Moshe Katsav was expected to step down as Israel's president after agreeing today to plead guilty to sexual harassment rather than face more serious charges that he raped female staffers.

Under the plea agreement announced by Atty. Gen. Menachem Mazuz, the 61-year-old Katsav will avoid jail time, raising an outcry among women's rights activists who saw the case as an important test of Israel's commitment to stamp out sexual harassment in the workplace.

The presidency in Israel is largely a ceremonial position; political power rests with the prime minister.

The Katsav case was among a list of scandals that have eroded Israelis' confidence in their leaders. Justice Minister Haim Ramon quit after being accused of forcibly kissing a female soldier and later was convicted of an indecent act. Corruption allegations also have swirled around top officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

The president faced possible indictment on charges that he raped and sexually harassed female subordinates while serving as president and earlier as tourism minister. In January, Mazuz warned Katsav that authorities had enough evidence to indict on allegations involving four women, but the attorney general had yet to issue formal charges.

Katsav agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges, including sexual harassment, indecent acts and harassment of a witness, Mazuz said today. Katsav will pay damages, but prison time was suspended under the deal, which requires court approval.

Katsav was expected to resign later today, though that move was largely symbolic because his term ends next month. The Israeli parliament had already elected a successor, Shimon Peres, who takes over July 15.

Mazuz defended the decision to drop the more serious charges, saying they were going to be difficult to prove in court.

"I have reached the conclusion that I cannot in fact determine that we have crossed the threshold of the reasonable chance of conviction," Mazuz told reporters.

The plea would spare the country and alleged victims the spectacle of a trial and prevent further damage to the presidency, Mazuz said.

"From the status of No. 1 citizen, he will have dropped to the status of a man convicted of sex offenses, bearing eternal turpitude and shame," Mazuz said.

Women's rights advocates accused Mazuz of giving Katsav preferential treatment and undermining efforts to encourage Israelis to step forward with complaints about harassment on the job.

"We talk about citizens being equal before the law, and here we see a man of stature, power, money, advisors, the finest attorneys - and all these together succeed in imposing their way on the state of Israel and reach a deal that conveys a grave message," Shelly Yacimovich, a lawmaker from the center-left Labor Party, told Israel Radio.

Katsav, elected to a seven-year term in 2000, had vehemently denied wrongdoing since sexual-misconduct allegations were lodged last summer by a presidential staffer, identified publicly only by her first initial, A. Other women later stepped forward with additional allegations, but the statute of limitations had run out on some of those charges.

In January, Mazuz notified Katsav that he planned to indict pending the outcome of a subsequent hearing. But after that hearing in May, Katsav's lawyers and prosecutors began discussing a plea bargain.

Katsav's lawyers said they persuaded him to admit guilt to lesser charges to avoid the rape indictment.

Moshe Negbi, a legal analyst for Israel Radio, said the outcome would leave few Israelis satisfied.

"The president maintains he did nothing but is willing to confess so as to spare his family the suffering. And the women say they aren't retracting a single word, but the prosecution capitulated to a man in high office," Negbi said. "The public will believe in either option, but will no longer believe in the system itself."

The investigation began in September at Saratoga Gaming and Raceway following a tip from people at the track that harness horses were being injected.

The indictments also charged the Barracks with wrongly giving Patsy B Happy the anti-bleeding drug Lasix on Nov. 3, 2006. They earned $540 in that race.

The men will be sentenced Aug. 31. Murphy said it was likely the men would receive probation, but a judge will make that determination.

The Barracks' horse racing licenses are currently suspended, and a hearing will determine whether they will be permanently revoked.

Marc Mosher, 38, Robert Moscone, 60, and Carl Forrester, 31, also face charges in the case. It was unclear late Wednesday when their trials will take place. Each was charged with two counts of fifth-degree conspiracy, a misdemeanor.

"It can be said that the quality of China's exports all are guaranteed," Wang told reporters at a regularly scheduled briefing.

However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advised consumers to "avoid using tubes of toothpaste labeled as made in China," according to a statement posted on the agency's Web site.

"Out of an abundance of caution, FDA suggests that consumers throw away toothpaste labeled as made in China," the statement said.

Chinese-made toothpaste has been banned by numerous countries in Asia and the Americas for containing diethylene glycol, or DEG, a chemical often found in antifreeze. It is also a low-cost -- and sometimes deadly -- substitute for glycerin, a sweetener in many drugs.

The New York Times reported Thursday that tainted Chinese toothpaste had been more widely distributed in the United States than had been previously reported. It said about 900,000 tubes have turned up in places including correctional facilities and some hospitals, not just at discount stores.

A spokesman for North Carolina's Department of Correction said this month that Pacific brand toothpaste was distributed to prisoners who could not afford to buy a name brand at prison stores. The tubes were taken away after trace amounts of DEG was found in them.

Officials in Georgia and North Carolina told the Times there had been no illnesses reported, and that the toothpaste in question was being replaced with brands not manufactured in China.

Chinese exports came under scrutiny earlier this year with the deaths of dog and cats in North America blamed on Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine.

Since then, U.S. authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint.

On Wednesday, three Japanese importers recalled millions of Chinese-made travel toothpaste sets, many sold to inns and hotels, after they were found to contain as much as 6.2 percent of diethylene glycol.

Wang, the Commerce Ministry spokesman, said Chinese experts have already "explained the situation."

He gave no details, although the country's quality watchdog has in past cited tests from 2000 that it said showed toothpaste containing less than 15.6 percent diethylene glycol was harmless to humans.

Also Wednesday, Beijing police raided a village where live pigs were force-fed wastewater to boost their weight before slaughter, state media reported.

