PITTSBURGH — The public corruption retrial of Pittsburgh-area state Sen. Jane Orie and her sister, Janine, has been pushed back two weeks because the senator's attorney expects to be busy defending House Speaker Bill DeWeese in a separate corruption trial.

Allegheny County Judge Jeffrey Manning pushed the Orie retrial back from Feb. 13 to Feb. 27 to give attorney William Costopoulos time to wrap up the trial of DeWeese, a Greene County Democrat.

The 50-year-old Republican senator and her 57-year-old sister are charged with using Orie's state paid staff to do campaign work that benefited the senator and a third sister, state Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin. The retrial also includes new charges that Sen. Orie forged and lied about defense documents, prompting a mistrial in March.

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey say they will sit next to each other when President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of the U.S. House and Senate next week.Obama will speak Tuesday.Democrats and Republicans usually sit with members of their parties during the annual speech in the House chamber.But some lawmakers broke that tradition last year amid calls for more civility in Congress and less partisanship after the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

HARRISBURG — The administration of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has cut funding for a wildlife research program by nearly 70 percent, eliminating state money for projects meant to examine the impact of natural gas drilling and climate change, according to a report.Richard Allan, the secretary of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, eliminated 13 of the 21 projects that staff in the agency's Wildlife Resource Conservation Program had recommended for funding, StateImpact Pennsylvania reported Wednesday.Allan failed to consult with program staff about which programs to keep and which ones to cut, and only one drilling-related project remained after last month's cuts, reported StateImpact.The program's budget was cut from $780,000 to $251,683.

NEW YORK — A group of Penn State University trustees say they decided to fire legendary football coach Joe Paterno in part because he didn't do enough after learning of an alleged child sex assault involving a former assistant. They also cited concerns Paterno couldn't effectively lead the team in the face of the scandal.More than a dozen members of the board of trustees discussed their decision in an interview published in today's editions of The New York Times.Some of the trustees said they were upset by seeing Paterno lead fans gathered outside his home in cheers while the university was engulfed in the worst scandal in its history.A grand jury investigation found Paterno informed the then-athletic director of a report of a sexual encounter involving former assistant Jerry Sandusky and a young boy, but did not go to police.

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania crept closer to becoming the nation’s second-largest gambling market in 2011, state regulators said Wednesday, as gross revenue at the state’s 10 casinos topped $3 billion in 2011 thanks to steady growth in slot machine play and a full year of gambling at table games.The results represent a nearly 22 percent increase from 2010, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board said.Gross revenue is the amount left over after payouts, or the amount that gamblers lost.Slot-machine revenue rose almost 6 percent to $2.4 billion, while table games revenue almost doubled to $619 million. Table games were legalized in early 2010.Pennsylvania’s first casinos opened in 2006, and are already threatening to surpass Atlantic City, N.J., as the nation’s second-largest gambling market.