According to Jessie Klein, the author of the new book "The Bully Society," it's a problem that's only getting worse. In her excellent examination of the school bullying epidemic, Klein, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Adelphi University, takes a broad approach to the subject. She first lays out the scope of the problem, before explaining how kids' changing attitudes towards masculinity, the birth of child-targeted consumerism and the erosion of our compassionate society have all helped to create a culture in which children are increasingly feeling overwhelmed and helpless, and, in some cases, prone to violence. Most provocatively, she ties the rise of bullying behavior to America's economic move to the right.

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Gardena police Lt. Steve Prendergast says the shooter is believed to be a student.

Prendergast says the three victims have been treated by paramedics and transported to a hospital.

The lieutenant says a teacher called 911 at 10:41 a.m. Tuesday and police from the city of Gardena initially responded. The school is actually located in the city of Los Angeles and the incident is being turned over to Los Angeles police.

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Gardena High School Principal Rudy Mendoza said the student dropped the bag as he walked between classes at midmorning. The boy who brought the gun was apprehended, Mendoza told The Associated Press.

Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Jamie Moore said two victims were transported to a hospital, one in serious and one in critical condition.

Police initially reported that three people were shot and the shooter was at large.

Numerous law enforcement agencies responded to the shooting at the 2,400-student campus located in the city of Los Angeles adjacent to the city of Gardena.

Gardena police Lt. Steve Prendergast said a teacher called 911 at 10:41 a.m. and Gardena officers initially responded. The investigation was being turned over to Los Angeles city and school district police.

A handful of frantic parents rushed to the school after hearing about the shooting on the news. They paced nervously as they waited behind police tapes for word from their children.

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Panama City Police Chief John Van Etten says Tuesday's date was circled on a calendar found in the trailer where 56-year-old Clay Duke lived north of Panama City.

Duke shot himself after firing at school board members during a meeting Tuesday. No one else was hurt. Before opening fire, he painted a red V on a wall and talked about his wife being fired.

Officials say she worked for the schools, but it wasn't clear whether she resigned or had been fired or what her job was. She was apparently living with her mother in a nearby town.

Van Etten says the shooting was not "spur of the moment." Police also found anti-government paraphanelia in Duke's home.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) -- An ex-convict calmly held a school board at gunpoint, complaining about taxes and his wife being fired before shooting at close range as the superintendent begged, "Please don't."

Minutes earlier, the room had been filled with students accepting awards, but no one was hurt except the gunman, who shot himself Tuesday after exchanging fire with a security guard, police said.

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Marinette Police Chief Jeff Skorik says sophomore Samuel Hengel died at 10:44 a.m. Tuesday. Skorik says Hengel, of Porterfield, shot himself as police stormed a classroom at Marinette High School Monday night.

The 24 hostages who were held for several hours Monday afternoon were not injured.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

Trapped in their classroom with a student gunman, a group of terrified Wisconsin high schoolers worked desperately to keep their captor calm by chatting and laughing with him about hunting and fishing.

The 15-year-old gunman eventually shot himself as police stormed the room at Marinette High School hours later Monday evening, and he was in a grave condition early Tuesday.

The teenager allowed five of his hostages out after about six and a half hours, and finally all 23 and their social studies teacher Valerie Burd emerged unharmed. Student hostage Zach Campbell said the gunman seemed depressed, but he didn't think he meant his classmates any harm.

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The UC Board of Regents, meeting at UC San Francisco, will consider Thursday a proposal to raise student fees by 8 percent next fall while expanding financial aid to more students.

If approved, student fees for California residents would increase by $822 to $11,124. The figure doesn't include individual campus fees or room and board. The increase would raise an estimated $180 million in annual revenue, with $64 million set aside for financial aid.

Students at Wednesday's demonstration called on the regents to reject the tuition hike, which would follow a 32 percent fee increase that went into effect this fall.

"Students every year are paying more and more for an education that they're getting less and less from," said Jared McCreary, 23, a fourth-year student majoring in history and political science at UC Riverside. "You still see a lot of students struggling, having to take out loans, working multiple jobs. That's the reality of the situation."

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The lockdown of all 300 Broward County schools was ordered after the radio station found it had earlier been sent an e-mail, perhaps by the husband, saying "something big was going to happen," possibly at a post office or a school, said Pembroke Pines Police Capt. Daniel Rakofsky.

Broward school Superintendent James Notter said the threat included hate words, apparently against certain ethnic and religious groups. The district has nearly 257,000 students, who were let go at their normal time.

The lockdown had some parents nervously going to the schools, but they were not allowed to get their children. Some schools were guarded by officers in bulletproof vests.

"We're just nervous, scared," said Inez Hernandez, who waited outside Charles W. Flanagan High School, where he 15-year-old son is a student. "We don't know what's going to happen."

By early afternoon, police said they had determined that the threat had "diminished" and the students were dismissed, although with a heavier police presence. All after-school activities were canceled.

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Broward County schools were locked down Wednesday after the woman told the radio station her husband was going to start shooting at a school in Pembroke Pines, a Fort Lauderdale suburb.

Police say there is no credible threat and that all schools are safe.

Police say an e-mail was also sent to the radio station, saying "something big was going to happen," possibly at a post office or at a school.

Investigators have not confirmed the identity of the man or woman.

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Officials told the Daily Breeze that four of the injured teens at North High School in Torrance were seriously hurt in the Friday afternoon blast.

No other information was immediately available and calls to fire officials and the school district were not immediately returned.

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The injuries were not life-threatening, said Carlsbad police spokeswoman Fiona Everett, who did not know the nature of the wounds. The North County Times reported the students were shot in the arm.

