With the school year now underway a flurry of federally-coordinated "active shooter drills" are taking place across the country. The exercises are part of a broader program the FBI is carrying out as a result of an Obama's directive following the December 2012 Newtown school massacre.

The FBI has teamed up with an existing active-shooter training program - Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) - begun in Texas after the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and funded in part by the US Department of Justice. The FBI sent roughly 100 tactical instructors to ALERRT training and then placed them throughout the US to oversee mock terror exercises with local law enforcement agencies.

"Officers and instructors were divided into gunmen, responders, hostages and victims and given real-life scenarios that test their ability to enter a building and confront a shooter," according to an Associated Press report.

"The officers, in blue protective helmets, fired non-lethal projectiles from lookalike handguns - enough to make a loud "pop" and sting on impact ... "In that kind of event, you can never get to the point where it's real life. Always in back of the officer's head, they know, 'I'm not actually going to die. No one's being killed,'" said J. Pete Blair, the ALERRT program's research director and an associate professor at Texas State University-San Marcos. But, he added, "It's as close as we can get to the real thing without people getting hurt. The [new] drills coach officers to directly engage the shooter instead of waiting for specialized SWAT teams to arrive ... The protocol marks a stark shift from past training that focused on containing the scene, controlling the perimeter and calling for SWAT help. That strategy, though widely accepted at the time, was criticized as too slow and painstaking after the Columbine shootings." [1]

The attorney who helped murder defendant George Zimmerman win a controversial acquittal last month was frustrated to learn his client toured a gun factory on Thursday.

According to TMZ, the former neighborhood crime watchman visited Kel-Tec firearms, the company that manufactured the semi-automatic handgun Zimmerman used in the fatal confrontation with Trayvon Martin.

"We certainly would not have advised him to go to the factory that made the gun that he used to shoot Trayvon Martin through the heart," Shawn Vincent, a spokesman for attorney Mark O'Mara, told Yahoo News. "That was not part of our public relations plan."

News of Zimmerman's visit to the gunmaker comes just six weeks after a jury found him not guilty in the 2012 shooting death of Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Sanford, Fla. The trial was televised to a wide audience, and his acquittal led to nationwide protests and prompted President Barack Obama to speak out on the case.

According to the TMZ story, Zimmerman got a personal tour of the Cocoa, Fla., facility from the son of Kel-Tec's founder and owner. The story includes a picture of Zimmerman and a man wearing a Kel-Tec shirt. TMZ says it was taken on the assembly plant floor. The entertainment website reported that Zimmerman inquired about purchasing a tactical shotgun; however Kel-Tec's website says the company doesn't sell firearms directly to the public.

A Russian court sentenced the infamous Belgorod shooter who killed six people in a random shooting spree earlier this year to life imprisonment Friday.

The Belgorod Regional Court found Sergei Pomazun guilty of six counts of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.

On April 22, Pomazun opened fire in a weapons store, killing three people, and then shot another three people on the street outside. Five people died at the scene, including a 14-year-old girl. Another victim, a 16-year-old girl, died later in intensive care.

On April 23, Pomazun was detained as he attempted to flee the city on a freight train. He was identified and detained by transport police. He resisted arrest and managed to wound one of the police officers.

As many as 50,000 stray dogs roam the streets and vacant homes of bankrupt Detroit, replacing residents, menacing humans who remain and overwhelming the city's ability to find them homes or peaceful deaths.

Dens of as many as 20 canines have been found in boarded-up homes in the community of about 700,000 that once pulsed with 1.8 million people. One officer in the Police Department's skeleton animal-control unit recalled a pack splashing away in a basement that flooded when thieves ripped out water pipes.

"The dogs were having a pool party," said Lapez Moore, 30. "We went in and fished them out."

Poverty roils the Motor City and many dogs have been left to fend for themselves, abandoned by owners who are financially stressed or unaware of proper care. Strays have killed pets, bitten mail carriers and clogged the animal shelter, where more than 70 percent are euthanized.

Fed says no inflation. USDA says food inflation picking up substantially http://t.co/J5wO2Xj1cN
- Pippa Malmgren (@DrPippaM) August 24, 2013

The USDA reports:

Food prices have also been rising faster than in earlier years, and food price inflation has easily outpaced price inflation for many other types of goods. Among major consumer spending categories, only prices for transportation, which include a number of energy price measures, and medical care have risen faster than food prices[...]

Since 2006, when commodity prices began their rollercoaster ride, the all-items CPI has risen 14 percent while the all-food CPI is up close to 20 percent. The wider differential in the post-2005 era means that a number of the macroeconomic inflationary factors have been specific to food prices. This effect was largely due to rising U.S. farm prices for corn, wheat, soybeans, and other food commodities

Steve Lonegan, the New Jersey Tea Party favorite for U.S. Senate, told MSNBC Saturday that single mothers don't need food stamps because his mother managed without the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, ThinkProgress reported.

"Unemployment in New Jersey now is around nine percent. To a single working mother in New Jersey who has a couple of kids ... What is your specific policy prescription on how to help her?" host of Up Steve Kornacki asked Lonegan.

