisco-based biotechnology company was ordered to pay $500 million to a Southern California hospital for failing to pay royalties after City of Hope Medical Center helped manufacture some of its drugs.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury had awarded the hospital $300 million in actual damages and another $200 million in punitive damages for violating a contract signed in 1976.

The state's high court on Wednesday knocked out the $200 million in punitive damages but upheld the $300 million.

The closely watched case attracted 17 friends-of-the-court briefs from a variety of business interests.

The Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law.

The unanimous decision came in a case from Portsmouth, Va., where city detectives seized crack cocaine from motorist David Lee Moore after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense.

Justice Antonin Scalia said that when officers have probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest and to search the suspect to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety.

Moore was convicted on a drug charge and sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison. The Virginia Supreme Court had ruled police could not lawfully conduct a search.

It is not necessarily unlawful for an employer to adopt policies that put older workers at a disadvantage. Such policies pass muster under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act as long as they are based on “reasonable factors other than age.”

The question in a Supreme Court argument on Wednesday was whether the employer has to prove that such “reasonable factors” exist, or whether it is up to the employee who has brought a lawsuit to show that they do not.

The burden of proof makes a substantial difference in any lawsuit, although statutes rarely specify which side bears it. For federal laws against race and sex discrimination in the workplace, the Supreme Court has filled the gap by developing fairly elaborate procedures that plaintiffs and defendants must follow. But for age discrimination, the rules have remained murky, leaving the lower courts in confusion over how to handle this rapidly growing category of workplace discrimination claims.

The argument the justices heard on Wednesday was in a case brought by two dozen workers at a federal research laboratory in upstate New York. Carrying out a reduction in force, the employer, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, which is owned by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, terminated 31 employees after using a set of guidelines to evaluate workers’ skills and amenability to retraining. All but one dismissed employee was over 40, the age at which the protections of the federal age discrimination law begin to apply.

Most of the affected employees joined a lawsuit arguing that there was no justification for using an evaluation system that had such a starkly disparate impact on older workers, and that the procedure consequently violated the federal law. The plaintiffs won in a jury trial. But the judgment was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, which held that plaintiffs in such a case had the burden of showing that the policy they were challenging was unreasonable.

States began moving forward with plans for executions this week after the Supreme Court declined last Wednesday to review the appeals of death row inmates who had challenged lethal-injection methods in nearly a dozen states.

The court had issued orders staying several executions last year and earlier this year while it weighed whether Kentucky's lethal-injection procedure constituted cruel and unusual punishment. States had postponed at least 14 scheduled executions pending the high court's decision, creating a de facto moratorium on capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

In a 7 to 2 vote last week, the justices said the three-drug cocktail used by Kentucky, which is similar to the one employed by the federal government and 34 other states, does not carry so great a risk of pain that it violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

With three executions already scheduled for this summer, Virginia could be the first state to carry out the punishment after the resolution of the Kentucky case. The state has scheduled a May 27 execution date for Kevin Green, who killed a couple in Brunswick County; June 10 for Percy L. Walton, who killed three neighbors in Danville; and July 24 for Edward Nathaniel Bell, who shot a police officer in Winchester.

"I actually expect to see a spate of scheduled executions," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Dieter said that despite its approval of Kentucky's lethal-injection procedure, the Supreme Court left room for lawyers to contest other states' procedures. "That sets the stage for a state-by-state resolution of this conflict," he said.

Attorneys contesting lethal injections have focused on training and procedures as ways to challenge them.

In numerous cases before federal and state courts, attorneys have argued that people who deliver anesthesia do not know how to insert a needle properly into a vein. They have contended that lighting has been poor during some executions, limiting the ability to see mistakes. And they have argued that some technicians hired to conduct medical procedures are not qualified.