"Today’s lawsuit details how mace is used against children who are completely restrained and pose no threat to themselves or others in the school environment. These children are accused of engaging in normal but non-dangerous adolescent misbehavior – after which the adults taunt and celebrate their punishment." [more inside]
posted by 445supermag on Dec 22, 2011 - 35 comments

Larry Langford was sentenced to 15 years in a federal prison in 2010 for his role in it. "It’s unclear how much Langford actually understood. Later he told the Securities and Exchange Commission that he wouldn’t know a swap advisor from a rubber band."

Yesterday, Jefferson County in Alabama declared bankruptcy, the largest municipality to do so. "The filing means the county has declared war on its creditors. " [more inside]
posted by dig_duggler on Nov 10, 2011 - 48 comments

"What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street" - "Looting Main Street" Matt Taibbi takes an in-depth look into how finance, deregulation, corruption, synthetic rate swaps, and greed decimated Birmingham, AL. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk on Apr 12, 2010 - 42 comments

This is the story of what happens when a naïve 15-year-old prodigy collides with an upward-reaching football program, some of whose players feel like they own the campus. Brittany Benefield started college at age 15 with the dream of finishing law school before she turned 21. Didn't quite work out that way, and hers is an amazing story. Take the time to read this, and think about it. Would you fault her parents, for letting her get into something she wasn't ready for; the university, for letting this get out of control; the football program, for running roughshod over the school; or Brittany, for her own decisions?
posted by msacheson on May 31, 2002 - 45 comments

Southern Gothic gets downright surreal. I'm not sure what the point of this site is, or if there is one, but as a Birminghamster, I applaud local attempts to mix fact and fiction with the brio usually reserved for articles about us in the national media.
posted by BitterOldPunk on May 16, 2002 - 6 comments

Ex-Klansman Thomas Blanton Jr. has been convicted of first degree murder, for the bombing and killing of four young girls in a Birmingham, Alabama church, back in 1963. If anyone here has seen Four Little Girls, you'll probably agree: it's about time.
posted by mathowie on May 1, 2001 - 18 comments