This Quality Counts 2019 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

Georgia wants to allow districts to use a series of "formative assessments" instead of one big test at the end of the year.

A new study says that problems surrounding child-care hurt Georgia parents economically in many ways including in turned down promotions and having to cut back on work and school hours.

Curtis Jones, a U.S. Army veteran, has led Georgia's Bibb County school system since 2015.

Curtis Jones, a U.S. Army veteran who has led Georgia's Bibb County school system since 2015, has been named the 2019 AASA National Superintendent of the Year.

The Georgia Cyber Academy moved to stop using the company's curriculum and technology, a decision that K12 Inc. says violated an agreement between the two sides.

This Quality Counts 2019 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

This Quality Counts 2020 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

Dougherty County, a largely black school district in an region heavily affected by coronavirus, is no longer subject to desegregation orders first imposed in 1963.

Maori Davenport, who drew national attention over an eligibility dispute during her senior year of high school, is transferring to Georgia after playing sparingly in her lone season at Rutgers. Lady Bulldogs coach Joni Taylor announced Davenport's decision Wednesday. The 6-foot-4 center from Troy, Alabama will have to sit out a season under NCAA transfer rules before she is eligible to join Georgia in 2021-22.

Georgia is one of four states that doesn't have a hate crime law. Arbery's killing has reignited calls for legislation.

Late Thursday, Georgia father and son Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael were arrested in connection with the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man.

OM EAST responds to the need for Christian books in the Georgian language.

OM EAST shares about a significant event in the Georgian church: OM EAST’s publication of the Right Choices Bible.

WHILE almost every athlete has been affected by the global shutdown of sport, it is perhaps the old and the young who are feeling it the most.

Dougherty County, a largely black school district in an region heavily affected by coronavirus, is no longer subject to desegregation orders first imposed in 1963.

"Rupert Grint and Georgia Groome are delighted to confirm the birth of their baby girl," the couple's representative said in a statement

After weeks of rumor and speculation, Mikhail Saakashvili, the former Georgian president who is wanted for embezzlement at home, has been appointed as head of Ukraine’s executive council on reforms.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Tbilisi is recalling its ambassador from Kiev for consultations, a day after Ukraine elevated Mikhail Saakashvili, the fugitive ex-president of Georgia who faces embezzlement charges at home, to the head of Ukraine’s reform body. 
Read Full Article at RT.com

Read Full Article at RT.com

The Players Coalition and dozens of professional athletes sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting an immediate federal investigation into the death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.

Duke Energy Renewables, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, announced that nine solar projects developed with SolAmerica Energy totaling 14.1 megawatts (MW) have begun commercial operations across central Georgia under Georgia Power’s Renewable Energy Development Initiative. These projects bring Duke Energy Renewables, operating through its REC Solar business unit, to 27.4 MW of solar projects in Georgia.

This week LONGi announced that it would be supplying modules to what it says is the largest “bifacial+tracker” power generation project in the United States. The 224-MW project will be built in Mitchell County, Georgia and is expected to be complete this year.

While solar roads have been criticized as impractical and inefficient, a Georgia foundation says they will continue to be part of its research lab for greener highways.

On January 31, 2019, Georgia Power, the largest utility in the state submitted its newest integrated resource plan (IRP) to the state utility commission for approval.

While solar roads have been criticized as impractical and inefficient, a Georgia foundation says they will continue to be part of its research lab for greener highways.

Georgia summoned its ambassador to Ukraine back to Tbilisi in a sign of its displeasure over Kyiv’s decision to name Mikheil Saakashvili to a government reform body. 

On 9th May the European Union and its member states mark Europe Day, which commemorates the historic 1950 Schuman declaration. This speech, made in the ruins of World War II, laid out a vision of cooperation between European nations that would lead to the European Union as we know it. Today, with 27 Member States and almost 446 million people, the EU marks the 70th anniversary of this declaration. The theme of 2020 Europe Day is Stronger Together, highlighting the need for solidarity particularly in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. To mark 9 May, Europe Day EU Ambassador to Georgia Carl Hartzell has issued a statement: 'Today, exactly 70 year ago a new vision for Europe was presented, that...

