Midday Roundup: Teacher describes horrific school shooting on 911 tapes

Caught on tape. Officials have released the 911 tapes from last month’s school cafeteria shooting in Washington state. On the tapes, first-year teacher Megan Silberberger tells dispatchers how she tried to stop shooter Jaylen Fryberg before he killed himself. “Blood is everywhere. I do not see the gun. I have him down. … I need help now,” she said. Locals have hailed Silberberger as a hero for calmly confronting Fryberg and attempting to stop the bloodshed.

Conservative agenda. The House is set to vote Friday on approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Republicans, hot off their successes in last week’s midterm election, tout the pipeline as a way to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and decrease U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East. Environmentalists loathe the project, and President Barack Obama has not said whether he would sign a bill approving it.

Hate mail. In a letter to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI derided the civil rights leader as evil and tried to bully him into committing suicide, The New York Times revealed. The letter has been known to exist for some time, but Times reporter Beverly Gage recently found an un-redacted copy of it in the National Archives. Former FBI direct J. Edgar Hoover was known to despise King and considered him a threat to national security. The letter shows how out-of-control Hoover’s FBI was, but also calls attention to the less savory side of King’s life. The letter condemns King for having extramarital affairs and threatens to expose them to the press. In fact, the FBI did leak details from its surveillance of King to the media, but stories about King’s sex life never took off. “Today it is almost impossible to imagine the press refusing a juicy story,” Gage wrote. “Faced with today’s political environment, perhaps King would have made different decisions in his personal affairs. Perhaps, though, he never would have had the chance to emerge as the public leader he ultimately became.”

Coppertop swap. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company will buy the battery brand Duracell from Procter & Gamble (P&G), the companies announced today. The move comes as P&G works to cut down the number of consumer products it makes. As part of the sale, P&G will get back about $4.7 billion of its stock that Berkshire Hathaway owns. “I have always been impressed by Duracell, as a consumer and as a long-term investor in P&G and Gillette,” Buffett said in a prepared statement.

Sky-high rescue. Two window washers are doing well after firefighters rescued them from a malfunctioning scaffold on the side of the new 1 World Trade Center skyscraper. The workers were 68 stories up when a cable in their rigging went slack and left their platform dangling nearly vertically. The workers, who were harnessed into the platform, held on for two hours. Firefighters cut a hole in an exterior pane of glass and pulled them into the building. Rescue 1, one of the crews that rescued Juan Lizama and Juan Lopez also responded to the same site on Sept. 11, 2001. Eleven members of Rescue 1 died that day.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.