In a bizarre and tragic story out of Alabama, police say the car fire that left a local college football reporter with burns over the majority of her body was started by the reporter herself.

In September, an Alabama judge was recorded giving a mandate to the offenders assembled before him, all of whom owed money for fees stemming from their crimes. They could pay up, they could go to jail, or they could give a pint of their blood.

Facing a state budget reduction, Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency opted to cut driver-licensing services at 31 satellite offices, serving 28 counties. Twelve to fifteen of the affected counties are in Alabama’s “black belt,” and every Alabama county where black people make up 75% or more of registered voters. That’s troubling because, since last year, Alabama has required government ID to vote.

An Alabama man was arrested for three counts of attempted murder today after authorities say he opened fire in a church in Selma, Alabama, injuring his girlfriend, their newborn child and a clergyman that attempted to stop him, NBC News reports.

Rising inequality. Irreversible climate change. A possible third Grown Ups movie. These are just a few of the challenges facing America in the 21st Century. Luckily, our country is protected by our almighty creator who (when he isn’t smiting eponymous fast food chains) is apparently telling our legislators to address pressing issues like publicly exposed boxer shorts.

Montez Spradley, who was convicted of murder and spent nearly ten years in prison in Alabama—including more than three years on Death Row—has been released from prison, his conviction overturned. Gawker published a letter from Spradley in 2013.

Last week, Dianne Bentley filed for divorce from her husband of 50 years, Robert Bentley, who has served as the Republican governor of Alabama since 2011. While Dianne Bentley’s initial petition refers to “an irretrievable breakdown” of her marriage, several Alabama media outlets—along with many local political insiders—have put forth a much more specific explanation: Dianne Bentley came to believe that her husband had an ongoing affair with a female staffer many decades his junior. No one involved—not the wife, the husband, or the alleged paramour—have attempted to refute the allegations.

“In a five-year period ending in 2010, according to a lawsuit, prosecutors in Houston and Henry Counties in Alabama used peremptory strikes to remove 82 percent of eligible black potential jurors from trials in which the death penalty was imposed.”

An Alexander City, Alabama, police officer was recorded speculating about murdering a black man named Vincent Bias, and kept his job after the incident, the Guardian reports.

A recently filed federal lawsuit has accused police officers in Alabama of tasering a 16-year-old girl multiple times, binding and gagging her and threatening to have her committed to mental hospital—all for the apparent crime of having a seizure in public, The Washington Post reports.

Following the lead of his colleagues in South Carolina and Virginia, this morning Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley ordered the removal of the four confederate flags flying at the state’s Capitol in Montgomery.

The City of Anniston, Alabama has placed two police officers on administrative leave while it investigates accusations they belong to a secessionist hate group, AL.com reports.

An Alabama man, accused of third-degree assault, attempted to wiggle out of his legal trouble by wiggling out of his pants. He reportedly showed the alleged assault victim his dumb penis and asked her to drop the charges. To everyone’s absolute and total shock, he was unable to make his problems disappear merely by waving his dick like a magic wand.

If you needed to run yonder to Bessemer for that easement to cross Scuzz McWhorter’s field so’s you can dig up all the lead shot what gramma’s blasted out there from the kitchen porch over all these years, let it wait till Tuesday, son: Alabama done went down to the beach in honor of the Confederacy!

Authorities say an Alabama man charged with murder this weekend beat his mother to death following an argument about his college grades, CNN reports.

On Monday afternoon, Etowah County Circuit Judge Billy Ogletree will sentence Joyce Hardin Garrard, 50, to either the death penalty or life in prison, the Associated Press reports. Garrard was convicted in March of killing her granddaughter after she told a lie about candy.

After being sentenced to death nearly three decades ago, Anthony Ray Hinton has been exonerated and was released on Friday. The Jefferson County district attorney's office moved to drop the case on Wednesday, after years of appeals that ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court.

The story of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches has been documented countless times. What hasn't been explored with the same scope is the effect these momentous events had on townspeople living in Selma during that period. Growing up, my mom shipped me to Selma every summer to stay with my grandmother, Bernice McMillian, choosing the familiar streets of where she grew up instead of letting me run wild in Chicago. It's as big a part of who I am as anything else. In the interest of posterity, I reached out to people who were around during the events of that month.

A suspected—and determined—shoplifter at a Walmart in Mobile, Ala. managed to escape store security Wednesday by climbing up into the store's ventilation system. From there, he crawled his way to the store's entrance, kicked through the ceiling, jumped down, and fled.

President Barack Obama delivered a speech on Saturday from the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and site of what came to be known as "Bloody Sunday"—addressing race in America. "What happened in Ferguson may not be unique," he said, "but it's no longer endemic. It's no longer sanctioned by law or custom, and before the civil rights movement, it most surely was."