Terry Lynn told KNSD-TV he looked out his window to see a man park his van, jump over a fence at Kelly Elementary School, walk across a field, and fire a .357 Magnum revolver toward a crowd of children.

"He was saying something about the president, he was ranting," Lynn said.

Lynn said he screamed, "No! No!" and rushed to the scene. By the time he arrived, construction workers had tackled the suspect. He helped restrain the man until police arrived.

"It was very chaotic," he told the television station.

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George Huguely, 22, of Chevy Chase, Md., has been charged in the death of Yeardley Love, 22, of Cockeysville, Md., Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo said. Both were seniors.

Longo said Love's roommate called police around 2:15 a.m. concerned that Love may have had an alcohol overdose, but police found her dead with obvious physical injuries.

"It was quickly apparent to them that this young lady was the victim of something far worse," Longo said.

Longo said Huguely quickly became the focus. He wouldn't say what lead investigators to Huguely or detail the extent of Love's injuries. He said there did not appear to be any weapons.

Love and Huguely were in a relationship at some point, Longo said. Huguely lived nearby, but not in the same apartment complex, he said.

Huguely was being held in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.

Huguely and Love were scheduled to graduate later this month. Leonard Sandridge, executive vice president of the university, said the campus was shocked and saddened over Love's death.

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The fight that killed Derrion began as a dispute between boys from the Ville, the neighborhood surrounding Fenger, and Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where President Obama worked as a community organizer in the mid-1980s. Traditionally, students from Altgeld attended Carver High School, a five- to 10-minute walk away. The school is now a military academy, which draws students from all over the city and the suburbs. To make room, students from Altgeld were shifted to Fenger. That decision was made by Arne Duncan, who was then CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and is now Obama’s secretary of education.

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Local police threaten legal consequences if journalists breach the reservation's boundaries and have sent many journalists on their way, with their only recourse being an appeal to the tribal court. Some family members of Red Lake shooting victims have stepped forward and criticized the tribal officials for their stringent restrictions on the press. On Thursday, tribal police pulled over a Knight-Ridder vehicle, confiscated camera equipment, and broke up an interview with the father of one of the victims.

To muckraking Chippewa journalist Bill Lawrence, the press constraints in Red Lake come as no surprise. He lived there as a child and returned after law school. In 1970 and 1978, he ran losing campaigns to become a tribal official -- he insists the elections were rigged -- and has been an outspoken critic of tribal governments. He now lives in Bemidji, 30 minutes outside Red Lake.

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"I record everything," Rohrbough says here at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Golden, Colo., one Thursday morning late in February; it is yet another Columbine news conference, just two months before the fifth anniversary of the tragedy. "My format is mini-disk, but I have others."

The event at the fairgrounds is billed as an unprecedented gesture of openness for Columbine and, indeed, for every criminal case anywhere that has never gone to trial. In the interest of providing full disclosure and of quieting the howls of skeptics who still want further investigation, the new sheriff, Ted Mink, has ordered that all of the Columbine evidence, every bomb and bullet, be put on display for one afternoon of public viewing.

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The grind houses are gone now that Times Square has been cleaned up by Disney, among others. But the spirit of the grind houses lives on in the art house. At least three or four times a year now, a foreign or indie movie appears whose main selling point is the same gore-and-sex combo that used to lure audiences into the grind houses. Theaters no longer pass out barf bags as they did for "Mark of the Devil," but the ads for Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible" made sure to mention the couple of hundred audience members who stormed out of the film's Cannes screening during the nine-minute unbroken-take rape scene. The gruesome climax of Noé's previous movie, "I Stand Alone," was preceded by a flourish right out of William Castle, a blinking red "WARNING!" sign that alerted moviegoers, "You have 30 seconds to leave the theater." Essentially, this is the same "Can You Take It?" come-on that exploitation producers used to promise grind-house patrons that their movie delivered the dirty goods.

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But whatever the investigation of Williams uncovers, one thing is already clear: The high school freshman will be tried as an adult, thanks to California's latest crackdown on juvenile crime, Proposition 21, a ballot measure that passed last year and requires that teenagers as young as 14 who are accused of murder be tried as adults. Now Williams' attorneys are trying to use his case to challenge Prop. 21 by arguing that its provisions, which automatically move their client's case to adult court, are unconstitutional.

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Or at least they took photos -- the police confiscated the film and, in at least one case, the video, in a gesture that unwittingly soothes us just a little: Please separate these children from their cameras. We don't understand their calmness.

This is our hysteria. The shooting is hard to process -- there's lots to feel but little to say, at least until we start reminding ourselves of old metal-detector and gun-control discussions -- so we wring our hands over how we see these children respond. In a press conference, San Diego County District Attorney Paul Pfingst said what CNN showed us -- that parents were more upset than the kids in many cases. In the initial TV coverage, we heard students speak clearly and calmly about what had fired past them down the halls. Less than an hour after the shooting, they were eerily sophisticated. Their faces appeared unruffled and thoughtful, and they were media-ready. They weren't glib, but they were savvy. They speculated about cries for help; they referenced Columbine intelligently, without prompting from the interviewer.

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The central focus of the package is a
minute-by-minute timeline describing the
events of April 20, 1999, in great
detail. It dramatically collapses the
amount of time the massacre took to
unfold, claiming gunmen Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold only spent seven and a
half minutes in the library, killing 10
and wounding 12. "They carried more than
enough ammunition to kill all 56 people
in the library," it says, adding that
the 34 victims were killed or injured in
the first 16 minutes of the attack.
After the killing rampage, there were 33
minutes in which nobody was shot until
the gunmen killed themselves.

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