Birmingham Blues

Last year, Echidne wrote about three De Anza college students, members of the women’s soccer team, who rescued a girl who was apparently being gang-raped by several members of the school’s baseball team:
Lauren Chief Elk and April Grolle are 20-year old De Anza College students and teammates on the school’s soccer squad. They were leaving [...]

From a story about the hiring practices of Prichard police chief Lawrence Battiste IV, in today’s Press-Register:
Battiste said that if he had known hiring his brother, sister, cousin and father would be perceived as nepotism, he never would have done it.
You just can’t make this stuff up.

UPDATE: It was I-35W in Minneapolis. 
MSNBC is reporting that a freeway bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minnesota has collapsed.  The whole damn thing.  At 6:05 pm on a workday.

After all the wannabes and false alarms (yeah, I should have remembered that today is the anniversary of Columbine), we have a live one — at least for now.  There is a gunman holed up in Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Not good. 
Hoover High School was locked down for a couple of hours this morning after a student found a written bomb threat in the cafeteria.  Two juniors were arrested and charged with making terrorist threats.  Idiots.
And Homewood High School will be open tomorrow despite rumors about threats to the school and its students.  Authorities have [...]

MSNBC is reporting that someone has called in a bomb threat to Burruss Hall on the Virginia Tech campus.  The building has been evacuated, and hordes of law enforcement are on the scene.
UPDATE:  Everything is okay, but the students got another bad scare.  Burruss Hall is an administrative building that houses the university president’s office.

Three universities and two public schools were shut down and evacuated today after receiving threats.  What is it about one crazy that encourages the others to come out in the open?
AUSTIN, Texas - Campus threats forced lock-downs and evacuations at universities in Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee and two public schools in Louisiana on Tuesday, a [...]

Unimaginable.  Twenty-two dead, including the shooter.  This was “the deadliest campus shooting in US history”.  Please send prayers and good thoughts.
UPDATE:  AP now puts the death toll at 31.
SECOND UPDATE:  It’s now 33. 

Say it isn’t so!
And, btw, Happy April Fool’s Day!

(Now former) Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, just a month shy of pleading guilty to charges brought by US Attorney Carol Lam, signed on to a letter criticizing her “lax” handling of immigration cases.  That is the definition of chutzpah.
But I’m sure there was no political motivation whatsoever.
(Oh, btw, Cunningham’s now serving eight years and four months [...]