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — Many people saw more than the last moments of Ahmaud Arbery’s life when a video emerged this week of white men armed with guns confronting the black man, a struggle with punches thrown, three shots fired and Arbery collapsing dead. The Feb. 23 shooting in coastal Georgia is drawing comparisons to a much darker period of U.S. history — when extrajudicial killings of black people, almost exclusively at the hands of white male vigilantes, inflicted racial terror on African Americans. It frequently happened with law enforcement complicity or feigned ignorance. The footage of Arbery’s death was not the only thing that rattled the nation’s conscience. It took more than...

Police on Thursday arrested two white men for the shooting death of an unarmed black jogger in Georgia whose killing was captured in a video that went viral, sparking massive public outcry.Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was killed on February 23 as he ran on a sunny day in his residential neighbourhood in the town of Brunswick.But the case gained national notoriety this week with the release of a 28-second mobile phone video that captured the shooting.“Gregory & Travis McMichael have been arrested for the…

Rupert Grint and Georgia Groome welcomed their little bundle of joy on Thursday

More than two months after a black man was shot to death while jogging on a Sunday afternoon, Georgia investigators conceded that the facts show enough evidence to jail a white father and son on charges of felony murder and aggravated assault.  The investigation appeared stalled by local author...

A white former police officer and his son were arrested on Thursday in Georgia, United States of America, and charged with murder in the shooting death of an unarmed black man, an incident that touched off a furore in the community and among civil rights activists nationwide.

Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis, 34, were taken into custody by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and charged with aggravated assault as well as murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in the town of Brunswick, the agency said in a statement.

The Feb 23 shooting death of Arbery, 25, as he ran unarmed through the small town was captured on video by an unnamed witness in a vehicle near the scene. The video’s wide broadcast in recent days ignited outrage among activists, politicians and celebrities who saw the incident as the latest case of white perpetrators killing a black man and going unpunished.

It was not immediately clear on Thursday if the two men had retained attorneys.

A district attorney appointed to handle the high-profile case after two other prosecutors recused themselves said on Wednesday he would ask a county grand jury to decide if the two men should face charges.

The men’s arrest by the GBI, one day after the agency opened an investigation into the case, appears to have sidelined any grand jury probe.

Three shots

The video footage shows Arbery jogging down a narrow two-lane road and around the McMichaels’ white pickup truck, which had stopped in the right lane with its driver’s door open.

As Arbery crosses back in front of the truck, a gunshot is fired. Arbery is then seen struggling with a man holding a long gun as a second man stands in the bed of the truck brandishing a revolver. Two more shots are heard before Arbery stumbles and falls face down onto the asphalt. The GBI said it was Travis McMichael who fired the fatal round.

According to a police report obtained by the New York Times, Gregory McMichael, a former Glynn County police officer and district attorney’s investigator, told detectives the incident began when he spotted Arbery from his front yard “hauling ass” down the street.

McMichael told police that, because he suspected Arbery in a string of recent neighborhood break-ins, he and his son gave chase in the truck, with Gregory McMichael carrying a .357 Magnum revolver and Travis armed with a shotgun.

Gregory McMichael said Arbery began to “violently attack” his son, fighting him for the shotgun, prompting Travis to open fire.

According to a letter obtained by the Times, the prosecutor in Brunswick argued there was not probable cause to arrest the McMichaels because they were legally carrying firearms, had a right to pursue a burglary suspect and use deadly force to protect themselves.

Activists, religious leaders and family members of Ahmaud Arbery - a 25-year-old unarmed black man who was fatally shot in February - gather in front of the Glynn County Courthouse in Georgia to call for justice.

Hundreds of protesters gathered in front of a Georgia courthouse on Friday to decry the killing of an unarmed black man in February and the delay in charging two white men in a shooting captured on video that was released earlier this week.

