Multiple deaths and multiple injuries have resulted from shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, according to a Fort Hood spokesman.

At least seven people are dead and as many as 20 are wounded, CNN affiliate KXXV reported, citing a Fort Hood spokesman. One person is in custody in connection with the incident, it said.

UPDATE: President Obama has been briefed

The army is saying 20 have been wounded.

UPDATE 2: Army rep says 12 dead currently… shooter was killed, was soldier and 2 additional arrested (also soldiers)

UPDATE 3: Gunman identified as Major Malik Nadal Hasan

UPDATE 4: VIDEO: President Obama on the “horrific outburst of violence”

Transcript of President Obama’s remarks

UPDATE 5: I should note that I find the constant cable news appearances of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson to be unseemly. Other pols have come on from the area (Republican) and have not been as icky as Hutchinson.

UPDATE 6: Army now reports that the shooter – Hassan – is not dead. He’s alive.

Backstory.

President Obama on Wednesday signed a law that makes it a federal crime to assault an individual because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity.

The expanded federal hate crimes law was added to a $680 billion defense authorization bill that Obama signed at a packed White House ceremony.

The hate crimes measure was named for Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming teenager who died after being kidnapped and severely beaten in October 1998, and James Byrd Jr., an African-American man dragged to death in Texas the same year.

The 68-to-29 vote sends the legislation to President Obama, who has said he supports it.

The measure, attached to an essential military-spending bill, broadens the definition of federal hate crimes to include those committed because of a victim’s gender or gender identity, or sexual orientation. It gives victims the same federal safeguards already afforded to people who are victims of violent crimes because of their race, color, religion or national origin.

The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency’s overall mission.

The Secret Service is tracking a far broader range of possible threats to the nation’s leaders, the officials said, even as it also investigates financial crimes such as counterfeiting as part of its original mandate.

The new demands are leading some officials, both inside and outside the agency, to raise the possibility of the service curtailing or dropping its role in fighting financial crime to focus more on protecting leaders and their families from assassination attempts and thwarting terrorist plots aimed at high-profile events.

Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.

More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming “giant concentration camps,” a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years.

It’s a Cold War-era nightmare vision with a major twist: The occupying forces in this imagined future are American, not Soviet.

“The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer, said in an interview with the Review-Journal. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.

The White House is placing a major vote of confidence in J Street, the left-leaning Jewish group whose conference later this month has become the focus of a battle over the group’s place in American Middle East politics.

National Security Adviser Jim Jones will be the keynote speaker at the conference, a J Street official, Hadar Susskind, confirms.

Nationally syndicated radio host Tom Joyner is asking South Carolina to posthumously pardon two of his great-uncles – black landowners executed in 1915 after being convicted of murdering an elderly Confederate Army veteran.

Joyner learned of the fate of his great-uncles, farmers Thomas and Meeks Griffin, during filming of the PBS documentary ‘African American Lives 2,’ which first aired in February 2008 and was based on research by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

…

‘The records will show they did not do what they were executed for, and maybe now they can rest in peace,’ Joyner said from his Dallas studio.”

Far right sites have been spreading a post around today by blogger Anne Leary, who wrote that she ran into Obama acquaintance and 2008 election albatross Bill Ayers at an airport. Leary writes how Ayers, unprompted, unleashed a long-winded confession confirming one of the more absurd conspiracy theories floating around the fringes: that Ayers secretly authored Obama’s bestselling memoir, Dreams From My Father.’

I e-mailed Ayers to see if he could shed any light on the story. His response:

‘You’ve all lost your minds,’ he wrote. ‘Best of luck in the twilight zone.’

RELATED: Which Bloggers Feel for the Bill Ayers Prank?