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.

"Please help us save the children, the children of Fukushima"

The company that is seeking permission to build a new crude oil pipeline between Canada and the U.S. Gulf Coast has wildly underestimated the damage that could occur in a worst case spill scenario, a University of Nebraska researcher warned this week.

Even a small, undetected leak from an underground rupture of the pipeline in the Nebraska Sandhills could pollute almost 5 billion gallons of groundwater with benzene at concentrations exceeding safe drinking water levels," University of Nebraska researcher John Stansbury said.

TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline would would carry 700,000 gallons of Canadian crude per day from the tar sands area of Western Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Along the way, the 36 inch diameter pipe would cross important waterways, including the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in Montana, the Platte River in Nebraska and the Sandhills, where highly permeable soil covers the enormous Ogallala aquifer.

La Salle County authorities believe the deaths of a mother and her two sons in a house fire Thursday in rural Streator were a murder-suicide.

Jennifer Shepard, 36, and her sons, Jordan, 11, and Jake, 9, were found dead by firefighters in an upstairs bedroom of their home Thursday afternoon following a fire that was believed to be intentionally set by the mother.

Preliminary autopsy results Friday revealed the boys were stabbed and the mother had cuts on her arms. A knife was found at the scene and is believed to be involved in the incident.

Authorities found evidence of an accelerant in the house, located four miles east of Route 23 on 18th Road.

Bernard said information from her office's forensic investigation and evidence recovered from the fire affirmed the deaths of the two boys were the result of homicide and the death of Jennifer to be suicide.

Coroner Jody Bernard said the actual cause of death awaits further forensic testing and toxicology results.

Mexican authorities say at least 12 state police officers and a bystander have been killed in an ambush on a highway in Mexico's western state of Sinaloa.

Sinaloa state security officials say the attack happened around 6 p.m. Friday at a fake checkpoint set up by gunmen on the highway near the town of Guasave.

The police convoy was traveling from Los Mochis, a Pacific coastal city where the officers helped launch a "Safe Commerce" program aimed at averting attacks on merchants.

Officials say the slain bystander was driving from a nearby tortilla stand where he works and got caught in the crossfire.

An attack on police earlier in the day in Los Mochis wounded two police officers.

Source: The Associated Press