Georgia's National Ballet, the former Soviet country's famous folk dance ensemble, started giving lessons online after the group's popular dance schools closed their doors due to the coronavirus.

A white former police officer and his son were arrested in Georgia on Thursday and charged with murder in the death of an unarmed black man, an incident that has sparked furor in the community and among civil rights activists across the United States. Gloria Tso reports.

Systemic flaws within Glynn county’s district attorney offices led to a lack of action against the men involved in this ‘modern lynching’In the days and weeks after Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed, multiple Glynn county law enforcement officials failed to thoroughly investigate his death and, in one case, refused to allow police officers to make arrests, the Guardian has learned.Arbery, 25, was jogging through the neighborhood just outside Brunswick, Georgia, on 23 February when he was shot dead by two white men. Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis, 34, were charged with murder and aggravated assault on Thursday evening, after graphic video footage of the killing was released publicly and sparked national outrage.Lawyers for Arbery’s family have called the killing a “modern lynching” and decried the lack of action in the case prior to the release of the video, pointing to racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.In the police report, Gregory McMichael claimed Arbery “violently attacked” his son, who shot Arbery in self defense.Jackie Johnson, the Glynn county district attorney, refused to allow police officers who responded to arrest the two men, Glynn county commissioner Peter Murphy told the Guardian in a phone call on Friday.The police department was put in touch with one of Johnson’s assistant district attorneys after the shooting, but Johnson made the decision not to charge the father and son, the former having worked in her office for more than 20 years, Murphy said.“The police at the scene went to her, saying they were ready to arrest both of them,” Allen Booker, the Glynn county district 5 commissioner, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday. “These were the police at the scene who had done the investigation. She shut them down to protect her friend McMichael.”Days later, Johnson recused herself. Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. By 27 February, George Barnhill, the Waycross judicial district attorney, and the second of three DAs on the case, took over. Less than 24 hours after seeing the video and evidence compiled by the police, Murphy said, Barnhill decided to not charge the McMichaels.“And so within 24 hours the Glynn county police had been told by two separate DA offices not to make any arrests,” Murphy said. “And obviously, they want to assume no responsibility for their actions.”On 2 April, Barnhill sent an email to law enforcement authorities saying the 25-year-old Arbery had an “apparent aggressive nature” and that his family were “not strangers to the local criminal justice system”.“Arbery’s mental health records & prior convictions help explain his apparent aggressive nature and his possible thought pattern to attack an armed man,” Barnhill said in the email, which was first reported by the New York Times.“What it appears is he was purposely trying to assault the character of the victim and there’s just no reason why,” said Chris Stewart, one of the lawyers representing Arbery’s family.The family have pointed to the McMichaels’ connection to local law enforcement both at the district attorney’s office and police department as evidence of systemic flaws and roadblocks in their search for justice. It was only after the video of Arbery’s death was released this week that the third DA’s office requested the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) get involved.On Friday, GBI director Vic Reynolds told reporters he could not “answer what another agency did or didn’t see” in the first two months of the investigation.“But I can tell you that based on our involvement in this case and considering the fact we hit the ground running Wednesday morning and within 36 hours we had secured warrants for two individuals for felony murder, I think that speaks volumes for itself.”In a 7 April email sent to the office of Georgia attorney general Chris Carr, Barnhill recused himself because his son worked on a case involving Arbery while working in Johnson’s office.Lee Merritt, one of the lawyers who represents Arbery’s family, said Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother, found the connection between Barnhill’s son and her own on Facebook and brought it to the attention of his office.“She followed the links. That’s exactly how it happened,” he said to the Guardian on Friday by phone.According to a police report filed 23 February, Gregory and Travis McMichael grabbed their weapons, a .357 Magnum revolver and a shotgun, jumped into a truck and followed Arbery as he ran.In the email to Carr from early April, Barnhill references a “decent cell phone video of the entire shooting incident”, an apparent reference to the one leaked this week.Reynolds said on Friday that the investigation into the shooting, the video and the person who filmed it, would continue.