"The policy that my Mom adopted when my Dad died, when I was a teenager and she had to go back to work as a single mom supporting two boys and had no health insurance and all of the things you just mentioned," Lonegan responded. "You go to work, you roll up your sleeves, and you do the best you can, and you struggle and strife."

Lonegan said "we need to create an economy where single mothers can grow and prosper," but he did not elaborate on any policy plans he has on the economy.

"We never had to have SNAP, when I was a kid," said Lonegan. "Ok, so, this thing that every single mother is the poster child for the welfare state is nonsense ... I know a lot of single moms go out to work and do very, very well for themselves."

When asked how he would help single mothers balance work and parenting, he suggested "cutting the size of government across the board, freeing up businesses and cutting regulation."

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer this month, Lonegan said he lost his eyesight to a disease when he was a young man and began collecting disability. A social worker told him about food stamps, rent subsidies and vocational training.

A Tennessee police officer has been placed on leave after shooting 68-year-old man to death in his garage allegedly following a brief verbal altercation. The officer claims the man was armed with a handgun and refusing to listen to his commands before the officer discharged his gun.

According to The Knoxville News Sentinel:

Deputy Ernest Ti Ragland, 22, was conducting a property check at 1856 Mentor Road in Louisville following two reported burglaries at the rental property this week, according to a Blount County Sheriff's Office news release

At the same time, Henry C. "Joe" Taylor apparently was making his own check inside the garage.

Ragland "saw a broken window and went to investigate it, then shined his flashlight inside the building and saw a man with a handgun," the BCSO news release states. "He told supervisors that he gave verbal commands, and fired multiple shots, striking Henry C. Taylor, 68, and killing him."Ragland, who has since been placed on paid administrative leave pending the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's findings, has been with the sheriff's office since Dec. 2012.

An employee for the Department of Homeland Security has been put on paid administrative leave after reports surfaced that he runs a racist website advocating a race war.

Ayo Kimathi, an acquisitions officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who is in charge of buying weapons and ammunition for the government, operates the website named "War on the Horizon," according to Fox News.

The website includes descriptions of an "unavoidable, inevitable clash with the white race." Kimathi, who reportedly calls himself the "Irritated Genie," is black. He apparently told his supervisors that the website was set up to sell concert and lecture videos.

Kimathi's site criticizes whites, gays, those of mixed race, and blacks who integrate with whites.

"Warfare is eminent," the website declares, according to Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch site, "and in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites - more than our Christian hearts can possibly count,"

A former supervisor of Kimathi's at the DHS told Hatewatch, "Everybody in the office is afraid of him."

Students wonder why a campus safety alert wasn't sent out.

New information is coming out about how many explosive bottles were found outside a sorority house at Missouri State University. One of those bottles exploded Wednesday at Gamma Phi Beta. A woman was burned from the chemical contents.

A third bottle was found in the alley behind the sorority house. All of the bottles are being tested to find out what chemicals were inside.

Firefighters call what happened an explosion. The question that many students have is why they didn't hear about it from their university.

"We talk about current events in my classes and that's the first thing we talked about. A lot of kids didn't know," said MSU student John Adams.

MSU student Madeline Phillips feels the same way.

"I get campus alerts, not every day, but quite often around the Springfield area. The fact that something happened on Sorority Row and nobody knew about it -- yeah, it's weird," she said.

Madeline Phillips' roommate happens to be a Gamma Phi Beta. That's how she found out about the explosion.

"She was scared. It could have been somebody in the house for that matter or if somebody had not finished their plan could have come back that night," said Phillips.

Two weeks ago, a safety alert went out to students because shots were fired off-campus at a nearby restaurant. But, campus officials won't say why a safety alert didn't go out for this incident.

Jay Huff, assistant director of Safety and Transportation, told us to speak with MSU Chief of Staff Paul Kincaid. He declined our request for an interview, but did direct us to the university's Safety and Transportation website. It lists the requirements that campus officials must have before issuing a Missouri State Alert. The second bullet point is a security alert. That's why many students question why they never got one.

"Why don't we know about these kinds of things? Why aren't we in the know about things that happen to actual students instead of people just close by?" asked MSU student Christa Baver.

Fire Marshal Phil Noah says, at the very least, students should be have told what was happening.

A local police officer is accused of purchasing domain names featuring different variations of his police chief's name and knowingly redirecting those domain names to pornographic websites.

Steven Gravier, 41, an officer with the Richmond Police Department, was issued a federal arrest warrant on Thursday for using misleading domain names on the internet.

According to a report from the Rhode Island State Police, several law enforcement agencies - including the State Police Computer Crimes Unit, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service - conducted an investigation at the request of Richmond Police Chief Elwood Johnson, Jr.

The investigation led police to issue Gravier purchased domain names featuring Chief Johnson's name and intentionally made those sites lead to adult websites.

Gravier was arraigned on Thursday and released on $10,000 bond. According to police, Gravier was suspended without pay.

He faces up to two years in prison and/or a monetary fine.