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"While we remain optimistic that we can reach an agreement," said Michael Cordiello, president of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, the strike is to begin on Wednesday morning.

"This is not a decision we've arrived at lightly, but an action we must take," Mr. Cordiello said.

A strike would require as many as 152,000 city public and private school students to find another way to get to school. The city has said it would provide parents and students with MetroCards and reimburse cab fare for those without access to public transportation.

The central issue in the labor dispute is job protection for the drivers. Last month, the city's Education Department announced that it would accept competitive bids for 1,100 of its routes — about a sixth of the total — for children with disabilities. If the vendors who employ some of the most experienced yellow-bus drivers lose their city contracts, the drivers could lose their jobs.

The strike has grown to seem inevitable in recent days.

After Mr. Cordiello's announcement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, "With its regrettable decision to strike, the union is abandoning 152,000 students and their families who rely on school bus service each day." He added: "The union's decision to strike has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with job protections that the city legally cannot include in its bus contracts. We hope that the union will reconsider its irresponsible and misguided decision to jeopardize our students' education."

A strike would be the first by the city's school bus drivers since 1979, when they walked out for 13 weeks.

The justices were considering the qualifications of a death penalty defense lawyer in Louisiana, and Justice Antonin Scalia noted that she had graduated from Yale Law School, which is, by some measures, the best in the nation. It is also Justice Thomas's alma mater.

Justice Thomas leaned into his microphone, and in the midst of a great deal of cross talk among the justices, cracked a joke. Or so it seemed to people in the courtroom.

The official transcript confirms that Justice Thomas spoke, for the first time since Feb 22, 2006. It attributes these words to him, after a follow-up comment from Justice Scalia concerning a male graduate of Harvard Law School: "Well – he did not —." That is all the transcript recites.

Though the transcription is incomplete, people in the courtroom understood him to say that a law degree from Yale may actually be proof of incompetence.

What follows in the transcript supports that view. First, there is a notation indicating laughter in the courtroom. The stray set of four words attributed to Justice Thomas are in no sense a joke or other occasion for laughter.

And the lawyer at the lectern, a Louisiana prosecutor named Carla S. Sigler, responded, "I would refute that, Justice Thomas," indicating that the justice had articulated a proposition capable of refutation. Ms. Sigler had said earlier that the Yale lawyer was "a very impressive attorney."

It is not unusual for Justice Thomas to exchange banter with the members of the court who sit next to him, Justices Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer. But those communications are inaudible in the courtroom. This remark seemed meant for public consumption.

Justice Thomas has offered various reasons for his general taciturnity. He has said, for instance, that he is self-conscious about the way he speaks and has recalled being teased about the dialect he grew up speaking in rural Georgia.

In his 2007 memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," he wrote that he never asked questions in college or law school and that he was intimidated by some of his fellow students.

At other times, he has said that he is silent out of simple courtesy. He has also complained about the difficulty of getting a word in edgewise on an exceptionally voluble bench. The garbled transcript offers some support for that final rationale.

The joke itself was lighthearted, and it was probably further proof of a recent warming trend between Justice Thomas and Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1974.

In his memoir, Justice Thomas wrote that he had "peeled a 15-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale."

"I never did change my mind about its value," he wrote in the book. For many years, he refused to return the law school. But Justice Thomas visited it in 2011 and spoke to an alumni group in Washington last year.

Joseph Hall was 10 years old when he shot his sleeping father in the head in 2011. Now 12, he could be held in state custody until age 23.

Because Joseph was so young at the time of the murder, the case hinged on whether he understood that shooting his father, Jeffrey Hall, 32, was wrong at the time. The judge, Jean P. Leonard, of Riverside County Superior Court, noted that after the shooting, Joseph put the gun under his bed, and he did not cry when the police arrived, even as other family members were sobbing.

"These actions show the court that he knew his actions were wrong and did not want to get caught," Judge Leonard said in court Monday. "The killing was not spontaneous but planned."

The trial, which began in October but was delayed for months and only resumed last week, offered a rare and intimate glimpse into the life of a neo-Nazi's son.

Joseph had been violent almost his entire life, according to testimony, beginning before his father joined the National Socialist Movement. He hit his sisters and his stepmother, stabbed classmates at school with pencils and once tried to strangle a teacher with a telephone cord. As a result, he was expelled from at least half a dozen schools.

"He was very impulsive and very violent towards the other children and teachers," his stepmother, Krista McCary, testified during the trial. "Hitting, kicking, biting, scratching, stabbing with sharp objects, hitting with objects."

Mr. Hall also beat Joseph regularly for years before the murder, the judge noted on Monday. The prosecutor, Michael Soccio, said he hoped the court would get Joseph help.

"Joseph is a little boy, and his life has been very, very sad," Mr. Soccio said after the ruling Monday. But he added that he would have been concerned had the judge ordered Joseph's release "He's a very dangerous boy," Mr. Soccio said.

Matthew J. Hardy, the public defender representing Joseph, said he planned to appeal. He said there was "no basis" to find that Joseph knew his actions were wrong.

In some of their first public statements since the Dec. 14 shooting that killed 20 children and 6 staff members at the school, the families of 11 of the children and adult victims appeared at a news conference and called for a national dialogue around issues of mental health, school safety and what their organization, called Sandy Hook Promise, described as "gun responsibility."

"On Friday, Dec. 14, I put two children on the bus, and only one came home," said Nelba Marquez-Greene, whose 6-year-old daughter, Ana, died that day. "I hope that no parent, grandparent or caregiver of children ever has to go through that pain."