“Every stone will be uncovered,” Reynolds said.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. -- When the Glynn County Police Department arrived at the scene of a fatal shooting in February in southeastern Georgia, officers encountered a former colleague with the victim's blood on his hands.They took down his version of events and let him and his adult son, who had fired the shots, go home.Later that day, Wanda Cooper, the mother of the 25-year-old victim, Ahmaud Arbery, received a call from a police investigator. She recounted later that the investigator said her son had been involved in a burglary and was killed by "the homeowner," an inaccurate version of what had happened.More than two months after that fatal confrontation, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which took over the case this week, arrested the former officer, Gregory McMichael, and his son, Travis McMichael, on charges of murder and aggravated assault.The charges -- which came after the release of a graphic video showing the killing as the two white men confront Arbery, who was African American -- made clear the depths of the local department's bungling of the case, which was just the latest in a series of troubling episodes involving its officers.And it was one element of the broader potential breakdown of the justice system in South Georgia. Attorney General Chris Carr, through a spokeswoman, said Friday that he planned to start a review of all of the relevant players in that system.Carr's office has already determined that George E. Barnhill, a district attorney who was assigned the case in February but recused himself late last month, should have never taken it on. Among his many conflicts: His son once worked alongside one of the suspects at the local prosecutor's office.S. Lee Merritt, a lawyer representing Arbery's family, has called for a federal civil rights investigation focused not only on the men who pursued Arbery but also the broader justice system."It's small-town America," Merritt said in an interview Thursday. "Those counties, the law enforcement community there, they know each other well; they recycle officers in between themselves -- it's a very tight-knit community."Over the years, Glynn County police officers have been accused of covering up allegations of misconduct, tampering with a crime scene, interfering in an investigation of a police shooting and retaliating against fellow officers who cooperated with outside investigators.The police chief was indicted days after Arbery's killing on charges related to an alleged cover-up of an officer's sexual relationship with an informant. The chief, John Powell, had been hired to clean up the department, which the Glynn County manager described last fall as suffering from poor training, outdated policies and "a culture of cronyism."The Glynn County force was the sort of department where disciplinary records went missing and where evidence room standards were not maintained, leading the state to strip it of its accreditation.Arbery was killed after the McMichaels confronted him while he was running in the Satilla Shores neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, the Glynn County seat. But neither of the McMichaels was arrested immediately after the slaying, which occurred Feb. 23 about 1 p.m.According to a police report, Gregory McMichael said that he saw Arbery running through his neighborhood and thought that he looked like the suspect in a rash of recent break-ins. McMichael, 64, told authorities that he and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, armed themselves and began chasing him in a truck.Gregory McMichael had been a Glynn County police officer from 1982 to 1989 and later worked as an investigator in the local prosecutor's office, before retiring last year.Darren W. Penn, a lawyer and a department critic, said the Ahmaud Arbery case was "another symptom or sign of a police department that appears willing to protect those that they know."Penn is representing a woman who is suing the department over claims that it failed to intervene with her estranged son-in-law, a Glynn County officer, who killed her daughter, a friend and himself in 2018.County officials and a police spokesman could not be reached Friday for comment.From the start, McMichael's connections to the police department and the prosecutor's office presented other challenges.The first district attorney assigned to the case, Jackie Johnson, recused herself because she had worked with McMichael. The second prosecutor, Barnhill, advised Glynn County police that there was "insufficient probable cause" to issue arrest warrants, according to an internal document.Finally, the case moved to Tom Durden, the district attorney in Georgia's Atlantic Judicial Circuit in Hinesville, who this week formally asked the state bureau of investigation to get involved, according to a GBI statement. A Justice Department spokesperson said this week that the FBI was assisting in the investigation.Bob Coleman, a county