A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found "no evidence to indicate that any of the last six inmates executed suffered any unnecessary pain," according to its ruling.

The court's decision reversed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. ordering reforms to Missouri's lethal injection procedures. He wanted the state to involve a doctor specializing in anesthesia, but the state has been unable to find a doctor willing to participate.

Missouri is among nine states that have put executions on hold as it grapples with whether lethal injection is inhumane.

Attorney General Jay Nixon said the decision "reopens the necessary legal avenue for the state of Missouri to move forward on this issue."

Margaret Phillips of the Eastern Missouri Coalition Against the Death Penalty said many questions remain unanswered and it would be unwise for the state to renew executions.

"The uncertainty of all of this is a good indication that Missouri needs a moratorium on the death penalty," she said.

A message seeking comment was left with the governor's office.

Taylor, convicted of killing 15-year-old Ann Harrison in Kansas City in 1989, was hours away from being put to death in February 2006 when the execution was halted. His attorney, Ginger Anders, said she would appeal Monday's ruling but declined further comment.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the decision of the trial judge and said the 9th Circuit erred by intervening.

"It is not for us to second-guess the determination" of the trial judge over whether a potential juror is willing to follow the law, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said.

He said the prosecutor and the judge had ample reason for excusing the man, referred to as Juror Z, because he had said the death penalty was appropriate only if the killer might be released and kill again.

In Washington, as in California, that was not a possibility in a case such as this one. The defendant, if convicted of aggravated murder, would be sentenced either to life in prison without parole or to death. The prosecutor asked to have Juror Z excluded, saying his comments suggested he would reject the death penalty for Brown. The defense lawyer replied, "We have no objection."

Nonetheless, the move -- seemingly minor at the time -- led to the reversal of Brown's death sentence more than 12 years later by the San Francisco-based appeals court.

The Supreme Court was sharply split along conservative-liberal lines in its decision.

Justice John Paul Stevens delivered a strong dissent in the courtroom. By allowing prosecutors to exclude jurors who have qualms about the capital punishment, the court will encourage the formation of juries "unfairly biased in favor of the death penalty," Stevens said. "Millions of Americans oppose the death penalty," and juries are supposed to represent a cross section of the community, he argued.

He said jurors who pledged to follow the law in death penalty cases should be seated, even if they expressed doubts about the use of such punishment.

Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer joined his dissent in the case of Uttecht vs. Brown.

Based on the order, known as a preliminary injunction, a federal judge ruled that Florida should pay Wyner's lawyers $25,000 in legal fees.

But Wyner's lawsuit also was a broader challenge to a Florida law that bans nudity on beaches, arguing that the law violated her First Amendment right of free expression.

Wyner lost that fight and the Supreme Court said that what matters is the final resolution of the lawsuit.

"Here, at the end of the fray, Florida prevailed in the suit. The state's bathing suit rule remained intact," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her opinion for the court.

Ginsburg cautioned that the court was taking no position "on the extent to which the First Amendment protects artworks that involve nudity."

Because the case had the potential for broad impact on lawsuits against governments generally, the Bush administration and 24 states joined Florida in urging the court to reverse the award of attorney's fees.

An unusual array of conservative and liberal interest groups came together in support of Wyner, arguing that public interest law firms would be left without any compensation in many cases.

The governments wanted the court to rule that parties who win preliminary injunctions can never recover attorney's fees.

The court, however, left unanswered what happens in lawsuits in which "the preliminary injunction essentially resolves the whole case and ends the litigation," said Andrew Pincus, a partner with the Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw law firm who filed a brief on behalf of the interest groups.

Authorities have been tracking the plot for more than a year. The suspects include Russell Defreitas, a US citizen native to Guyana and former JFK air cargo employee, Abdul Kadir of Guyana, Kareem Ibrahim of Trinidad, and Abdel Nur of Guyana, who is still being sought in Trinidad. Defreitas said he formed the plot more than a decade ago when he worked as a cargo handler. He said he chose the airport because its destruction would put "the whole country in mourning."

China promised Monday to better control emissions of greenhouse gases, unveiling a new national program to combat global warming, but rejected mandatory caps on emissions as unfair to countries still trying to catch up with the developed West.

The program offered few new concrete targets for reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases that are believed to contribute to global warming. But the plan outlined steps China would take to meet a previously announced government goal of improving overall energy efficiency in 2010 by 20 percent over 2005's level.

One of China's chief objectives is "to make significant achievements in controlling greenhouse gas emissions," said the report, released by the National Development and Reform Commission, the economic planning agency.

Among the measures the government called for were stepped-up efforts to put the hard-charging but inefficient economy on a more sustainable footing, to research and deploy new energy-saving technologies and to plant more trees.

Given an economy that has been growing at better than 9 percent annually over the past 25 years, the plan's overall effect, if implemented, would be to slow the increase in greenhouse gases, not reduce their absolute amount.

China has fallen under increasing pressure internationally to take more forceful measures to curb releases of greenhouse gases. The country relies on coal among the dirtiest of fuels to meet two-thirds of its energy needs and is projected to surpass the U.S. as the world's No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases sometimes in the next two years.

In explaining the new program, the head of China's planning agency said global warming was largely caused by 200 years of unrestrained industrialization by the West, and it would be unfair to impose mandatory emissions caps on China and other developing nations.

"This would hinder the development of developing countries and hamper their industrialization," Ma Kai told reporters.

The report's release seemed in part an attempt to pre-empt criticism of China when Chinese President Hu Jintao attends an expanded summit of the Group of Eight industrialized nations in Germany this Friday. The summit will feature a session on global warming.

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Friday announced draft legislation to combat violent crime that would increase penalties, extend the statute of limitations for prosecution, and create separate statutory prohibitions against violent crime by illegal immigrants. The proposed Violent Crime and Anti-Terrorism Act of 2007, brought forward just days after FBI Assistant Director of Public Affairs John Miller said that a forthcoming FBI report would detail a nationwide increase in murders, robberies and other violent crimes for a second straight year, also seeks to restore the binding nature of sentencing guidelines, which the US Supreme Court found to be merely advisory in US v. Booker. The legislation would also expand federal narcotics law, sexual predator law, and anti-terrorism law.

Gonzales also announced the expansion of violent crime task forces into four new cities: Mesa, AZ; Orlando, FL; San Bernardino, CA; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. In a statement made at the ATF Headquarters, Gonzales said that the four cities were chosen because they asked for help following an "unacceptable increase in homicides or other violent crimes" [statement text]. The addition of the four cities means that 29 US cities are now covered in the Violent Crime Impact Team program. Friday's proposals do not increase funding for individual communities' own law enforcement groups.