Today's newspapers carry the obituary for the somewhat accidental civil rights pioneer Mildred Loving, who died last Friday at 68. Loving and her late husband Richard were the plaintiffs in one of the most important civil rights cases ever to reach the Supreme Court. Their exquisitely- and aptly-named case, Loving v.

In a case with eerie similarities to the Bush administration’s destruction the CIA “torture tapes,” the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, a school in Canton, MA, for special needs students, is reportedly being investigated by state prosecutors over its destruction of videotape evidence. According to a page-one story in today’s Boston Globe, the school electroshocked one student 77 times and the other 29 times after a prank caller posing as a supervisor ordered the treatments, and then erased (by recording over) video surveillance footage of the bizarre incident.

Last July, the city council of Hazelton, Pennsylvania passed several ordinances aimed at ridding the city of illegal immigrants, by penalizing employers who hire them and landlords who provide them with homes. The ordinances were, in part, responses to an increase in violent crime, which town officials blamed on immigration.