Opponents of General Motors Corp.'s plan to sell the bulk of itself to a new government-controlled company face a noon deadline to file appeals and find a way to get the sale halted.

But with their options dwindling and time running out, it's increasingly likely that U.S. Judge Robert Gerber's order approving the sale will go through at noon Eastern, paving the way for the automaker's speedy exit from Chapter 11.

GM's lawyers are working to get documents ready to close the sale quickly if the deadline passes and the sale is legally allowed to go through.

"We'll do it as quickly as possible," GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson said Thursday morning.

The sale is the centerpiece of Detroit-based GM's government-endorsed plan to emerge from court oversight. Once it becomes final, the automaker will be largely free to emerge from bankruptcy protection.

Gerber issued a ruling approving the sale late Sunday, but gave its objectors a four-day window to file appeals. The ruling followed a three-day hearing the week before during which attorneys for several groups including argued against its approval.

Some of the most vocal objectors included groups of people with product-related claims against the automaker. Under the current sale plan, liability for claims related to incidents that occurred before GM's bankruptcy filing won't carry over to "new GM."

That means that those people who claim they were injured as a result of a defective GM product before June 1 will be forced to seek compensation from "old GM," the collection of assets and liabilities leftover from the sale, where they will have to fight with the company's other creditors for a share of what's left.

One of the product liability groups filed papers to appeal Gerber's ruling and asked that the appeal be sent directly to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals for action.

The California Supreme Court has joined a handful of other courts in the country that have said Breathalyzer results mean different things for different people and ruled that suspected drunken drivers can attack the test results in court.

Defense attorneys lauded Thursday's unanimous ruling for deferring to science, which has shown for years that the test results are highly variable. Prosecutors, however, predicted the move will undermine California drunken driving cases.

At issue is how authorities use booze breath to determine how much alcohol is in the bloodstream.

When consumed, alcohol is absorbed in the blood and carried through the brain to the liver and heart before diffusing in the lungs, where it is exhaled in breath.

Authorities now use a nationally accepted scientific formula known as "Henry's law" to convert the amount of alcohol vapor in the lungs to a blood-alcohol level.

The scientific problem is that breath-to-blood ratios vary greatly throughout the population and fluctuate individually, influenced by such factors as body temperature, atmospheric pressure, medical conditions and the precision of the measuring device.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has endured weeks of insults, obnoxious questions and unwelcome drilling into her work as a judge and a lawyer — and it was all on purpose, essentially a dress rehearsal for her confirmation hearings.

In a series of faux hearings, Sotomayor has been barraged by hostile questions thrown her way by allies preparing the federal appeals judge for the interrogation that will begin Monday. She's been reviewing her past writings, speeches, cases and legal opinions while gaming questions she is likely to hear next week when the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up her nomination.

And Sotomayor also has been learning the quirks of senators who will do the questioning, and developing a thick skin for the barbs that might come her way.

The point is to ensure that no question comes up that Sotomayor hasn't heard and hasn't answered in the mock exercises.

"Judges are not accustomed to being judged," said Ed Gillespie, a White House counsel for President George W. Bush who helped prepare John Roberts and Samuel Alito for their confirmation hearings. "Helping them to understand the nature of the confirmation process and the nature of the Senate is important."

Sotomayor has faced Senate questioning before — when she was nominated by President George H.W. Bush for a federal trial judgeship in 1992, and again in 1997 when President Bill Clinton nominated her for a seat on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A fundraiser at an upstate university has sued two senior athletic department officials, accusing them of using her as a "plaything" and trying to make her ply big donors with her sexuality.

The plaintiff, Elizabeth Williams, is represented by the lawyer who won a highly publicized sexual harassment case against former New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas two years ago.

Williams' lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, alleges that after she took the fundraising position late last year in the Binghamton University athletic department, she "discovered that her new bosses viewed women as playthings and expected women in the department to raise money by exploiting their sexuality."

A spokeswoman for the university, which has about 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students, said it "has zero tolerance" for harassment or discrimination and was "dismayed" by the allegations against athletic department officials Jason Siegel and Chris Lewis.

