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son, executive director of Academy of Hope, an adult charter school in Washington. "People just don't want to start over."
• Test takers have been warned for more than a year about the approaching Dec. 31 deadline to complete the test. States and localities are phoning people, and thousands of letters have gone out -- including to 32,000 Californians who passed parts but not all the test in the last two years.
• "We don't want anyone to be caught off-guard and come in and test in January or February thinking they have their old scores, and they have to start over," said Pam Blundell, who oversees adult education for the Oklahoma State Department of Education. She said Oklahoma test sites have added additional test days and referred students to other sites.
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• BEIJING (AP) -- The 27-year-old journalist wore a green jail uniform, his head shaved and hands in metal cuffs, when he appeared on national TV and confessed his guilt in bribery allegations. And he had yet to be charged with anything.
• "I willingly admit my crime, and I repent it," Chen Yongzhou said in footage aired on the state broadcaster China Central Television. He said he took money while a reporter at a metropolitan newspaper in southern China in exchange for running several stories smearing a company that makes heavy machinery.
• It was the latest of several high-profile, televised confessions, a new tactic by Chinese authorities attempting to scrub information they deem harmful, illegal or false from the public domain, especially from the Internet. The confessions have come alongside a propaganda campaign warning against relaying false information, and new penalties for reposting untrue information in social media.
• Critics warn that the government is trying to curb public speech, and legal and journalism scholars say the airing of confessions before court trials tramples on China's rule of law.
• "The street parades of yesterday have become television parades of today," Chinese University of Political Science and Law professor He Bing lamented on his microblog. He was alluding to China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when mobs denounced and punished suspected wrongdoers without due process.
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