Federal authorities have charged two men with running an insider trading scheme that netted more than $30 million with information stolen from law firms.

Garrett Bauer is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., on Wednesday afternoon. Matthew Kluger will make his first appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Va.

They're accused of trading on inside information stolen from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a law firm with offices in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong.

Authorities also allege the decades-long scheme used information stolen from prominent New York law firms Cravath Swaine & Moore and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

A sex discrimination suit against Wal-Mart on behalf of at least 500,000 past and present female employees appeared to be on the verge of unraveling at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, as conservative justices questioned the rationale for holding the retail giant accountable for store-level decisions.

In particular, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who often casts the deciding vote in close cases, said the women's claims seemed contradictory. The plaintiffs said on the one hand that Wal-Mart was infused with sex bias, Kennedy said, and on the other hand that the company provided no standards to store managers who made the personnel decisions.

"It seems to me there's an inconsistency there, and I'm just not sure what the unlawful policy is," Kennedy said during the one-hour argument.

The women's lawyer, Joseph Sellers, replied that the only contradiction was between Wal-Mart's professed policy of nondiscrimination and its practice of paying women less than men and promoting them less often.

The Wal-Mart suit was filed in San Francisco by six women nearly a decade ago. Lower courts have certified it as a class action on behalf of female employees who have worked at the chain's retail stores and Sam's Club warehouses since December 1998.

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the first scheduled execution of a Texas death row inmate using a new drug cocktail on Tuesday, although the proposed lethal mix was not mentioned in the court's decision to reconsider the merits of the condemned man's appeal.

Cleve Foster was to have been executed hours later for the 2002 slaying of a Sudanese woman in Fort Worth — the first Texas execution since the state switched to pentobarbital in its three-drug mixture. The sedative has already been used for executions in Oklahoma and Ohio.

On Tuesday morning, the high court agreed to reconsider its January order denying Foster's appeal that raised claims of innocence and poor legal help during his trial and early stages of his appeals.

Foster's lawyers also have argued that Texas prison officials violated administrative procedures last month when they announced the switch to pentobarbital from sodium thiopental, which is in short supply nationwide. Foster's lawyers contend that the rules change in Texas required more time for public comment and review. Lower courts have rejected their appeals and attorneys had planned to take their case to the Texas Supreme Court.