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Associated Press

ST. PAUL — A 10-year-old North St. Paul boy is being honored as a hero for rescuing his friend from a Wisconsin river.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar gave Antonio Vandal a national Boy Scouts award on Saturday.

The National Certificate of Merit award is given to scouts and scout leaders who perform a significant act of service.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that less than 60 of the awards were given out in 2011.

Vandal was on his first canoe trip with his dad and others on the Namekagon River in 2010 when a friend’s canoe capsized. Vandal used his Boy Scouts training to pull the boy from the water without capsizing his own canoe.

Associated Press

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday before the Senate Finance Committee hearing on President Barack Obama's fiscal 2013 federal budget.

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congress Tuesday that the president’s new $3.8 trillion spending plan would impose new taxes on only 2 percent of the nation’s wealthiest families and the alternative would be to seek more painful cuts in other government programs such as defense, Social Security and Medicare.

Geithner defended the new budget plan in the face of intense attacks from GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee. Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah told Geithner that the administration’s spending plan would give the country a “permanently larger, European-inspired government.”

But Geithner said deeper spending cuts now would damage economic growth and push more Americans into poverty at a time when the economy is still struggling to recover from a deep recession.

Geithner told the committee that the administration hopes to send Congress next week a framework for making changes in the country’s corporate tax structure.

CANNON FALLS — A Lanesboro woman was injured Monday evening when the car she was driving went off U.S. 52 about four miles south of Cannon Fall.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — An elementary school teacher was arrested on horrifying child molestation charges after a film processor gave police photos showing blindfolded children with their mouths taped and cockroaches on their faces, authorities said Tuesday.

Mark Berndt, 61, was arrested Monday at his Torrance home and remained jailed on $2.3 million bail, according to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department statement.

The charges involve 23 boys and girls ages 6 to 10 between 2008 and 2010.

The investigation started when the film processor gave authorities some 40 photographs depicting blindfolded children in a classroom with their mouths taped shut.

Berndt worked for more than 30 years at Miramonte Elementary School in an unincorporated area of South Los Angeles before being fired as a result of the investigation. Miramonte serves a poor, mainly Hispanic neighborhood. More than half of its approximately 1,400 students are still learning English, according to the school’s website.

Some of the photos showed Berndt with his arm around children or with his hand over their mouth.

Other pictures depicted girls with what appears to be a spoon up to their mouths as if they were going to ingest a clear-white liquid.

Sheriff’s Lt. Carlos Marquez of the Special Victims Bureau said it was determined the children were given semen on a spoon or on a cookie. A blue plastic spoon and container found in trash in Berndt’s classroom tested positive for semen, the sheriff’s statement said.

None of the photos showed the students actually eating the semen, but Marquez said the children reported they didn’t like the taste.

Authorities are recommending the children be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

Some of the children’s mouths and faces had large, live Madagascar-type cockroaches on them, according to the statement.

The incidents occurred during school hours but not all the children were students of Berndt, Marquez said.

None of the alleged victims told anyone about the incidents and photos, Marquez said.

“They didn’t know they were being violated in that manner. They just thought it was a game,” Marquez said.

The lieutenant said Berndt was placed under surveillance and it’s believed he had no contact with children during the investigation.

Berndt is unmarried, has no children and there’s no indication of a previous arrest record, authorities said.

BEAUFORT, S.C. — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich faces new accusations from one of his former wives that he had asked her permission to have an “open marriage” after she learned he was having an affair.

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Mayo Clinic officials say that Lake City police officer Shawn Schneider died earlier this evening, 11 days after being shot while responding to a domestic dispute.

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The Salvation Army took in a record $354,000 this holiday season, and had a record number of volunteers ringing bells by the kettles, according to spokesman Jeff Urban.