Good morning, Washington. Are ya ready for some embezzlement scandal news? Of course you are! This morning's update comes not from the embattled Office of Tax and Revenue, but rather from the D.C. Public Schools front office, as the Examiner reports that Eugene Smith, the former director of internal audits for DCPS, entered a guilty plea yesterday to charges of stealing nearly $50,000 from a charter school account. Smith was fired by the school system......

The Supreme Court has announced that it will take on Heller v. District of Columbia, the D.C. handgun case, and decide whether our city's ban on handguns violates the Constitution. The Court will likely hear the case sometime in March, with a decision to come later in the session. The case will mark the first time the Court has taken up the meaning of the Second Amendment in almost 70 years, and the decision could......

...ummm, nothing yet. According to the Associated Press, the Supreme Court failed to reach a decision on whether or not to hear a case related to the District's gun laws. Though a verdict from last week's conference discussion was possible today, it seems that the nine justices haven't yet decided if they want to take the case, which stems from a March decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District Circuit that ruled......

Good morning, Washington. It's Friday, and the city is still reacting to yesterday afternoon's announcement about how our new taxi meters are going to work. We already told you about the $4 flag drop, which many people are already saying is too high, and the fact that taxi roof lights will go on and off automatically to indicate whether a cab has a passenger, which everyone seems to agree is long overdue. One more thing......

>> Candey Hardware on 18th and Connecticut is closing its doors for good tonight. [Free Ride] >> Police Chief Cathy Lanier has scheduled another "All Hands on Deck" weekend after four murders took place in D.C.'s Fifth District over the past week. [WJLA] >> Surprise, surprise, the O Street Market development plans are being delayed. [ANC2C02 Forum via 14th & You] >> Va. Sen. John Warner is back in the hospital for a third......

You'd think potentially violent criminals would know by now: if you injure someone anywhere near your favorite hang out spot in Ward 1, Council member Jim Graham is going to swoop in and ruin the fun for everyone else. If the possibility of being locked up in the terrifying confines of the D.C. Jail isn't enough of a deterrent, having all your friends be totally pissed at you for getting the place where they like......

Even if the Employment Non-Discrimination Act will move forward without the transgender segment of the LGBT community, the District's transgender residents did score a victory yesterday. D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier issued a department general order on how transgender citizens should be treated by MPD officers when placed under arrest. In June, the DC Trans Coalition organized a forum to discuss changes needed from D.C.'s police, fire and emergency medical services with regards to the......

Good morning, Washington. Remember that recent weird burglary at Ward 8 Council member Marion Barry's house -- the one that Barry seemingly didn't want investigated in favor of telling the police they had more important things to do? Well, Harry Jaffe got hold of the police report, and it turns out Barry may have had good reason not to want it looked at it too closely. Apparently the former mayor had a large collection of......

Last week we pointed out a Hollywood Reporter story that says there's a FOX television show in development inspired by the life of D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier. Lanier's life is certainly the stuff of a good drama -- being a 39-year-old single mother who dropped out of high school after getting pregnant at 14, only to work her way to the top to become D.C.'s first female police chief, can't have been easy. Yesterday......

>> Runners at the Army Ten-miler are saying there wasn't enough water on the race course. [WTOP] >> Former Mayor Anthony Williams hearts Jenna Bush's new book. [Capital Comment] >> D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier speaks out to defend the records and reputations of the two officers involved in the killing of DeOnte Rawlings, while his father calls for their arrest. [WaPo and WJLA] >> Columbia Heights day was a bit of a bust.......

>> Right there is the Laura Sessions Stepp Credo: Laura doesn't "get it" so the "social culture" is broken. [DCeiver] >> Don't miss the ABC News coverage of the 5-year anniversary of the D.C.-area sniper shooting spree. What do you think of Lee Boyd Malvo's apology? [ABC News] >> Oh c'mon, don't you get it? Kids can say they're going to "The Library" and not be lying! It's totally hilarious. [Free Ride] >> Regarding......

On Monday morning at a little after 11 a.m., we noticed a pair of beat cops walking along U Street NW near 12th Street. In many other cities, this would certainly be nothing to take note of, but in D.C., the cries from neighborhood associations and individual residents for more officers to patrol on foot have been heard for years. Police Chief Cathy Lanier thus rightly made a big deal out of increasing the number......

Good morning, Washington. Have you recovered from yesterday's local sports emotional rollercoaster yet? The Nationals bid farewell to RFK, and managed to close out their time there with a 5-3 victory over the Phillies. The Redskins, on the other hand, well ... we might still not be ready to talk about that last drive. Yet despite the despondent football fans across the region this morning, we get the sense that no one is sadder than......

Good morning, Washington, and welcome to September. After what was quite possibly the most beautiful weekend in the history of late summer weather in this city, we've finally arrived at the date many of us still associate with "back-to-school" -- the Tuesday after Labor Day. So sharpen your pencils, polish your lunchbox and make sure you have the right Trapper Keeper as we check out today's headlines. At Least Four Weekend Killings: The Examiner......

While he worked the crowd last Saturday at Eastern Market's re-opening, Mayor Adrian Fenty again made it clear that he likes to keep connected to city affairs at all times. Hanging from his belt were his famous three Blackberries -- one for mayoral duties, one for personal responsibilities and one for immediate contact with Police Chief Cathy Lanier. Rumors have circulated that he may be in the market for a fourth. Photo by Martin......

