Sean Mueller, the Colorado hedge fund manager who threatened suicide just before the collapse of his alleged $20 million Ponzi scheme, will plead guilty to defrauding investors.

Mueller was charged with racketeering, securities fraud and theft last week. On Friday, he waived his right to a preliminary hearing, and his attorney said that a plea deal has been reach with prosecutors.

"We have reach an agreement that will be settled," Rick Kornfield said. The plea deal will be made public at a Nov. 1 hearing.

Mueller has been held in custody since turning himself in last week, and has not sought bail. "Mr. Mueller is very sorry and very remorseful," Kornfield said. "It is genuine."

According to prosecutors, Mueller lied to investors about the size and success of his Mueller Capital Management and its Mueller Over Under Fund. According to the state’s lawsuit against him, Mueller admitted he scammed investors in a series of e-mails and notes written prior to his suicide attempt in April, when he was talked down from a building in suburban Denver. In a note written after the suicide attempt, Mueller admitted that documents claiming his Over-Under Fund managed $122 million were falsified. He wrote that only $15 million remained of the $20.6 million he collected.

The federal judge who halted the military's ban on openly gay troops is known for working at court well past closing time, typing her own court orders and doting on two terriers who themselves are no strangers to the halls of justice.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips won praise from gays and was derided by critics as an activist judge when she issued an injunction Tuesday ending the 17-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy, saying it violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The fallout on the polarizing topic has surprised Phillips' friends and colleagues, who said the 53-year-old registered Democrat is much better known in her inner circle for her empathy, her love of Jane Austen novels and her annual walking tours of Europe.

Phillips is popular with her court staff and works harder than anyone to get a case right, said Stephen Larson, a former federal judge in Riverside.

In her tenure as a federal judge, Phillips has handled a wide array of cases, from criminal bank robberies and drug trafficking to civil cases involving the freedoms of religion and speech, police brutality, environmental protections and labor law.

A Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas has represented himself at a quick hearing in Detroit federal court.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (OO'-mahr fah-ROOK' ahb-DOOL'-moo-TAH'-lahb) was accompanied at Thursday's 15-minute hearing by standby counsel Anthony Chambers, who can give advice.

The participants briefly discussed schedules, and U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds set the next hearing for Jan. 12.

In September, the 24-year-old suggested he wanted to plead guilty to some charges. There was no talk of that Thursday.

He is charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253, an Amsterdam-to-Detroit plane. He's accused of trying to set off explosives hidden in his underwear.

A Texas death row inmate found with the blood of murder victims on his clothing is seeking the Supreme Court's help in getting access to other evidence for DNA testing that might implicate someone else.

Hank Skinner was convicted of pummeling his girlfriend with a pickax handle and stabbing her two sons on New Year's Eve in 1993 in their Texas Panhandle home. DNA evidence at his trial showed that blood on his clothing was from at least two of the victims.

The Supreme Court is hearing argument Wednesday on whether Skinner may use a federal civil rights law to ask for tests on other evidence that were not done before his conviction.

The justices blocked Skinner's execution in March an hour before he was to go to the death chamber.

The Supreme Court is trying to sort out whether drug companies can be sued for claims of serious side effects from childhood vaccines without driving vaccine makers from the market and risking a public health crisis.

The court heard argument Tuesday in an appeal filed by Pittsburgh area parents who want to sue Pfizer Inc.'s Wyeth for the serious health problems they say their 18-year-old daughter suffered from a vaccine she received in infancy.

Several justices appeared sympathetic to the parents' claims.

Wyeth, backed by the Obama administration and many public health groups, argued that Congress shielded drug companies from most vaccine lawsuits when it created a special vaccine court 24 years ago to handle the claims.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed skeptical of a $14 million judgment given to a former death row inmate who accused New Orleans prosecutors of withholding evidence to help convict him of murder.

John Thompson, who at one point was only weeks away from being executed, successfully sued the district attorney's office in New Orleans, arguing that former District Attorney Harry Connick showed deliberate indifference by not providing adequate training for assistant district attorneys.

Prosecutors normally have immunity for their actions while working, but Thompson convinced a jury that the district attorney's office had not trained its lawyers sufficiently on how to handle evidence. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was split evenly on appeal, which upheld the lower court verdict.

"They all knew what not to produce. What they didn't know was what to produce," Thompson's lawyer J. Gordon Cooney said.

But justices repeatedly questioned how much training would be enough to satisfy any new legal standard on Brady rights for prosecutors. Brady rights are named after the Supreme Court's Brady v. Maryland case, which says prosecutors violate a defendant's constitutional rights by not turning over evidence that could prove a person's innocence.