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The Advocatereports four local teens accused of spending their Friday night building small bombs using a few household items, including aluminum foil and Gatorade bottles, then tossing them at people and houses, have been arrested.

East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputies on Saturday booked Blaine Burkett, 17, 16228 Chevernt Ave., Greenwell Springs, into Parish Prison on three counts of contributing to the delinquency of juveniles and counts of manufacturing and possessing a bomb, prison records show.

The three others, whose names were not released, each were booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Juvenile Detention Center on counts of manufacturing and possessing a bomb, sheriff’s spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks said.

The Sheriff’s Office did not say where or how the four learned to make the bombs.

An affidavit of probable cause, which is Burkett’s arrest document, gave this account:

Burkett told deputies that he and the others were playing “ding-dong-ditch” — a game in which a person knocks on someone’s door, then runs — when the other three decided to go to a nearby store to buy supplies to build a “homemade explosive device,” the affidavit of probable cause said.

One minor, identified only as “GA,” bought aluminum foil and Gatorade, while another, identified as “TM,” bought household cleaners and eggs, the affidavit said.

The four teens drove to an unidentified BREC park and built and exploded two test devices. Burkett said they wanted to make sure the various chemicals reacted properly with each other and would explode, according to the affidavit.

They built and exploded two more bombs before egging several parked cars at the park. Before they left, they built two more bombs.

“The second set of bombs were thrown at a group of people at their residence (unknown address) while they sat around a fire in the backyard,” the arrest document said.

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Bloomberg reports President Barack Obamasaid that racial tensions may have softened his popularity among white voters within the last two years, according to a story posted on the New Yorkermagazine’s website today.


“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,” Obama said in the article by David Remnick, appearing in the magazine’s Jan. 27 edition.

“Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president,” Obama said in his most direct comments on how race has affected his political standing since he’s been in office.

Obama’s second term has been marked by controversies including a partial government shutdown in October, revelations that the National Security Agency has gathered personal mobile phone data and the troubled rollout of health-insurance expansion.

Obama’s approval rating among all voters is 39 percent and his disapproval rating is 53 percent, according to a Gallup Poll conducted Jan. 14-16. In the 2012 presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romneywon 59 percent of the white vote, compared with Obama’s 39 percent, according to exit polling by a consortium of major news outlets. Obama won 43 percent of the white vote in 2008 against 55 percent for opponent John McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona.

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AOL Newsreports Lee Roy Myers has everything you'd expect to find in the nation's porn capital in Southern California: sets of a classroom, hospital room, locker room and a bedroom, as well as a list of porn stars waiting to perform.

But his plywood universe is not in the San Fernando Valley. It's a few paces away from the glittery casinos of the Las Vegas Strip.

"Las Vegas is a fresh town, and it's where people need the business," said Myers, whose new studio is part of a boom in X-rated production in Sin City sparked by a Los Angeles law requiring male actors to wear condoms.

The rule and potential opportunities in Nevada were the talk of the Adult Entertainment Expo this week. The annual sex industry trade show culminates Saturday with an awards ceremony for adult films.

"It's not really an option to change the way we make our movies, and moving production isn't that hard," said porn purveyor Jules Jordan, who hid out behind nearly naked models at his booth.

Jordan warned reporters not to ask him about condoms.

The voter-approved Los Angeles regulation survived a constitutional challenge, but other lawsuits are ongoing, and the industry is still waiting for the first big prophylactic bust.

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