“I can’t say anything,” one male athlete at Rutgers told me as he hustled away with a friend. Then he shouted over his shoulder: “But I can throw a basketball in your face!”

Shoving and kicking players, slinging basketballs at their heads, calling them “faggots” and “fairies”—these are a few of former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice’s abusive coaching tactics that players dared not speak of and school administrators silenced for months, until they were aired on ESPN Tuesday.

In what increasingly appears to be an all-out fight between white-supremacist prison gangs and law enforcement, the feds are taking their incarcerated rivals very seriously. In a remarkable move, following the murders of two local prosecutors in Texas, a federal prosecutor reportedly withdrew Wednesday from a huge case there against the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, or ABT, for “security reasons.”

Seth Ferranti, who’s serving a 25-year sentence for drug trafficking and writes regularly about prisons and prisoners at Gorilla Convict, spoke to two Texas inmates with firsthand experience with the ABT:

One admitted to kidnapping and ransoming hostages in the Ivory Coast. Others said they had molested children or committed rape. And one, as he prepared for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, contemplated assassinating President Barack Obama.

These are among the thousands of applicants who have sought sensitive law enforcement jobs in recent years with the U.S. Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection.

This is one local election that’s going to get national attention.

With Mark Sanford’s victory in the Republican runoff Tuesday night, South Carolina’s May 7 congressional special election will be packed with enough scandal, redemption, and gender-war themes to fill a telenovela. To sweeten the pot, polls show that the Democratic candidate, Elizabeth Colbert Busch (sister of talk-show host Stephen Colbert), might have a real shot at winning what has traditionally been a safe Republican seat. Fasten your seat belts—this is going to be a wild four-week ride.

“Justice is death.”

With those three words, Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler attempted on Monday to justify his decision to seek the death penalty for James Holmes, who is charged with murdering 12 people and injuring 58 more in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, last July.

When is a quarantine not a quarantine?

That is what lawmakers and LGBT advocates in Kansas are arguing about after both houses of the legislature passed a bill that would allow the state to quarantine people afflicted with dangerous infectious diseases. LGBT advocates fear the quarantined could include people with HIV or AIDS, while state officials and backers of the bill insist that it would not.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the marriage cases, I agreed with the conventional wisdom about the best way the Court could rule: strike down DOMA, affirm that Prop 8 violates the California constitution, but leave the definition of marriage up to the states, where it has traditionally resided. This has been called the “nine-state solution,” referring to the nine states that currently have marriage equality.

But then I read Harvard law professor Noah Feldman’s perceptive and challenging essay, “On Gay Marriage, Moderation Could Be Disastrous.” Feldman asks us to imagine a post-DOMA world in which an individual is married in the eyes of New York, married in the eyes of the federal government, but living in a state like Ohio, which does not recognize her marriage as valid. This woman couldn’t divorce her wife and couldn’t visit her in the hospital, but could even marry a man, thus becoming a bigamist in the eyes of the United States of America, yet duly married in Ohio. And New York.

A detective at the scene on Monday theorized that the killer or killers struck during a powerful thunderstorm that swept through the Texas town of Forney early Saturday morning.

The thunderclaps might well have masked the gunshots, as nobody in the surrounding houses called the police. The bodies of 63-year-old Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, 65-year-old Cynthia McLelland, were not discovered until one of their five children was unable to reach them by phone and asked a friend to check on them early Saturday evening.

The National Rifle Association on Tuesday will announce its National School Shield Program. The plan is a follow-up to the gun lobby’s controversial claim, made by executive Wayne LaPierre in the wake of the Newtown massacre, that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

The NRA’s proposal will urge federal legislation requiring an armed guard in every public school in the country, as well as training proposals for the guards and ways for local lawmakers to ensure their local school districts have access to police in schools. A representative for the NRA did not respond to requests for comment.

It came to me in Prague. Or possibly Copenhagen. But to minimize confusion, let’s agree upon Prague. I assume I was being unbearably pretentious, sitting beneath one of those baroque sculptures on Charles Bridge (or was it one of those other, less beautiful bridges spanning the Vltava River?), a tattered Tom Stoppard play stuffed in my back pocket (or possibly Kafka?), the Plastic People of the Universe on my headphones (could have been Dvořák). It was here, leafing through back issues of the Prague Post and Prognosis, that I was inspired to print 10,000 copies of a muckraking, nakedly ideological newspaper of my own. To be launched in Sweden. To be called the Spectator.

I must confess that these images of Prague—in all of its inspirational grandeur—are cribbed either from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being or INXS’s video for “Never Tear Us Apart.” Because despite what my Wikipedia entry tells me, I’ve never been to the Czech Republic.