These are heady days for 2nd Amendment fans. Under a new federal law that took effect yesterday, when you're packing for a trip to a national park, you can include heat:
Visitors now can pack heat in any national park from Gates of the Arctic to Everglades, provided they comply with the firearms laws of the park's home state, according to the new law that was passed as an amendment to credit-card legislation.
This guy doesn't strike me as someone women would be falling all over themselves over, but he must have something, since he's allegedly slept with hundreds of them, and apparently with evil intent:
Another teacher dallies with another student:
A female Pike High School assistant teacher was being held Thursday, accused of engaging in sex acts with a 17-year-old male student.
Taine Abdullah, 40, was in the Marion County Jail on Thursday on a preliminary charge of child seduction. Bond was set at $300,000.
West Lafayette is considering a "pay as you throw" trash pickup fee. There are good arguments for such a system -- our newspaper even editorialized in favor of it when Fort Wayne was considering the idea in 1992. We said it would make people think of the real costs of trash disposal and quit forcing those of us who put out little trash to subsidize those who generate too much. But this Purdue junior, writing in the Exponent student newspaper, seems a little too enthusiastic about the plan:
It's good news that the Fort Wayne crime rate is, as Mayor Henry says "the lowest in three decades." And we shouldn't begrudge Police Chief Rusty York a little bragging about "trending" and other preventive techniques they've been using.
Some people in Indy are wringing their hands over what to do about three dozen or so of the "homeless" who have built themselves a ramshackle village under a railroad bridge in downtown Indianapolis. "Issue of bridge people defies easy solution," the headline says, and one person attending a "summit" about the problem said "you can't just kick them out" but they should at least "be required to clean up after themselves." Most solutions, the group concluded, are complex.
A tale of two sentences. Is this one too lenient?
INDIANAPOLIS — A judge gave a 53-year prison sentence to a man convicted of shooting a pregnant teller during a bank robbery and causing the deaths of her unborn twins.
The April 2008 shooting led to a change in state law increasing the prison term for anyone who murders or attempts to murder a pregnant woman and causes the loss of her unborn child.
We've gone and wasted all that time, effort and money on complicated approaches like border fences and stepped-up law enforcement and employer sanctions and moral arguments, and it turns out all we had to do to solve the problem of illegal immigration was wreck the economy a littler:
The number of illegal immigrants living in the United States dropped by 1 million people in two years, according to new estimates by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Sometimes when I get mired in the relatively boring politics of northeast Indiana, I miss the gleeful graft and corruption practiced routinely in The Region. The latest case is from East Chicago, where Mayor George Pabey is accused of getting a little extra out of city employees:
If you wanted to disprove the contention that "Self-help gurus are charlatans and hucksers," you probably shouldn't use James Arthur Ray. He preaches that success can come to those who will it, and he gets people to pay good money to do things like sit in sweat lodges to benefit from the techniques "he searched out in the mountains of Peru and the jungles of the Amazon" so they can "gain strength and confidence by mastering physical discomfort."
