The annual "mayfly hatch," as it's so charmingly known in towns along the Mississippi River, has yielded a specific kind of repulsion the past few days as the pests that commonly hatch along river towns have burst onto everything from gas pumps to soda machines to busy roads, causing car accidents.

Chris McDaniel, who narrowly lost Mississippi's GOP Senate primary to incumbent Thad Cochran last week, told a crowd Saturday that his loss was "clearly the most unethical election in the history of this state" and also "the most illegal," apparently forgetting that Mississippi also existed from 1866 to 1965.

Immediately after the Mississippi Republican Party certified incumbent Thad Cochran as the winner of its Senate primary today, the Senate Conservatives Fund wired $70,000 to his Tea Party opponent to challenge the result. The fund is run by Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP's foremost expert on losing elections.

This was predictable. The war between a Tea Party conservative and the sitting senator he challenged in Mississippi's GOP primary last month is intensifying, with name-calling, Baba Booey-style gonzo tactics, and pearl-clutching accusations of voter fraud involving black Democrats. Deep South, y'all!

It's no secret that Democrats in Mississippi, consigned to losing the general Senate election in November, turned out Tuesday night to support incumbent Republican Thad Cochran against a Tea Party primary challenger. But in doing so, they may have run afoul of state election laws.

In response to longtime-establishment Senator Thad Cochran's outreach to Democrats, Tea Party organizations plan to deploy poll watchers for tomorrow's Republican senate runoff election in Mississippi.

KFC has issued a $30,000 apology to the family of a 3-year-old Mississippi girl who was asked to leave one of their restaurants because her scarred face was "disrupting our customers."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit will hear arguments next week regarding a 2012 law that would force the only remaining clinic in Mississippi to close, making it the first state in the nation without an abortion clinic. Not one.

A fraternity chapter at the University of Mississippi has been shut down after three members hung a noose around the neck of a statue of James Meredith, the university's first-ever black student.

The good news: Mississippi is finally teaching sex ed. The bad news: "The curricula adopted by the school district in Oxford called on students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became."

Early Thursday morning, workers at a funeral home were shocked when they found a man alive—and literally kicking—inside one of their body bags. The man was set to be embalmed later that morning.

Last week, a Mississippi man finally pled guilty to mailing President Obama a ricin-laden letter and trying to frame an Elvis impersonator for the crime. Tuesday, he settled other legal business: confessing that he inappropriately touched little girls at his karate studio, Tupelo Taekwondo Plus.

For more than a century, the state of Mississippi has allowed the inmates of its prison system to behave as if they are human beings capable of familial relationships, providing well-behaved prisoners the chance to briefly spend time alone with their spouses. On February 1, falling in line with prevailing trends in American justice, the state will stop allowing the visits.

That thing in the picture isn't an old granary of the side of I-95. It's a half-finished state-of-the-art test stand for a series of planned space rockets that the U.S. decided not to construct. But the stand is getting finished anyway. Enjoy it, America! You paid more than a third of a billion dollars for it.

Tae Kwon Do instructor J. Everett Dutschke was arrested in April for the outlandish crime of sending ricin-tainted letters to public figures and then trying to frame his archenemy, an Elvis impersonator named Paul Kevin Curtis, with the poisoning attempts. The story immediately became freak-show fodder, complete with a long GQ article that went back to the origin of Dutschke and Curtis' rivalry. Today that story continues, as Dutschke has been charged with again attempting the same ridiculous crime, this time from behind bars.

The bodies of a family missing since Saturday morning have been found in an abandoned home outside of Jackson, Mississippi. Police have arrested Timothy Lydell Burns, 42, on charges of murder and arson.

Authorities in Mississippi are currently searching for a family considered missing and “endangered” after discovering the family’s abandoned and overturned car in a Hermanville, Miss. ditch on Saturday morning. Altira Hughes-Smith, 30, her 7-year-old-son Jaidon Hill, and her husband, Laterry Smith, 34, were last seen driving their car on Friday after leaving a Halloween party in Flowood.

Intrepid Mississippians tracked down the state's largest alligator, and killed it.

Jackson, Mississippi's longstanding and widespread pothole problem is finally getting fixed. Not by the city, mind you, but by an ordinary citizen known to the community as "the Robin Hood of potholes."

Today, the ACLU announced that it is filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, a private prison in Meridian, Mississippi. The suit alleges that EMCF is "hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous." One example of the jail's dangers: this handwritten letter from an inmate describing his own rape.