A former University of Georgia head football coach has settled a legal dispute with a bankrupt liquidation company that accused him of recruiting other high-profile coaches to invest in a Ponzi scheme, according to federal court documents filed this week.

Jim Donnan and his wife agreed to transfer about $5.5 million in cash, stocks and other assets to West Virginia-based GLC Ltd. to settle claims he profited by convincing investors to pump money into the company. Donnan has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing and defense attorney Ed Tolley said his client was "absolutely not involved in a Ponzi scheme."

The settlement was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Bankruptcy Court and must be approved by a federal judge. It would end months of litigation between the Donnans and GLC, which claimed the ex-coach invested more than $5.4 million in the firm and that his family ultimately made more than $14.5 million.

GLC, a liquidation company that purchased and then resold surplus retail products, is being restructured in an Ohio bankruptcy court and is now being run by new operators who targeted Donnan in the court filings.

The firm said Donnan received a commission of up to 20 percent for each investment, and assured each potential investor the money would be used to buy retail items from major companies, according to court records. But only about $12 million of the $82 million was spent on inventory, the firm said.

Fifteen incarcerated men who claim they were sent to prison by confessions that were beaten, burned and tortured out of them by convicted Chicago police Lt. Jon Burge and his officers are getting some high-profile help — including from a former Illinois governor.

In a friend-of-the-court brief to be filed Wednesday with the Illinois Supreme Court, ex-Gov. Jim Thompson and more than 60 current and former prosecutors, judges and lawmakers are asking for new evidentiary hearings for inmates who say their convictions were based on coerced confessions.

The brief marks the first effort on behalf of alleged Burge victims as a group and not separate individual cases, attorneys said.

Burge's name has become synonymous with police abuse in the nation's third-largest city, and more than 100 men — most of them African-American and Latino— have alleged Burge and his men tortured them from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Burge was convicted last year of lying about whether he ever witnessed or participated in the torture of suspects. He's serving a 4 1/2-year sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.

Burge never has faced criminal charges for abuse. He was fired from the police department in 1993 over the 1982 beating and burning of Andrew Wilson, a suspect later convicted of killing two police officers.

A legally blind law school student has won her first big court victory.

Deanna Jones of Middlesex, Vt., sued the National Conference of Bar Examiners in July, accusing it of violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. The examiners would not let her take a legal ethics exam with software she's used for reading in college and in law school.

A federal judge ruled last week the NCBE must provide her a computer equipped with the software. She took the test with it Friday and thinks she passed.

NCBE had argued that the security of its pencil-and-paper test could be jeopardized when the test is taken electronically.

The examiners, who will appeal, offered someone to read the exam to Jones, and offered the test in Braille, as an audio CD and in enlarged print.

Jurors have begun deliberating the fate of five current or former police officers charged in deadly shootings on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina.

Jurors began their deliberations Wednesday after U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt gave them instructions.

The jury heard several hours of closing arguments Tuesday after five weeks of testimony by roughly 60 witnesses.

Police shot and killed two people and wounded four others on the Danziger Bridge less than a week after the 2005 storm. Officers are also accused of engaging in a cover-up.

Prosecutors say Katrina's chaotic aftermath offers no justification for police to shoot unarmed people who posed no threat.

Defense attorneys urged jurors to weigh the conditions after the storm in judging whether the officers acted reasonably.

Police investigating phone hacking and police bribery at defunct British tabloid News of the World on Tuesday arrested a man, believed to be a former executive at the newspaper.

The Metropolitan Police said a 71-year-old man had been arrested by appointment Tuesday morning at a London police station. They did not name him in keeping with the British police practice of not identifying suspects who have not been charged.

Sky News, which is 39 percent owned by the newspaper's parent company, News Corp., identified him as former News of the World managing editor Stuart Kuttner.

Kuttner retired in 2009 after 29 years at the News of the World, 22 of them as managing editor.

News International — Murdoch's British newspaper division — would not confirm the arrested man's identity.

Police said he was in custody and being questioned on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications — phone hacking — and on suspicion of corruption, which relates to claims that journalists bribed police officers for information.

Detectives investigating claims the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper illegally eavesdropped on the phone messages of celebrities, politicians and even crime victims have previously arrested 10 people, including Murdoch's former British newspaper chief Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, an ex-News of the World editor who went on to be Prime Minister David Cameron's communications chief.