A prominent lawyer trained at Harvard and Yale universities who admitted defrauding hedge funds of more than $400 million should be sentenced to 145 years in prison, prosecutors told a judge Wednesday.

Prosecutors cited the privileged education and his comfortable upbringing as they urged the maximum sentence for 59-year-old Marc Dreier. His lawyer, Gerald Shargel, said a sentence of between 10 and 12 1/2 years in prison was appropriate.

"Dreier could have pursued a rewarding and productive life as a lawyer, serving clients and the law, with compensation in the top few percent of the general population," prosecutors said in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

"Instead, Dreier decided to seek vast personal riches and prestige through a life of fraud and through dishonor to his profession," they wrote.

In a letter to the judge dated Tuesday and filed with the court Wednesday, Dreier said he suffers "every day from the shame and self-loathing and regret with which I will always have to live."

He said his crimes were inexcusable.

"I expect and deserve a significant prison sentence," he wrote. He said he asked his lawyers to file his letter in the public record "in the hope that it may do some good as a warning to others not to follow in my path."

He said he has lost all his friends, his law firm, his law license and all he ever owned, along with causing unimaginable suffering to his family, including his 19-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter.

"I will always be remembered as a thief," Dreier wrote. "I have lost my past and my future. I have lost everything a man can lose. And now I will lose my freedom as well, and rightly so."

Three gay-friendly legal groups have asked to be part of a federal lawsuit challenging California's same-sex marriage ban — a request that drew an icy reception from the activists behind the case.

After publicly questioning the wisdom of the suit and then submitting papers in support of it, the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights said they want to represent gay community groups in the proceedings.

The three legal organizations are the same ones that have long led the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in the state. Jennifer Pizer, Lambda Legal's national marriage director, said their full participation is vital now that U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker has put the Proposition 8 challenge on a fast-track to trial.

"We think it will be very helpful to Judge Walker and the ultimate resolution of the questions in the case for the litigation to have the benefit of the presence of the community in all its diversity," Pizer said.

But the newly formed political group funding the case, the American Foundation for Equal Rights, is opposing the request. The foundation scored a public relations coup when it persuaded the high-profile lawyers who squared off over the disputed 2000 presidential election to take on the lawsuit.

In a letter to the legal groups sent Wednesday, board president Chad Griffin, a Los Angeles-based political consultant, said the show of solidarity was coming too late since the same groups originally criticized a federal civil rights claim as premature.

A Las Vegas man won a courtroom battle Wednesday with the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles over his "HOE" license plate, which the agency tried to cancel on grounds that he was using a slang reference to prostitutes.

The high court said the DMV based its opposition to William Junge's plate on definitions found in the Web-based Urban Dictionary, which includes user contributions. Justices ruled that the contributed definitions "do not always reflect generally accepted definitions for words."

Junge, whose case was pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said he got the "HOE" plate in 1999 for his Chevy Tahoe, after being told "TAHOE" wasn't available.

"It's nonsense," Junge said of the state agency's efforts to pull his plates. The 62-year-old said he was referring to his vehicle's model and not to prostitutes with his plates, adding: "That was their interpretation. Shame on them."

The high court said Urban Dictionary "allows, if not encourages, users to invent new words or attribute new, not generally accepted meanings to existing words."

But "a reasonable mind would not accept the Urban Dictionary entries alone as adequate to support a conclusion that the word 'HOE' is offensive or inappropriate," the justices wrote.

Rebecca Gasca of the ACLU of Nevada said the attempt by a DMV supervisor to cancel Junge's license plate violated constitutional First Amendment protections. Junge dropped out of the litigation after the DMV appealed to the Supreme Court, but the ACLU continued the fight.

"While the Urban Dictionary might be an entertaining Web site about the English language, the court acknowledged it's not a reliable source for DMV decision-making about whether a license plate is vulgar," Gasca said.

In written briefs submitted to the state Supreme Court, an attorney for the DMV argued there was no First Amendment violation and the state has a reasonable basis for regulating vanity plates on vehicles. It also said the term "hoe" was derogatory toward women.