commissioner at large, was critical of Johnson, saying she should have given the case to the state attorney general, not Barnhill. After the Georgia Bureau of Investigation made arrests this week, Coleman said, "That's what should have happened a long time ago before the sun went down. They killed a person in the bright sunlight."Glynn County is a marshy coastal corner of Georgia about 300 miles southeast of Atlanta with about 85,000 residents, and is known mostly for its mellow barrier islands and its rich African American coastal culture.Like many Southern communities, its history is studded with racial violence, including three late 19th-century lynchings. Today, the county is about 70% white and 27% black, according to census figures.On Friday, hundreds gathered under the moss-draped trees outside the Glynn County courthouse to protest, arguing that the handling of the case had been botched as months went by without charges."I will never call the Glynn County police to my house!" one of Arbery's aunts said.Mario Baggs, a lifelong resident of Brunswick, said he believed that race was a factor in Arbery's killing, given the unfair treatment black men have long received."The black man is an endangered species," Baggs, 46, said. "We need justice; we need relief; we need the world to pay attention."Yet he also believed that Arbery's case fit into a larger pattern of dysfunction.Over the last decade, the Glynn County Police Department, which has 122 officers, has faced at least 17 lawsuits, including allegations of illegal search and seizure.One suit accused the department of wrongfully killing an unarmed white woman after officers fired through her car windshield. An investigation into that shooting found that Glynn County officers had tried to interfere with the inquiry to protect the officers involved.One of the officers in that shooting later killed his estranged wife and a friend. The wife's mother accused police of ignoring several alarming encounters in the months before the killings.Powell, the police chief, was arrested this year along with three other department officials after an investigation into a disbanded narcotics task force. The inquiry found that Powell had actively tried to shield wrongdoing by the task force. That led to his indictment on charges including violating the oath of office, criminal attempt to commit a felony and influencing a witness.As details of Arbery's death slowly emerged and were reported in The Brunswick News, Arbery's mother, increasingly distraught, called the department. She said that she had been told one thing but that the newspaper had reported something else entirely.Cooper's faith was shaken. "It's hard when you can't really believe what authority tells you, you know?" she said. "When you just cannot believe the people that's supposed to look out for all people. And when you question that, it's not a good feeling."Attempts to reach Gregory McMichael late last month were unsuccessful. In a brief phone conversation late last month, Travis McMichael, who runs a company that gives custom boat tours, declined to comment, citing the continuing investigation.The two men made a brief appearance in Glynn County Magistrate Court on Friday afternoon, but court officials said they did not enter a plea. No information about their lawyers was immediately available.Questions about the handling of Arbery's case extend beyond the police department and to Barnhill, the prosecutor who told police that there was insufficient probable cause to arrest the McMichaels.In an email Barnhill wrote to the state attorney general's office April 7, he asked to be taken off the case, stating that his son, an assistant district attorney in the Brunswick prosecutor's office, had handled a felony probation revocation case involving Arbery. He also said Gregory McMichael had helped with "a previous prosecution of Arbery."Court records show that Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and of violating probation in 2018; according to local news reports, he was indicted five years earlier for taking a handgun to a basketball game.Barnhill's office most recently drew attention beyond south Georgia for its prosecution of a black woman in rural Coffee County who had helped a first-time voter use a voting machine in the 2012 election. In 2018, a jury found the woman not guilty of multiple felonies. Her lawyers called the case "a racially motivated targeted prosecution."J. Peter Murphy, a Glynn County commissioner, on Friday defended the Police Department's decision to make no arrests in the shooting of Arbery. Murphy said the agency had been advised not to make arrests by both Barnhill and officials at the office of Johnson, the district attorney in Brunswick who formally asked to be taken off the case four days after the shooting. Neither prosecutor could be reached for comment."Tell me what the agency did wrong when its men and women were told several times not to arrest anyone?" Murphy said, referring to police. "What were they supposed to do? Cuff these guys and walk them into the jail and have no one prosecute them?"This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company