Washington Post:

Chalkley took none of this seriously. Who would? As Wales Online described the inquest testimony, Chalkley “said she put the comment down to Mrs Sabine making it up, because she had heard nothing on the news which would tally with what she had said during their conversation.” After the telephone call, Chalkley said that death by stone amphibian — “Watch out or I will frog you” — became something of an in-joke among her family members. …

For 18 years, no one believed the woman who said she killed her husband with a stone frog. Then…
“It is beyond doubt in my mind,” a coroner concluded Thursday, “…that foul play was at the cause of his death.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Even the New York Times is covering the purge.

When student reporters at Mount St. Mary’s University, a small Catholic institution in Maryland, published an article in January that quoted the university’s president likening struggling freshmen to bunnies that should be drowned, they knew it might get a big reaction.

It finally came this week, it appears — in the form of a pink slip for the faculty adviser of the campus newspaper.

The university informed the adviser, Ed Egan, that he had been disloyal and was now fired, a move seen by many on the campus in Emmitsburg as a retaliatory strike.

The decision, along with other recent punishments of faculty members at Mount St. Mary’s, has triggered outrage well beyond its rural campus in northern Maryland, earning condemnation from thousands of academics across the country as well as national monitors of academic and journalistic freedom.

The report said that the administration was planning to cull struggling freshmen from the institution as part of an effort to improve retention numbers — a big factor in rankings published in outlets like U.S. News & World Report — and that the university’s president, Simon Newman, had used disturbing language to sell the idea to a skeptical professor last fall.

“This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t,” Mr. Newman is quoted as saying. “You just have to drown the bunnies.”

He added, “Put a Glock to their heads.”

Hat tip to John Brewer.

Hat tip to VA Viper.

From Steven Hayward