Each of the six men charged with killing 15-year-old Nicholas Jackson had different accounts of how they ended up in Norcross on Feb. 2, when the valedictorian and football star was shot in the heart during an apparent robbery gone awry, police said Friday.

WASHINGTON -- Three chief contenders for the Republican presidential nomination made their case as the most conservative candidate Friday, wooing the party's activist core at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum all have been CPAC regulars in recent years, but each faced uncommon scrutiny amid the escalating presidential race.

The National Park Service announced plans Friday to remove an inscription from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and replace it with a full quotation from the civil rights leader — a move the memorial project's architect said would "destroy" the monument.

Metro Atlanta has seen some of the steepest declines in construction jobs in the country since peaking five years ago, a new study shows. The region has lost 56,100 construction jobs – a 40-percent drop since December 2006, according to a survey released Friday by industry group Associated General Contractors of America.

An investigation of two Atlanta Housing Authority commissioners has determined that they made hostile and offensive comments to agency employees late last year, according to an 18-page report that a local law firm representing the agency has sent to Mayor Kasim Reed.

A piece of Gone With the Wind history may have gone up in smoke. An overnight fire Friday morning at a Stockbridge self-storage facility destroyed or damaged 200 of 400 units, including one holding GWTW memorabilia worth an estimated $200,000. Artifacts kept there included large wooden posterboards depicting scenes from the movie that swept the 1939 Academy Awards, GWTW ads from such places as Italy and Russia and memorabilia from the world premier in Atlanta, where the story of the Old South and the Civil War was set.

Atlanta police have identified the third man seen in an online video allegedly beating and kicking a 20-year-old gay man while shouting anti-gay invectives. Brandon White was attacked Saturday in front of a corner market at 1029 McDaniel Street in the southwest Atlanta neighborhood of Pittsburgh by men identified as members of the 1029 Jack City Gang.

Covington police are seeking a 47-year-old man suspected of shooting a woman to death as she drove down the street Friday morning, causing her to crash into a gas station, Channel 2 Action News reported. The incident happened shortly before noon on Washington Street in the Newton County city.

The jackpot for Saturday's Powerball multi-state lottery climbed to $325 million, the Georgia Lottery said Friday. Officials said this is the largest Powerball jackpot in Georgia since the state began selling tickets in 2010. The largest-ever Powerball jackpot was $365 million in Nebraska in February 2006.

A coalition of watchdog groups said Friday cuts to the state ethics commission's budget have hobbled the agency and resulted in a backlog of unresolved complaints. "This agency has basically been crippled and is literally in a crisis of ethics because their budget has been so cut, they are so understaffed and underfunded that they have not been able to do the job that is laid out for them by law," said William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a member of the Georgia Alliance for Ethics Reform.

Savannah city leaders are banning the public display of snakes at the upcoming St. Patrick's Day festival. Pythons and other snakes have been part of the festivities in recent years, and the snake handlers are often mobbed by drunken revelers fascinated by the reptiles, The Savannah Morning News reported.

Clayton County narcotics officers recovered four pounds of marijuana and arrested five people during a drug bust Thursday in Riverdale. Police found $10,000 worth of marijuana, an AK-47 assault rifle , a .380 semi-automatic handgun and $7,610 in cash, Clayton police spokesman Officer Gary Siblis said.

A chunk of  "irreplaceable" southern history apparently went up in flames overnight when fire raced through a Henry County storage facility. The blaze broke out before midnight Thursday at Hudson Self Storage on Hudson Bridge Road near I-75. Several storage units were heavily damaged, including a 20-by-12-foot storage bay leased by the Clayton County Convention and Visitor's Bureau.

A nursing student from Columbus is getting a little help with her tuition from the Georgia Lottery. Mattie Billingsley, 49, won $7 million playing the lottery's new $7 Million Jackpot scratch-off game. “I can’t stop crying,” Billingsley said in a press release from the Georgia Lottery.

Eight Occupy Atlanta protesters were arrested Friday morning at a bank in the Edgewood area, according to police. The names of those arrested were not immediately available, Sgt. Curtis Davenport with Atlanta police told the AJC. Those arrested are expected to be charged with obstruction of law enforcement officers and criminal trespass, Davenport said.

Covington police Friday were investigating a late-morning drive-by shooting. Just before noon, crime scene tape surrounded the Pure station on Ga. 81, where a silver pickup truck appeared to have slammed into one of the gas pump islands. Covington police Capt.

Student test scores won't be pivotal to how schools are rated now that Georgia has been allowed to opt out of federal No Child Left Behind requirements. A waiver granted Thursday by the Obama administration also means Georgia won't be bound by the law's mandate that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Senior administration officials tell The Associated Press that President Barack Obama on Friday will announce that religious employers will not have to cover birth control for their employees after all. He will demand instead that insurance companies will be the ones ultimately responsible for providing free contraception.

The man charged with trying to kidnap a 7-year-old girl from a west Georgia Wal-Mart waived a first appearance hearing Friday morning. Thomas Andrew Woods, 25, of Austell, was convicted of killing his uncle in 2004 in DeKalb County, according to documents obtained Thursday.

An Arctic cold front will blow into metro Atlanta this weekend, bringing a bitter reminder that winter doesn't officially end for another five weeks. Channel 2 Action News meteorologist Karen Minton said temperatures will barely reach 40 degrees Saturday morning before  plummeting through the afternoon toward a low Saturday night in the low 20s.

Thieves apparently looking for hair weaves and cigarettes smashed their way into a Midtown CVS pharmacy before daybreak Friday. The break-in happened just before 5 a.m. at the CVS on Peachtree Street at 6th Street. The intruders tossed a brick through the front glass door.

Georgians live closer to the financial edge than anyone else in the nation, and the danger extends beyond the poor to the middle class, according to a newly published in-depth analysis. The study by the Washington-based Corporation for Enterprise Development ranked Georgia dead last in terms of the financial security of its residents, based on factors such as their high debt load, lack of savings and assets, and the prevalence of personal bankruptcies.

New orders from the Pentagon: The military on Thursday formally opened thousands of jobs to women in units that are closer to the front lines than ever before, reflecting what's already been going on as female American soldiers fight and die next to their male comrades.

A landmark $25 billion settlement with the nation's top mortgage lenders was hailed by government officials Thursday as long-overdue relief for victims of foreclosure abuses. But consumer advocates countered that far too few people will benefit.

Atlanta Police Chief George Turner said investigators know who some of the suspects are who were videotaped attacking a 20-year-old gay man outside a southwest Atlanta neighborhood store. "We have identified at least two of the three individuals," Turner said Thursday night at an emergency public safety meeting organized by the Pittsburgh Community Improvement Association.