A Pennsylvania bus company involved in a crash that killed the driver and a passenger in New Jersey has been taken off the road by federal transportation officials.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced Wednesday that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has taken away permission for Super Luxury Tours Inc. to operate.

Speaking at a U.S. Senate hearing in Washington earlier Wednesday, New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg said Super Luxury's safety record is in the bottom 1 percent of motor coach companies.

A bus operated by the Wilkes-Barre, Pa., company crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike as it traveled from New York City's Chinatown to Philadelphia on March 14, killing the 50-year-old driver and a passenger and injuring several other passengers.

Evidence suggests the bus was southbound on the turnpike near Interchange 9 in East Brunswick when the vehicle went off the road onto the grassy median before striking a concrete overpass support. The cause of the crash remains under investigation, and authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the driver may have been affected by a medical issue.

Gov. Deval Patrick is set to make his latest pick to the state’s highest court.

The governor has scheduled a Monday afternoon news conference at the Statehouse to nominate an associate justice to the Supreme Judicial Court. If confirmed, the person chosen would succeed Judith Cowin, who in January announced plans to retire after 11 years on the high court.

This will be the fourth associate justice that Patrick has selected to the SJC, meaning that he will now have personally selected a majority of the justices on the seven-member court, the oldest continuously serving court in the Western Hemisphere.

Patrick also elevated Roderick Ireland to chief justice of the SJC following the retirement last year of Margaret Marshall.

The official start of his second White House bid, in the midst of three wars, a budget fight with Congress, and sluggish economic recovery, comes 20 months before the November 2012 election.

"We've always known that lasting change wouldn't come quickly or easily. It never does," the Democrat said in an e-mail announcing his candidacy to more than 13 million supporters. "But as my administration and folks across the country fight to protect the progress we've made — and make more — we also need to begin mobilizing for 2012, long before the time comes for me to begin campaigning in earnest."

He told them he was filing the necessary paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, and directed them to his new campaign website where a launch video featured clips from supporters talking about their continued backing of the Democrat.

"I don't agree with Obama on everything but I respect him and I trust him," Ed from North Carolina says, delivering what's certain to become a key part of the president's pitch as he tries to re-energize liberal backers who have criticized some of his policies and independent voters who have fled from him in his first term.

A former South Texas judge who originally declared his innocence in a more than $250,000 bribery and extortion investigation hours later changed his plea and confessed to accepting payoffs.

Ex-State District Judge Abel C. Limas was arrested Thursday after the indictment in the racketeering investigation was unsealed.

Limas, 57, initially pleaded not guilty before U.S. Magistrate Felix Recio. Later Thursday he appeared before U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen and pleaded guilty in a plea agreement.

A federal grand jury indicted Limas on Tuesday accusing him of soliciting and accepting bribes and extorting as much as $257,000 from people with cases before his court, their attorneys and representatives in exchange for favorable rulings.

The former police officer, who served as a judge from 2001 through 2008, is free on a $50,000 unsecured bond.

Sentencing is set for July 5. The sentence for racketeering ranges from 10 years in prison to life behind bars, plus fines.

The indictment also accuses four attorneys and another person of involvement in the scam. They have not been indicted. The 17-page indictment did not name the lawyers and the person accused of acting as the go-between.

The U.S. attorney's office plans to seek forfeiture of at least $257,000 from Limas, who declined comment after his guilty plea.

Having declared that Wisconsin's divisive union law isn't really a law yet, a judge was set to return to one of the underlying questions dogging the measure — whether Republicans violated the state's open meetings law during the frenzied run-up to passage.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker's administration reluctantly suspended efforts to enact the law Thursday after Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi unexpectedly declared the measure hadn't been properly published. The move marked another round in a messy legal fight over the law, which requires most public workers to pay more for their benefits and strips away most of their collective bargaining rights.

Democrats and unions have filed three lawsuits challenging the law. Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne's action has taken center stage so far; he alleges Republicans didn't provide the proper public notice when it convened a special committee to amend the plan before its passage.

Sumi earlier issued an emergency restraining order blocking the secretary of state from publishing of the bill while she considered the case, but Republicans persuaded another state office to publish it, raising questions of whether the law was in effect. Sumi settled that unequivocally with her declaration early Thursday morning: No.

The judge is scheduled to take more testimony on the open meetings allegations on Friday. It's unclear when Ozanne may rule, but any decision almost certainly will trigger a storm of appeals that could stretch to the state Supreme Court.

The International Court of Justice has thrown out a case filed by Georgia accusing Russia and separatist militias of years of ethnic cleansing in two breakaway Georgian provinces that sparked a five-day war in 2008.

In a 10-6 ruling, President Hisashi Owada said Friday that the United Nations' highest court had no jurisdiction in the case because Russia and Georgia had not attempted to negotiate a settlement to their long-running dispute before filing it to the court at the end of the war.

Georgia complained to the court in 2008 that Russian authorities and militias allied to Moscow murdered thousands of ethnic Georgians and displaced some 300,000 people in a two-decade campaign of discrimination in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.