… who lives right in the midst of it in Watertown.

While Mr UD was talking to her ten minutes ago, she noted a swat team entering a house just across the street from hers.

She says she is basically watching television and talking to the people who are calling her.

She has “enough rice and sugar for about a month. Dinner and dessert!”

********************

She just called again. Swat team in her backyard. She heard someone say Hands up.

I’m not making this up.

*********************

Another call. All clear.

*********************

But she is definitely very rattled.

**********************

UD will venture a prediction: If this person has any shred of a rational mind left, he has crawled into a hole somewhere and killed himself. Police will find a body.

… the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The university has closed down and asked students and anyone else on campus to shelter in place.

A campus policeman responding to a disturbance call at MIT has been shot and killed outside one of its buildings.

People are being advised to stay indoors; the shooter is at large.

It’s unlikely to be connected to the marathon bombings, but it’s not impossible.

************************

Situation escalating, with what appears to be a police chase, many gunshots, and even explosions reported, in Watertown, where UD‘s sister-in-law lives.

*************************

AP reports “an arrest is imminent” in the marathon bombings.

**************************

Mr UD just spoke to his sister, who lives in the center of the activity. She had not long ago been awakened by a phone call from the police – they told her to stay inside. Just after that, she heard two explosions.

**************************

Confirmed: The Watertown suspects are the marathon bombers. One of the bombers has been killed. The other remains at large.

**************************

Police are now going door to door in Watertown.

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Events as of 8:00 AM Friday:

[T]he suspects [Chechen brothers with military experience, both of whom had been in the States for about a year] approached a police officer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and shot him in the head.

The two then stole the officer’s cruiser, robbed a nearby 7-Eleven, carjacked a Mercedes SUV and briefly kidnapped the driver, the sources said. The suspects threw explosives out the window during the chase that followed, they said. A Boston transit police officer was shot and wounded, authorities said.

The dead suspect — the man in the black hat from the FBI photos — had an improvised explosive device strapped to his chest, law enforcement officials said.

Kitzenberg said that the firefight ended when one of the shooters ran toward the Watertown officers and ultimately fell to the ground. Kitzenberg said he could not tell whether the man was tackled or had been shot.

The other drove the SUV through a line of police offcers at the end of the street, he said. A bullet from the gunbattle lodged in the wall of Kitzenberg’s apartment, he said.

***************************

Remaining suspect just graduated from Rindge and Latin School, steps from our Cambridge house.

If this is true – how remarkably fast.

This is all unconfirmed, but there are reports of many injuries.

Two explosions confirmed; many injured. Three deaths reported.

The scene.

Raw video on this page.

More video.

Ongoing coverage, harrowing videos.

At least two more explosive devices have been found in the same area; they are being dismantled.

Reports of yet more explosive devices around Boston.

This reports twelve dead and a suspect in custody.

****************

Death toll remains at three, among them an eight-year-old boy.

… that one responds to stories like this with relief. That he didn’t have a gun.

The suspect is a 21-year-old student.

He’s watching his dunce-nemesis, Alaska Rep. Don Young, twist slowly in the wind after having made his contribution to the Republican party’s effort to rebrand itself.

Of course Young has not apologized. Why should he apologize? Wetbacks is what they’re called.

UD definitely believes, along with Roman Hruska, that mediocrity has a right to representation in our government. She’s less sure about people like Don Young.

The most macabre headline is this one, in USA Today:

EXPLOSIVE DEVICES, CORPSE, FOUND ON UCF CAMPUS

A dorm was evacuated, and the campus closed, after – in response to a 911 call – police found a dead person in a dorm room and, near him, an assault weapon and improvised explosive devices.

This is a big story because it’s part of an emerging new normal for certain disturbed Americans. UD guesses that this suicide had in mind going out with a bang, as in Aurora and Sandy Hook. For whatever reason, though, he decided to skip the part where he murders forty people, and instead went straight to killing himself.

The Pope quits.

“[G]ases from the melting, brown load hindered firefighters.”

… is bombed. Probably by the government.

We’re on our way to one mass killing by a crazy person with guns every day.

The death toll is the highest from a school shooting in U.S. history since a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.

***********************

Comment from an Andrew Sullivan reader:

I could never feel anything but contempt for the asshole who did this, but the truth is we are a nation of assholes. I include myself in that. Most radio stations I heard could only be bothered to touch on this massacre of children for a moment or two before getting back to the critical topic of football. That wonderful game full of violence that has no regard for the well being of the young men who play it.

Someone’s been shooting on the campus of Casper College, a public community college in Wyoming.  One person is confirmed dead, and the shooter is either injured or dead.

The incident is still going on.

******************************

This report says it’s over – one dead, and the injured shooter in custody.

*******************************

Apparently the person killed was an instructor at the college.

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And apparently guns weren’t involved, as originally reported. Stabbing, it sounds like. And now three deaths are reported.

********************************

Bow and arrow?

Phys ed exam?

We need to know if (as UD suspects) the teachers cheating on these tests came out of only a handful of universities in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Massive, long-term conspiracies of this sort maintain themselves through word of mouth. I’d guess that only four or five schools generated the cheaters. Once we know the identities of the schools, it’s important to publicize their names (of course accreditors, and the schools themselves, will do nothing) and warn students away from them.

… proceeds briskly.