It's not exactly a banner day for D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier. The Examiner takes the chief to task a bit this morning for her latest "All Hands on Deck" initiative: four people were shot in the course of an hour during the second night of the effort, which also coincided with National Night Out events, and the force is seriously short handed today as well as Wednesday and Friday to avoid spending millions on......

>> Mayor Adrian Fenty has chosen Clark Ray to serve as the city’s director of the Department of Parks and Recreation. Ray was previously the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Relations and Services. >> D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has called for her third summertime "All Hands on Deck" initiative for Monday and Tuesday, to coincide with Tuesday's National Night Out. The last "All Hands on Deck," when Lanier requires all MPD......

In case you missed this great Post article from Clarence Williams and Elissa Silverman this morning, be sure and read the whole thing. It's the story of Simon Mahteme, owner of LeDroit Park Market, the center of a neighborhood struggling to improve itself in the face of continuing crime and violence. Mahteme's store has been broken into ten times since October, and after this last incident, he had a customer help him place the......

Good morning, Washington. It's hot again out there today, with highs expected in the upper 90s, and folks in the city are understandably getting a little hot under the collar. Take Duane Stillions, who ABC7 reports was attacked by a pit bull on July 4 while walking his two small dogs. One of his dogs, Molly, a ten-pound Bichon Frise, is hospitalized in intensive care at a cost of $1,000 a day, and Stillions is......

It looks like Police Chief Cathy Lanier might have to go back to the drawing board. After her new summer crime initiative enjoyed a successful rollout with a full-scale police deployment and a record number of weekend arrests two weeks back, this last weekend wasn't nearly as peaceful. According to WJLA, four seperate shootings over a two-hour period on Saturday night and Sunday morning (two dead, two injured) forced Lanier to call a meeting today......

When Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier introduced their new strategy for tackling the District's stubborn crime problem late last week, we expressed some skepticism. After all, "new" strategies come along about as often as school superintendents, neither of which have proven to be particularly good at fixing what they have to fix. But we might have reasons to be hopeful. Beyond today's news that the weekend's all-out deployment netted nearly 500 arrests,......

Summer is fast approaching, and that means public pools, barbeques and the inevitable jump in crime. But unlike in years past, city officials are handling this one differently. In an announcement earlier today, Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier announced that all 3,300 of the department's officers would work this weekend, part of a larger plan called the All Hands on Deck Summer Crime Initiative aimed at more effectively deploying resources to prevent......

As Southwest's H2O night club enters its second week of a city-imposed shutdown after a weekend shooting left one man dead outside the club in late May, questions remain as to what happened and why the club remains shuttered. In a hearing before the D.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Board last Thursday, city officials forcefully argued that the club remained a threat and revealed that Rashod Holmes, the gunman accused of killing Nelson Able outside the......

The story usually follows the same line -- a night club is the scene of a violent incident, the District responds by temporarily shutting it down and it invariably loses its liquor license and goes out of business. It happened at Club U, at Kili's Kafe and at Club 1919. And after a fatal shooting over the weekend at H20, the swanky waterfront club may be next. One man was shot and killed in an......

OK OK, so maybe it's not technically "morning" anymore. DCist is on vacation for the day, and we slept in before we started browsing today's headlines. We hope you're enjoying the holiday with good food and good friends, and we'd like to dedicate this roundup to all of our readers who serve in the armed forces. The photo at right by Flickr user Karon is of yesterday's Rolling Thunder motorcycle parade, which celebrated its 20th......

Good morning, Washington. We're not sure how last night's 2nd Republican debate could have been any more entertaining, so in case you missed it, the Politico has a nice collection of some of the highlights. There's going to be many, many more presidential primary debates over the course of the year, so we thought we'd take some nominations from you on the best bars in town to watch them. Nothing goes better with debating than......

We couldn't help but notice these odd signs popping up on the windows of businesses all along the U Street Corridor in the last month. "This Business is Being Monitored by the U Street Sheriff's Department" sounds a bit like a smart-alecky joke. Obviously the District has no sheriff's department at all, let alone one that only serves U Street. So what exactly are these signs? We could imagine a business version of "Beware of......

No, these adorable critters don't have anything to do with the last post of the day. We just finished watching many hours of Planet Earth and are now looking for ways to make blogging "green". See, Al Gore, DCist loves Mother Nature and all her creatures. Well, most of them. >> We also love all sorts of maps. Now we've been informed that National Geographic's awesome array of maps are online. Let the cartographic......

Wednesday, when a genial Police Chief Cathy Lanier met with the public, she addressed many sundry concerns about getting officers more time for crime prevention and increased face time with residents and business owners. Of course, with these lofty goals come a familiar set of barriers, among them paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. Apparently carrying a gun doesn't exempt you from the tiny-cut-giving task of shuffling paper after just about any arrest or incident.......

Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) is well known for being thoughtful, energetic, and responsive to the needs of his constitutents. He lords over the District's most diverse and vibrant ward, participating in discussions on everything from transportation to crime to consumer and regulatory affairs. It was no surprise, then, that Graham dove headfirst into last Saturday's tragic killing of 17-year-old Taleshia Ford at Club 1919. He quickly informed constituents of the night's events, pushed Police......