Mike Nifong, the North Carolina district attorney who brought trumped-up rape charges against three now-vindicated Duke lacrosse players, announced his resignation as D.A. while testifying today in his disbarment trial.

“It has become increasingly apparent, during the course of this week, in some ways that it might not have been before, that my presence as the district attorney in Durham is not furthering the cause of justice,” Nifong said, fighting back tears. “To the extent that my actions have caused pain to the Finnertys, Seligmanns and Evans, I apologize. To the extent that my actions have brought disrespect and disrepute to the Bar, to my community, I apologize.”

Joseph Cheshire, the defense attorney for one of the accused players, was not impressed: “It was an obvious cynical ploy to save his law license, and his apology to these people is far too little and comes far too late.”

Meanwhile, so far as I’m aware, there have been no apologies — not even too little, too late ones — from the “Group of 88″ Duke professors who were co-architects, along with Nifong, of this tragic and deplorable rush to judgment, publicly and stridently presuming their own students guilty until proven innocent.

Anyway, Durham-in-Wonderland has more on the Nifong trial.

P.S. Duke, incidentally, was the 2007 NCAA runner-up, losing 12-11 to Johns Hopkins in the title game last month. And in a rare example of the NCAA doing the right thing, the entire team has been granted an extra year of eligibility to make up for the one they lost when the 2006 season was cancelled because of the false allegations.

UPDATE: Nifong found guilty; disbarment decision soon:

A North Carolina prosecutor broke several rules of professional conduct during his disastrous prosecution of three white Duke University lacrosse players falsely acussed of raping a black stripper, a disciplinary committee ruled Saturday.

The committee must now decide if the longtime prosecutor, who tearfully pledged Friday to resign his post as district attorney, should be stripped of his law license. That decision was expected later Saturday.

So, this is brilliant. I just got an e-mail from Apple stating, “We need additional information about your POWERBOOK G4 (17-INCH DOUBLE-LAYER SD) before we can repair it. Please call 800-APL-CARE and refer to Repair ID [number redacted].” (Except it didn’t say “number redacted,” it had my actual ID there.) So, I dutifully called the number, and after some frustration navigating the automated menu (which doesn’t have an option like “press 5 if you got an e-mail telling you to call us”), finally reached a person at AppleCare headquarters. I gave her my Repair ID, wherepon she checked my record, saw the same message I’d gotten, and then put me on hold while she checked to see just exactly what “information” the repair technicians needed. She came back with words to the effect of: “Okay, they left a message saying they need more information, but they didn’t give any information about what information they need.” So she wrote a note to the repair techs asking for details, and said I should call back later today or on Monday morning (!).

It’s times like these I wish I had a MySpace or LiveJournal blog, so I could end this post with one of those emoticon-producing tags like “Current mood: Exasperated.”

UPDATE: Apparently the e-mail was sent out in error; they never actually needed more information. My computer is still undergoing various tests.

On the Drudge Report at last check, just below the masthead:

Heh.

God bless England.

Again with the terrorist squirrels!

I’m surprised Dave Barry isn’t all over this story.

Perhaps terrorist squirrels are also at fault for the computer problems on the international space station? Though the Russians seem more keen to blame us. To which I say, blame Canada.