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.

Jeffrey Immelt, the head of GE, is facing backlash from left-leaning groups who say that he shouldn’t be on the White House Jobs Council or any other panel in light of reports that the company last year made $14.2 billion in profit, paid zero in corporate federal taxes and actually received a $3.2 billion tax benefit.

GE disputes that claim and says it did pay all kinds of taxes last year, though notably, not federal taxes. But it also claims that it didn’t pay because it took hits for investment and other spending that is exactly what the tax code allows and is encouraged to help job creation.

Whatever the case, the optics are bad news for GE, which is facing increasing anger from the likes of former Wisconsin Sen. Feingold, MoveOn and even Jon Stewart.

In January, Obama named Immelt to head his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness as part of an effort to improve the White House's strained relationship with the business community. Now Obama's relationship with liberals is on the rocks.

Gov. Mitch Daniels and his chief of staff were both deeply involved in Indiana's decision to outsource the automation of welfare intake, and they should provide depositions in lawsuits over IBM Corp.'s cancelled $1.37 billion contract in the project, a lawyer for the company argues in a brief filed this week in Marion Superior Court.

The brief filed Tuesday by IBM attorney Andrew Hull notes Daniels at one point told a state employee union representative that the decision to upgrade Indiana's welfare eligibility system would "be made by me and me alone" and that Daniels personally signed the contract with Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM.

It also contends Chief of Staff Earl Goode was directly involved in all stages of the project from its inception to, after Daniels fired IBM in October 2009, the creation of a hybrid system that uses both automated intake and more face-to-face contact between state case workers and clients.

"Both Governor Daniels and Mr. Goode were intimately involved in all stages of the project, including key events at issue in this lawsuit," Hull wrote in the brief.