The news conference, which included other members of the Newtown community, was the first time a group of families have spoken publicly about the tragedy. It was held in the auditorium of the historic Edmond Town Hall in downtown Newtown.

The families entered holding hands and wearing green ribbons, and filed onstage. Some people held pictures of the children they lost. As they sat onstage, some wiped away tears, still gripped in mourning.

"It's a sad honor to be here today," said Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan, 6, was found dead in the arms of his favorite school aide, Anne Marie Murphy, who apparently died trying to shield him.

"I still find myself reaching for Dylan's hand to walk through a parking lot," she said as she stood on the podium alongside Ms. Marquez-Greene, "or expect him to crawl into my bed for early morning cuddles before school. It's so hard to believe he's gone."

The gathering came as President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepare to unveil gun-control proposals as soon as Tuesday that are expected to call for a ban on the kind of assault weapon and high-capacity ammunition magazines used by Adam Lanza in the Newtown shooting.

But asked where the group stood on tough new gun measures, Tim Makris, one of its 17 founders, said it was still in the process of educating itself before taking firm any stands.

"It's only been 30 days, and for the past 30 days we've really been looking inward and supporting our community," said Mr. Makris, who had a son at the school, who was not hurt.

"We love the focus of the president," he added, "and we love that the vice president reached out recently to talk directly to the families that chose to meet with him. But we don't have an immediate response right now.

"We're looking for dialogue. We're looking for ideas. We're looking for a national discussion to take place. We don't want to just come out and say this is what we stand for, this is what we believe in. We want to encourage a national discussion on this. Do something different. When you look at what's been done in the past, it hasn't gotten us very far. We have to do something different."

David and Francine Wheeler, whose son, Benjamin, 6, was killed, explained why they joined the campaign.

"'Parent' is defined as a 'point of origin,'" Mr. Wheeler said. "What I have recently come to realize is that I am not done being the best parent I can be for Ben. Not by a very long measure. If there is something in our society that clearly needs to be fixed or healed or resolved, that resolution needs a point of origin. It needs parents."

The smallest of the American automakers kicked off the annual Detroit auto show on Monday with new versions of two Jeep models, the Grand Cherokee and Compass, that have helped turn the company around since its government bailout and bankruptcy in 2009.

Chrysler outperformed the industry last year with a 20.6 percent increase in domestic sales in a market that grew by 13.4 percent. By comparison, sales increased just 3.7 percent at General Motors and 4.7 percent at Ford.

Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of both Chrysler and its Italian parent Fiat, said Monday he expected Chrysler's upward sales trend to continue this year, particularly in pickup trucks and SUVs.

"I think there's a general feeling that the U.S. market is in healthy shape," Mr. Marchionne said in a meeting with reporters. "And we're certainly going to improve in the market."

Last year was a stellar one for Chrysler. Its bread-and-butter products like the Grand Cherokee and the Ram pickup had big gains, and new cars like the Dodge Dart began to mitigate the company's traditional reliance on larger vehicles.

Now Mr. Marchionne is laying plans to build a new, entry-level Jeep at an underutilized Fiat plant in Italy – evidence of how the American company is shepherding its European parent company through difficult times.

Sales of Chrysler products now account for more than 60 percent of the total vehicles sold under the Fiat corporate umbrella, which also includes brands like Alfa Romeo and Maserati.

When Mr. Marchionne negotiated Fiat's acquisition of Chrysler during its federal bailout, industry executives were skeptical that the American company could thrive after the failures of its previous owners, the German carmaker Daimler and the private-equity firm Cerberus.

Now, however, "it's not Fiat saving Chrysler, it's Chrysler saving Fiat," said David Cole, a founder of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Mr. Marchionne said a key part of Chrysler's growth will come from its iconic Jeep brand, which has updated its rugged image with better fuel efficiency and improved quality.

The company showed off the first diesel-engine version of the Grand Cherokee on Monday, which officials said could get 30 miles per gallon in highway driving.

A new version of the Jeep Liberty is scheduled to be introduced later this year. Mr. Marchionne said. The compact Jeep will be built alongside a Fiat model in the Italian plant.

The plan helps solve Fiat's glaring overcapacity issues in Europe, where vehicle sales have dropped to their lowest level in years. It also represents an aggressive step to grow the Jeep brand outside the United States.

"The brand needs an entry-level Jeep" that people can get at a lower price point, Mr. Marchionne said.

Chrysler was also close to finalizing plans to build Jeeps in China, he said.

Mr. Marchionne said it was important for Chrysler to expand its product lineup to help Fiat weather the European sales crisis, which is affecting most auto companies there.

He estimated that mass-market carmakers in Europe lost a combined 5 billion euros last year, mostly because demand fell well short of supply.

Automakers have so far announced a handful of plant closings to address the overcapacity issue. But Mr. Marchionne has consistently argued for a broader reduction in the number of factories throughout Europe.

"The gap is too large," he said. "You can't close a 5 billion euro gap in operating profit by tweaking the machine."

Mr. Marchionne said that he was driving Chrysler to make up the difference in profits as Fiat falters and as comeback plans for Alfa Romeo take shape.

"We are living with the consequences of a collective inability to resolve the issue," he said. "But this is not for the fainthearted."

He said that overcoming the "threat of complacency" is Chrysler's biggest issue. After the Ram pickup won the truck of the year award at the Detroit show, Mr. Marchionne cut short the celebratory mood at the company's exhibit.

"Celebration is fine, I'm delighted," he said. "But it's over."