Plastic pipes had been forced down the pigs' throats and villagers had pumped each 220-pound pig with 44 pounds of wastewater, the Beijing Morning Post reported Thursday.

Paperwork showed the pigs were headed for one of Beijing's main slaughterhouses and stamps on their ears indicated that they already had been through quarantine and inspection, the paper said. Suspects escaped during the raid and no arrests were made, it said.

The case underscored China's chaotic food safety situation, where manufacturers and distributors often use unapproved additives, falsify expiration dates or find other methods of cutting corners to eke out small profits.

Officials have in recent weeks underscored the need to tighten up inspections, punish violators and increase surveillance.

Wei Chuanzhong, deputy director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said local governments "should be fully aware of the importance and improve responsibility for imported and exported food safety."

His remarks, made during an inspection tour of the port city of Tianjin, were posted Thursday on the administration's Web site.

Earlier this week, inspectors announced they had closed 180 food factories nationwide in the first half of this year and seized tons of candy, pickles, crackers and seafood tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.

"These are not isolated cases," Han Yi, an official with Wei's quality administration, was quoted as saying in Wednesday's state-run China Daily newspaper.

Han's admission was significant because the agency has said in the past that safety violations were the work of a few rogue operators -- a claim aimed at protecting China's billions of dollars of food exports.

Though Jobe is not identified in the court records in the Ketner case, she said she was falsely described in the document and has been identified by name by several El Paso-area media outlets.

She has alleged defamation and civil conspiracy, charging that Ketner worked with federal prosecutors and investigators to concoct false allegations against her and others. Jobe demanded a jury trial and has not specified how much money she is seeking.

Jobe's lawyer, Leon Schydlower, was in court Tuesday and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ketner's San Antonio lawyer, Joel Perez, has said he did not anticipate representing Ketner in the civil suit. Telephone numbers listed for Ketner have been disconnected.

In a statement, Countrywide denied that a raid had occurred but didn't address the general subject of an investigation.

"Even if there were [such a probe], it's company policy not to comment on anything to do with our regulators," a spokesman said.

In the insider trading case, the former executives — Alan Cao, 38, of Woodland Hills; Jun Shi, 43, of Moorpark; and Quan Zhu, 43, of Santa Monica — admitted in plea agreements that they had made tens of thousands of dollars by selling Countrywide shares, including some stock they had borrowed to profit from a price drop in a technique known as short selling, and by buying options giving them the right to sell Countrywide shares.

Countrywide reported Oct. 20, 2004, that its third-quarter profit was 7 cents a share lower than analysts had forecast. The company also cut its earnings forecast. Its stock sank 11.5% that day.

Prosecutors said the illegal profits amounted to $47,668 for Cao, who was Countrywide Financial's vice president of financial planning; $35,547 for Zhu, executive vice president of portfolio risk management; and $19,995 for Shi, first vice president of planning at Countrywide Bank.

Cao and Shi settled a related Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit in March 2006 by returning their earnings plus interest and paying a fine equal to their profit, the SEC said.

In the plea agreements, prosecutors said they would recommend home confinement and probation if pre-sentencing reports turn up no other wrongdoing. No one else is expected to be charged in the case, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Beong-Soo Kim in Los Angeles, the prosecutor in the case.

In a statement about the trading case, Countrywide said it was "committed to the highest ethical standards."

"The company's policies prohibiting illegal insider trading are strictly enforced," Countrywide said.

The company described the three executives as "mid-level managers" and said it had cooperated fully with regulators and prosecutors in the case.

Hose's attorney, Jim Ecker, said he is pleased with the outcome for his mentally ill client. The judge left the opportunity for Hose to receive mental health treatment in prison, he said.

"He has suicidal tendencies, and he's at high risk for that," Ecker said.

Hose was charged with several sex crimes related to the disappearance and alleged abuse of Tanya Kach, a runaway who was 14 when she vanished Feb. 10, 1996.

The trial was originally set to begin in February of this year, but Hose tried to kill himself the day before it began. It was delayed again in May because Hose was being treated at a mental hospital.

The majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush, said the law is unconstitutional as applied to issue ads that a Wisconsin anti-abortion group wanted to broadcast before the 2004 election.

The ruling was a victory for the group Wisconsin Right to Life, which argued the law violated its free-speech rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

"The First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it," Roberts wrote. "Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor."

The court upheld a ruling that the ads were not election ads covered by the law, but were general issue ads that did not aim to influence voters.

The court's four liberals dissented and said campaign finance reform laws seek to protect the integrity of elections from huge amounts of money.

"After today, the ban on contributions by corporations and unions and the limitation on their corrosive spending when they enter the political arena are open to easy circumvention," Justice David Souter said for the dissenters.

The part of the law at issue in the ruling bans corporations, unions and special interest groups from using unrestricted money to run television or radio ads that refer to a candidate for federal office two months before a general election or one month before a primary election.

In 2003, the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote upheld the law, including the ban on certain issue ads broadcast before an election.

But since then, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who cast the decisive vote in 2003, has retired and has been replaced by the more conservative Justice Samuel Alito, Bush's other appointee to the court, who joined the majority opinion.

The ads criticized Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin for supporting efforts to block confirmation of several of Bush's judicial nominees. Because Feingold, a Democrat, was running for re-election at the time, the ads were prohibited.

Feingold had co-written the landmark campaign finance law, along with Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who is running for president.

McCain called it regrettable that the court carved out a narrow exception by which some corporate and labor expenditures can be used to target a federal candidate in the days and weeks before an election.

"It is important to recognize, however, that the court's decision does not affect the principal provision of the (law), which bans federal officeholders from soliciting soft money contributions for their parties to spend on their campaigns," he said.

One of McCain's Republican presidential rivals, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, hailed the ruling "Score one for free speech," he said.