NPR: Kathy Lohr

Students in Atlanta's troubled public school system started classes this week. It follows a year of controversy after dozens of administrators and teachers were found to have cheated on state tests so that students would appear to have made academic gains.

This weekend, the University of Alabama will award degrees to students who would have received them last spring had a devastating tornado not postponed graduation. During ceremonies, the school will honor the six students killed in the storm. NPR's Kathy Lohr reports.

Bringing the 1996 Summer Olympic Games to Atlanta was a long shot. Athens, Greece was the sentimental favorite to host the centennial games, and tension was palpable as IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch made the announcement back on September 18, 1990.

"The International Olympic Committee has awarded the 1996 Olympic Games to the city of ... Atlanta," Samaranch revealed.

Space camp began in 1982, the year after the shuttle first flew. The camp started out small but more than half a million students have graduated from the program. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center, which runs the camp, is building a new simulator to mirror NASA's goals to travel to the Moon, Mars and into deep space.

As a child growing up just south of Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell used to sit on the front porch, listening to adults tell stories about the Civil War as they passed still summer nights in Clayton County. Those stories went on to help inspire one of the most famous novels of all time — Gone with the Wind, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary.

A new Boeing plant in South Carolina is the subject of a legal battle that's playing out across the South and in Congress.

The controversy is over Boeing's decision to assemble its fuel-efficient 787 Dreamliner in non-union South Carolina instead of in Washington state, where it has built planes for decades.

The company says South Carolina offered a lot of incentives to get the plant, but the union says Boeing broke the law and violated workers' rights.

Plant Timeline Not Affected

The federal government is holding an unusual auction. It's selling the possessions of criminal mastermind Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. He made bombs in a remote cabin in Montana and sent them across the country targeting scientists, computers and airplanes.

Kaczynski's bombs killed three people and injured dozens. Now officials are selling his property online.

Georgia is putting in place a new law aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants, and many across the state are nervous. Businesses fear an economic boycott, the Latino community fears police officers will abuse their new powers and farmers in South Georgia fear the law will hurt them dramatically.

Georgia is known for its peaches and Vidalia onions, the state vegetable. The specialty crop is produced in just a few counties in the rural southeast part of the state, where the soil is just right.

Across the country, recently elected GOP lawmakers are pushing hard to get new abortion restrictions on the books. About 570 bills have been introduced in 48 states this year to restrict abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks the laws.

In Texas, the legislature passed a bill that requires women have an ultrasound before an abortion and requires doctors to provide a verbal description of the fetus.

NPR has been profiling some of the Republicans who are considering a presidential run in 2012, to find out what first sparked their interest in politics. Read more of those profiles.

In 1994, President Clinton was crisscrossing the country to sell his health care reform plan. Among the skeptics were small businesses.

Herman Cain was living in Omaha, Neb., then, and was the CEO of Godfather's Pizza. At a town hall meeting, he stepped forward to question the president.

The death toll from this week's tornadoes has topped 340 — and 28 of them came from one small Alabama town. Very little of Rainsville, population 5,000, remains. And yet, survivors continue the difficult task of picking up the pieces. One family, the Hamiltons, struggles to figure out what to do next.

It's been three days since tornadoes ravaged the South, killing more than 300 people. In some areas not much has changed; there's no power, no water, no gas. People are struggling to get on with their day-to-day lives.

In northeast Alabama, parts of Tennessee and the northwest corner of Georgia, people are sitting in long lines waiting to buy gas.

Nicholas Goodridge was thrilled that this service station in Rising Fawn, Ga., just across the Alabama border, was open.

The first shots of the Civil War were fired 150 years ago Tuesday at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The state was the first to secede from the Union; now, it's treading carefully as it commemorates a war that left more than 600,000 soldiers dead.

Fort Sumter is an island built of rock and granite at the mouth of Charleston's harbor. It's accessible only by boat. Union troops occupied the fort after South Carolina seceded — and when they refused to leave, Confederate soldiers decided to take it back.