Prosecutors said Tuesday that 49-year-old Robert Powell of Hazleton falsified records to hide the true income of former Luzerne County judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan. They said Powell also transferred tens of thousands of dollars in cash to Conahan to avoid federal income taxes.

The former judges have pleaded guilty to accepting payoffs in exchange for placing juveniles in detention facilities operated by companies that Powell co-owned. Their sentencings are pending.

Powell's lawyer said Powell realized he made a mistake. He faces a maximum sentence of more than five years.

The Telegram & Gazette reports that Susan Johnson made the plea at her arraignment Wednesday in Worcester (WUH'-ster) Superior Court. She faces a variety of charges including armed assault with intent to murder and attempted murder. She was ordered held on $100,000 bail.

Prosecutors say the 39-year-old attacked the child in an apartment complex's laundry room in Gardner, about 70 miles northwest of Boston.

Authorities says she also tried to strangle the girl with a dryer's electrical cord.

Her lawyer says Johnson has a history of mental illness. She is scheduled back in court July 21.

The orders were expected after the U.S. Justice Department last week concluded prosecutors improperly handled evidence in the 2007 trials of former Alaska House Speaker Pete Kott and former Rep. Vic Kohring, both Republicans.

U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick on Wednesday ordered U.S. marshals to transport Kott and Kohring from federal prisons to Anchorage as soon as is reasonable for bail hearings. Last week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had asked that the former lawmakers be released on their own recognizance.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier in the day granted Kott's request for bail, subject to terms set by Sedwick. The judges ordered the immediate release of Kohring, again with Sedwick setting conditions.

A female nursery worker has been jeered and spat at when she appeared in court charged with sexual assault and making and distributing child abuse images.

Vanessa George, who worked at the Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth, was remanded in custody amid angry scenes in the city's magistrates' court.

George, 39, of Douglass Road, Plymouth, faces three counts of sexually assaulting a girl under 13 and one count of sexually assaulting a boy under 13.

She also faces three separate counts of making, possessing and distributing indecent images of children.

The court heard the charges range from January 2007 to this month.

George, wearing a white T-shirt and black trousers, spoke only to confirm her name and address. She entered no pleas, no application for bail was made and she will now appear at Plymouth Crown Court on September 21.

She was jeered and hissed by people in the public gallery as she emerged into the court, and when the charges were read out, parents cried and yelled and one man ran from the court in tears.

Four Illinois riverboat casinos failed to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their challenge to a law requiring them to share their profits with the state's ailing horse racing tracks.

The court's Monday decision means Illinois tracks expect to share in an estimated $80 million -- money set aside under a 2006 law requiring state riverboat casinos that gross over $200 million annually to give 3 percent of their take to the horse racing industry.

The boats -- in Aurora, Elgin, and two in Joliet -- asked the high court to review whether the law violated the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on unwarranted seizure of assets. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled last year that the "takings" clause applies to government acquisition of private land, not taxes.

The casinos had paid the fee in protest and money was set aside in a special state account during the three-year life of the law. About $79 million was in the account at the time of last June's state court ruling.

Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat who represented parts of New Orleans until losing his bid for re-election last year, goes on trial Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on allegations that he received more than $400,000 in bribes in return for using his influence to broker business deals in Africa.

Defense attorneys are expected to attack the credibility of a witness who frequently wore a wire for the government. They have to hope a jury will accept a fairly legalistic distinction that Jefferson's conduct wasn't bribery, but was more technically akin to influence peddling. And there's the money in the freezer — $90,000 wrapped in aluminum foil, found by federal agents in August 2005 in Jefferson's Washington home.

Just days earlier, agents videotaped him at a northern Virginia hotel accepting a suitcase stuffed with $100,000 cash from a cooperating witness.

The freezer funds became such a headline that Robert Trout, Jefferson's lawyer, suggested at a recent hearing that potential jurors need to be reminded during the jury selection phase of the trial that the Jefferson case is the one about "the money in the freezer" to try to weed out jurors exposed to pretrial publicity.