Georgia

A federal appeals court threw out an agreement that Georgia reached with the Army Corps of Engineers for water rights to a major federal reservoir outside Atlanta, handing Alabama and Florida a victory in the states' long-standing water wars. The ruling comes amid tense negotiations among the states' governors over water sharing during a record drought. The 2003 agreement with the corps would give Georgia about a quarter of Lake Lanier's capacity over the coming decades, primarily to serve Atlanta.

The news coming out of Georgia today revolves around a 6-year-old kindergartner who threw such a violent tantrum that school officials called police, who handcuffed her for her own safety. But the real story is this: Many people are siding with police. "I agree with the school, let the police cuff her. If anyone at the school would have touched her the parents would have sued and said how wrong they were," said one commenter at WMAZ-TV in Georgia, where coverage of the story is leading to a lively discussion on parenting skills.

When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

Responding to a question Tuesday about whether a Newt Gingrich-Rick Santorum ticket was possible, Gingrich offered a vague, but tantalizing answer: "I wouldn't be surprised, once we're through the primaries if it still looks like it does now, to see the conservatives come together. " But the former House speaker, interviewed in the radio studio of "The Rick & Bubba Show," said he thought he would campaign up until the Republicans nominate a presidential candidate. He predicted Mitt Romney would fall short of the delegates needed to win outright and said the convention could be the most exciting since 1940, when no nominee had it locked up. "There's a certain advantage, I think right now, in having both of us tag-team Romney because neither one of us by ourselves can raise the money to match Romney," he said.

The star witness of Georgia's sheriff-killing-sheriff trial took the stand Wednesday and offered a chilling picture of what happened the night Derwin Brown was assassinated. Patrick Cuffy, who was a hit man turned informant, said that two gunmen were hiding in the bushes, he was in a car and another accomplice was down the street -- all ready to spring -- when recently elected Sheriff Brown came trotting up his driveway, arms full of presents and red roses for his wife.

The families of more than 300 people whose bodies were found strewn across the grounds of a Georgia crematory will receive nearly $40 million in a settlement announced Thursday with the business and 58 funeral homes across the South. The funeral homes agreed to pay $36 million and the insurer for Tri-State Crematory $3.5 million. The Marsh family, which operates the crematory, also agreed to preserve two acres as a tribute to the dead.

Authorities were on a nationwide manhunt Saturday for a University of Georgia professor in the shooting deaths of three people, including his ex-wife, at a community theater near campus. Athens-Clarke County Police Capt. Clarence Holeman said authorities were searching for a suspect, 57-year-old George Zinkhan, who has been a marketing professor at the university in Athens since the 1990s, and lived about seven miles from campus.

The cost of executions is soaring, especially in the state that conducts the most: Texas. The reason? The necessary drugs have become increasingly hard to get. A year ago it cost the Texas Department of Criminal Justice $83.55 for the drugs used to carry out an execution -- sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Then last March the state was forced to replace sodium thiopental with pentobarbital after the U.S. supplier of the former drug halted distribution amid international protests.

Georgia may soon become the latest state to limit the time frame in which women may have an abortion with a so-called "fetal pain" bill that passed the state's House on Wednesday. The bill, HB 954 , now heads to the Republican-controlled Senate, according to the Associated Press. The legislation would ban abortions after 20 weeks, with exceptions for pregnancies that seriously threaten the life or health of the woman. Currently, the state bans abortions after 24 weeks.

Rick Santorum swept into the home turf of Republican presidential rival Newt Gingrich on Thursday with a full-bore family-values pitch to the same Georgia evangelicals whom the former House speaker is counting on to rescue his flagging candidacy. Five days before the Georgia primary, a must-win for Gingrich, Santorum sought to undercut the former House speaker in the state that Gingrich represented in Congress for two decades. Santorum was not mentioning Gingrich by name. But his target was clear as he laid out his record on social issues to a crowd in the council chambers here at Dalton City Hall in northwestern Georgia.

Newt Gingrich , racking up a Super Tuesday win in the state where he launched his extraordinary political rise, predicted he would win the GOP nomination despite opposition from the nation's elites because "people power" will trump "money power. " "We survived the national elites' effort to kill us," he told a boisterous crowd of more than 400 supporters in a ballroom at the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly Hotel, where he said he was when he learned in 1994 that the Republicans had taken over the House.

