Three of nine members of a Midwestern militia who are accused of conspiring to overthrow the government likely will be released from jail Tuesday until trial, a defense attorney said.

Prosecutors notified attorneys for Tina Stone, David Stone Jr., and Jacob Ward that they intended to withdraw their opposition to a judge's order releasing the three, lawyer Michael Rataj said.

"I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. They want to let her out," said Rataj, who represents Tina Stone. "Why they approached me and lawyers for two other defendants, I don't know."

The three were to appear Tuesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Detroit, said Rod Hansen, a spokesman for the court.

Prosecutors will continue to oppose the release of the other six and met a Monday deadline to file new court papers with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.

U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts ordered the release of all nine members until trial under strict conditions, including electronic monitors. But the government appealed her ruling, and the 6th Circuit suspended it May 10.

Microsoft Corp., the world’s biggest software maker, agreed to pay VirnetX Holding Corp. $200 million and license technology to communicate privately over the Internet, ending a patent dispute.

“We believe that this successful resolution of our litigation with Microsoft will allow us to focus on the upcoming pilot system” for a virtual private network, Chief Executive Officer Kendall Larsen said yesterday in a statement.

VirnetX, which won a $105.8 million jury verdict in its patent-infringement lawsuit in March, was seeking a court order to block Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft from continuing to use the technology in its Windows operating system and Communications Server. The jury award also could have been tripled by the court’s judge.

Microsoft argued at trial that the patents were valued at no more than $15 million. Investors bet the patents were worth more, driving Scotts Valley, California-based VirnetX’s share price up almost 300 percent in the past 12 months. VirnetX had a market value of $267.9 million, based on the May 14 price.

VirnetX had been public in its desire to be bought to resolve the dispute. The agreement in which it obtained the patents from defense contractor SAIC Inc. included a provision that SAIC would get 10 percent of any proceeds if VirnetX were acquired by Microsoft, according to a company regulatory filing.

The patents relate to use of a domain-name service to set up virtual private networks, through which a website owner can interact with a customer in a secure way or an employee can work at home and access a company’s files. The technology stemmed from work performed for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to develop secure communications, VirnetX said.

Prominent Southfield attorney Geoffrey Fieger called "absurd" any suggestion the shot fired by police officer during a raid that killed a 7-year-old girl Sunday morning was the result of an altercation between the cop and the girl's grandmother.

Fieger said today at an hour-long press conference he has filed lawsuits on behalf of the family of slain Aiyana Jones in both federal and state courts. The federal lawsuit argues the police violated the girl's constitutional rights and it seeks an award of more than $75,000. The state suit contains four counts and seeks damages in excess of $25,000.

Fieger said a three-minute video taken of the raid shows the gunshot fired came from the porch of the two-story duplex on the 4000 block of Lillibridge shortly after a "flash-bang" grenade was thrown into the home, contradicting police accounts.

The Supreme Court says an American mother illegally moved her son from Chile to the United States during a custody dispute with the boy's British father.

The high court on Monday said an international child custody treaty demands that the child goes back to the South American country.

The parents separated in Chile, and the courts there had granted the father visitation rights. But the mother fled with the boy to Texas and filed for divorce. She asked the court there to change the father's visitation rights. The father asked that the boy be returned to Chile.

The justices say the mother can argue in the lower courts that her safety may be at risk in Chile. That is an exception that can overrule the requirement that the child be returned to Chile.

A German man who called himself Clark Rockefeller and who spun fantastic stories about his past is appealing his sentence for kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter in Boston.

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is expected to appear before a tribunal in Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday.

Gerhartsreiter was sentenced to four to five years in prison last year for kidnapping his daughter in 2008. They were found in Baltimore and the girl was unhurt.

Defense lawyers argued Gerhartsreiter was legally insane.

Gerhartsreiter used multiple aliases to move in wealthy circles in Boston, New York and Los Angeles after coming to the U.S. in the 1970s. At times, he claimed to be a physicist, an art collector, a ship captain and a financial adviser.

The Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven't killed anyone.

By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.

The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

"The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. "This the Eighth Amendment does not permit."

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court's four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder; he was a "no" vote on the ruling.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing, although roughly three dozen states allow for the possibility of such prison terms. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Those inmates are in Florida and seven other states — California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina — according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone. Their sentences are not affected by Monday's decision.

Bank holding company Washington Mutual Inc. has filed an amended Chapter 11 reorganization plan.

The plan filed Sunday in Delaware bankruptcy court is based on a settlement involving WMI, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and JPMorgan Chase Bank, which filed lawsuits against one another after the FDIC seized Washington Mutual's flagship bank in 2008 and sold its assets to JPMorgan for $1.9 billion.

The FDIC objected to the initial settlement plan, resulting in negotiations that led to the amended plan.

In addition distributing some $7 billion in funds among various parties as part of the settlement, the plan allows certain creditors to buy new shares in the reorganized company. Holders of existing shares would receive nothing.