Charleston, West Virginia -- Federal environmental regulators are looking closely at a new scientific study that found Appalachian residents who live near mountaintop removal mine sites face an increased risk of birth defects.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials met last week with one of the study's authors, and EPA is concerned about growing evidence about mountaintop removal's potential adverse effects on public health in the coalfields.

Nancy Stoner, acting assistant EPA administrator for water, testified to a congressional committee last week about her agency's concerns regarding the findings of a series of West Virginia University studies.

"In 2010, an independent, peer-reviewed study by two university professors found that communities near degraded streams have higher rate of respiratory, digestive, urinary and breast cancer," Stoner told a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government and Regulatory Reform.

Dr. Jeffrey J. Narmi could not believe what he was seeing this spring in the emergency room at Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pa.: people arriving so agitated, violent and psychotic that a small army of medical workers was needed to hold them down.

They had taken new stimulant drugs that people are calling "bath salts," and sometimes even large doses of sedatives failed to quiet them.

"There were some who were admitted overnight for treatment and subsequently admitted to the psych floor upstairs," Dr. Narmi said. "These people were completely disconnected from reality and in a very bad place."

Similar reports are emerging from hospitals around the country, as doctors scramble to figure out the best treatment for people high on bath salts. The drugs started turning up regularly in the United States last year and have proliferated in recent months, alarming doctors, who say they have unusually dangerous and long-lasting effects.

A Mississippi woman has killed her husband after opening fire on a puppy she said threatened neighbourhood children, and accidentally shooting him in the chest.

Witnesses told Jackson police Robert Walker, 53, had picked up the eight-month-old pit bull after it had lunged at children on Friday.

His wife, Betty Walker, went inside to retrieve a gun, wounding the dog's leg with one shot and fatally shot her husband with another.

Mr Walker's son told local news station WLBT after the attack the children were taken inside before Mr Walker scooped up the dog.

Jackson police spokesman Colendula Green his death appears to have been accidental.

Ms Green said: 'The dog was trying to attack the kids in the neighbourhood and at that time, the wife did shoot at the dog but instead shot her husband in the chest area.'

Casey Anthony walked free from a Florida jail at midnight Sunday, three years and one day after she was first arrested for her role in the disappearance and, eventually, death of her 2-year-old daughter, Calyee.

Throngs of media and a handful of demonstrators were at hand outside the Orange County jail to witness the release.

Most of those who waved placards in the jail parking lot were there to voice their opposition to Anthony's release.

She did have some support. One man held a sign that read, "Casey, Will You Marry Me," while earlier someone else had a sign that said: "She's not guilty. Get over it."

Teachers spent nights huddled in a back room, erasing wrong answers on students' test sheets and filling in the correct bubbles. At another school, struggling students were seated next to higher-performing classmates so they could copy answers.

Those and other confessions are contained in a new state report that reveals how far some Atlanta public schools went to raise test scores in the nation's largest-ever cheating scandal. Investigators concluded that nearly half the city's schools allowed the cheating to go unchecked for as long as a decade, beginning in 2001.

Administrators - pressured to maintain high scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law - punished or fired those who reported anything amiss and created a culture of "fear, intimidation and retaliation," according to the report released earlier this month, two years after officials noticed a suspicious spike in some scores.

The report names 178 teachers and principals, and 82 of those confessed. Tens of thousands of children at the 44 schools, most in the city's poorest neighborhoods, were allowed to advance to higher grades, even though they didn't know basic concepts.

One teacher told investigators the district was "run like the mob."

"Everybody was in fear," another teacher said in the report. "It is not that the teachers are bad people and want to do it. It is that they are scared."

Authorities say a Colorado woman who allegedly groped a female Transportation Security Administration agent at Phoenix's international airport is facing a felony count of sexual abuse.

Phoenix police say 61-year-old Yukari Mihamae is accused of grabbing the left breast of the unidentified TSA agent Thursday afternoon at an airport checkpoint.

TSA staff say Mihamae refused to be go through passenger screening and became argumentative before she squeezed and twisted the agent's breast with both hands.

Police were called and say Mihamae admitted grabbing the TSA agent and continued to argue with officers before she was arrested.

Maricopa County jail officials say Mihamae was released from custody Friday. They couldn't immediately provide any information about her case status.

Phoenix TV station KSAZ says Mihamae lives in Longmont, Colo., and is self-employed.

Eugene police hope that a new strategy they're using to fight property crime can be effective as the Lane County Jail begins releasing more inmates into the community, Police Chief Pete Kerns said Friday.

"This is going to require that we be even more creative and innovative than we've been so far," Kerns said, referring to Lane County Sheriff Tom Turner's decision to cut the jail staff and close 84 beds in the facility's north annex in order to help balance his department's budget. The cuts went into effect last week.

Jail officials say they expect that about 750 more inmates per year will be released early as a result of the cuts. About 2,700 inmates gained early exits from the jail for "capacity based" reasons during the past year, sheriff's Capt. Randy Smith said.

The 84-bed annex previously was closed for a 16-month period in 2008 and 2009. Burglaries and thefts in Eugene rose sharply during that time, Kerns said.

The sheriff's office hired additional jail deputies and reopened the 84 beds in August 2009. Between then and now, property crime has dropped by about 25 percent in the city, Kerns said.

Why power-of-attorney abuse against seniors is soaring - and so easy to get away with

Léony de Graaf, a Burlington, Ont.-based financial adviser, witnessed first hand how lives can be ruined by the unscrupulous use of power of attorney. She received a call from an 82-year-old client who had been forcefully incarcerated in a Hamilton psychiatric ward. "Rose was still capable of handling her affairs, including her own banking," says de Graaf. "I had a very strong suspicion that her son, who had a power of attorney [POA] for his mother, was trying to have her deemed incompetent so he could take full control of her assets." She suspected Rose's son misled the psychiatrist whom he himself had arranged to evaluate his mother, whose family doctor had recently retired.

De Graaf fought to have Rose (not her client's real name) released from the facility, advocating for her capacities and a reassessment. The medical team relented and allowed Rose to move into a retirement residence. Unfortunately, even after Rose's release, de Graaf was powerless to stop the son from redirecting his mother's investment statements to himself, putting her house up for sale, and eventually moving her west, where he lived. "One of the fastest growing crimes against seniors is POA abuse," says De Graaf, who chairs the local chapter of a group called Seniors and Law Enforcement Together chapter.

Having a senior declared incompetent is a commonly used legal manoeuvre by POA abusers to nullify the senior's ability to make choices for themselves, including revoking the POA, says Ann Soden, a Montreal lawyer who specializes in elder law and heads the National Institute of Law, Policy and Aging. Sadly, perpetrators of many types of abuse against seniors are often their own children and others they trust. According to the Canadian Centre for Elder Law, the most conservative statistics suggest one in 12 older Canadians are abused or neglected, with the most commonly reported type of abuse being financial.

There is an awakening right now. People from all over the world are trying to stop the corrupted government and elite that want to enslave us.

Tokyo - A Japanese power firm said it would halt operations at a nuclear reactor because of a technical failure, placing further strain on the country's power supply.

Kansai Electric Power Co. said it would manually shut down reactor No. 1 at its Ooi plant in central Japan because of a temporary pressure drop in a standby tank.

The tank contains boric acid solution that can be pumped in to slow nuclear fission in case of emergency.

Pressure in the tank had already returned to the correct level, but the company decided to shut down the reactor "to give the top priority to safety and find out the cause," a company spokesman said on Saturday.