It's the biggest day of the primary season so far: Four Republican presidential candidates. Ten states. 437 delegates (out of 2,286 overall). And a potential turning point in the 2012 election.  Here are five key questions that Super Tuesday's voters will be answering.   1. Does Rick Santorum win Ohio? Ohio was the center of the campaign for the last week, and Romney once again outspent his main challenger. If Santorum overcomes that disadvantage, and scores a sorely needed upset, it would bolster his claim to be the anti-Romney choice that many conservatives have been looking for.  At a minimum, Santorum needs wins in Oklahoma and Tennessee to remain a plausible threat.  Elsewhere on Super Tuesday, a lack of campaign cash has hurt him badly.  In Georgia, for example, he had little media presence (Santorum says he bought cable TV time, but Romney and Gingrich "super PAC" ads flooded the airwaves and he was invisible)

Newt Gingrich has won the Republican presidential primary in Georgia, according to the Associated Press. Georgia was a must-win state for Gingrich, who crafted a Southern state strategy in his long-shot effort to win the Republican presidential nomination. That strategy hinges on a win in Georgia, the state he represented for 20 years as a member of Congress. The primary was called based on exit polls, as precinct results had just started to come in. Seventy-six delegates are at stake in the Georgia primary, and Gingrich is unlikely to win all of them.

Newt Gingrich had fallen by the wayside on Twitter . In January, the week after he decisively took South Carolina from assumed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney , the social media universe buzzed with Gingrich talk. The last week? Not so much. MOOD METER: Track political social sentiment San Francisco-based Kanjoya, which tracks social sentiment around the remaining Republican presidential hopefuls, found emotion in nearly 209,000 tweets tied to Gingrich between Jan. 23-29.

Rick Santorum swept into the home turf of Republican presidential rival Newt Gingrich on Thursday with a full-bore family-values pitch to the same Georgia evangelicals whom the former House speaker is counting on to rescue his flagging candidacy. Five days before the Georgia primary, a must-win for Gingrich, Santorum sought to undercut the former House speaker in the state that Gingrich represented in Congress for two decades. Santorum was not mentioning Gingrich by name. But his target was clear as he laid out his record on social issues to a crowd in the council chambers here at Dalton City Hall in northwestern Georgia.

Georgia may soon become the latest state to limit the time frame in which women may have an abortion with a so-called "fetal pain" bill that passed the state's House on Wednesday. The bill, HB 954 , now heads to the Republican-controlled Senate, according to the Associated Press. The legislation would ban abortions after 20 weeks, with exceptions for pregnancies that seriously threaten the life or health of the woman. Currently, the state bans abortions after 24 weeks.

One evening last spring, Chris Cunningham was sitting on his patio enjoying a cocktail and observing the state bird of Georgia, the brown thrasher. It was out in the yard doing whatever it is that thrashers do when Cunningham was seized by a thought. "The brown thrasher hasn't really done anything for Georgia," he said to his wife. "But the chicken is huge." It has certainly been good to Cunningham. He is the owner of Wife Saver Inc., a regional chain of family restaurants whose claim to fame -- aside from a name that is either chauvinistic or chivalric, depending on your perspective -- is its fried chicken box, a beloved culinary staple of football tailgaters and post-church suppers in this part of Georgia since the 1960s.

The stunning business-page success story of Glock, the Austrian handgun manufacturer, has also had its share of stunning tabloid intrigue and skullduggery. This week, another chapter full of sordid details is expected to unfurl in a suburban Georgia courtroom, where the former chief executive of the company is scheduled to go on trial on theft and racketeering charges. The executive, Paul Jannuzzo, 55, was indicted in 2009, and faces up to 30 years in prison, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Deep South, already the nation's hottest illegal immigration battleground, will see more action in the coming days, with Mississippi considering an Alabama-style immigration crackdown bill and a federal appeals court set to consider Thursday whether the Alabama law, and a similar one in Georgia, are constitutional. The legislation and the courtroom battle will serve as a prelude to April 25, when the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over Arizona's SB 1070, the controversial 2010 law that triggered a wave of state-level efforts nationwide to get tough on illegal immigrants.