The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is being sued by a woman who says that officers violated her civil rights when they pepper-sprayed her entire family - including a 2-year-old child and a 5-month-old baby.

In the lawsuit obtained by Courthouse News Service on Monday, Marilyn Taylor accuses Officers Maripily Clase, Suranjit Dey and Jermaine Hodge overacting when they saw her pushing the stroller through a service entrance instead of going through the subway turnstile.

According to the complaint, officers told her 4-year-old child that "everything will be OK," but then began pepper-spraying the entire family.

"The pepper-spray caused the children to scream out and choked the two-year old, who went into fits of vomiting," the lawsuit says. "Ms. Taylor was then placed in handcuffs as the minor children cried in fear and pain."

Televangelist Pat Robertson on Monday explained to his viewers that "sophisticated" Americans received less miracles because they had learned "things that says God isn't real" like evolution.

On Monday's episode of CBN's The 700 Club, Robertson responded to a viewer who wanted to know why "amazing miracles (people raised from the dead, blind eyes open, lame people walking) happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA?"

"People overseas didn't go to Ivy League schools," the TV preacher laughed. "We're so sophisticated, we think we've got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn't real."

Colorado, and apparently Texas (next) are being targeted with an attempt to set up a federal authority framework that will enable Secret Service agents (not just those guarding the president), and others of the U.S. Secret Service including uniformed division officers, physical security technicians and specialists, and other 'special officers', to arrest and remove an elected sheriff for refusing to enforce the law (or anyone breaking the law).

The bills being introduced defines law as including any rule, regulation, executive order, court order, statute or constitutional provision.

Why are they doing this? Here's why...

It would establish federal authority police powers in a State, enabling an enforcement arm reporting directly to the president (the Secret Service).

It would potentially lead to enabling the president / executive branch to theoretically override the actions and preventative measures that are now being taken by many States throughout the country who are trying to preserve 2nd Amendment gun rights and who are prohibiting the enforcement of unconstitutional law passed by Congress or pushed by executive order.

As some of you may know, a growing list of sheriffs (more than 340 so far) across the country have expressed that they will not enforce a Washington mandate that clearly violates the Second Amendment.

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor's 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market's last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later - within a few years, I predict - this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation's bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

Mortar shell fired from Syria strikes Tel Fares, patrol in Tel Hazeka comes under gunfire; Defense Minister Ya'alon said prior to attack on first visit to Syria border that Israel would respond to any security incident; also Tuesday, two Gaza rocket landed in western Negev.
A mortar shell fired from Syria landed in the Israeli Golan Heights on Tuesday evening, and an Israel Defense Forces patrol came under gunfire in a separate area of the northern territory.

IDF tanks fired shells into Syria in response to the gunfire, which struck near a patrol in Tel Hazeka. There was no word yet of casualties on the Syrian side. The same area has come under fire from Syria in the past, and was the site of Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon's first tour to the Golan border earlier on Tuesday.

Shrapnel from the mortar shell hit an IDF jeep touring in the central Golan Heights, near Tel Fares. The jeep sustained light damage, but no casualties were reported in either the shell or light fire incident.

A month ago we pointed out that as a result of Australia's unprecedented reliance on China as a target export market, accounting for nearly 30% of all Australian exports (with the flipside being just as true, as Australia now is the fifth-biggest source of Chinese imports), the two countries may as well be joined at the hip.

Over the weekend, Australia appears to have come to the same conclusion, with the Australian reporting that the land down under is set to say goodbye to the world's "reserve currency" in its trade dealings with the world's biggest marginal economic power, China, and will enable the direct convertibility of the Australian dollar into Chinese yuan, without US Dollar intermediation, in the process "slashing costs for thousands of business" and also confirming speculation that China is fully intent on, little by little, chipping away at the dollar's reserve currency status until one day it no longer is.

That said, this latest development in global currency relations should come as no surprise to those who have followed our series on China's slow but certain internationalization of its currency over the past two years. To wit: "World's Second (China) And Third Largest (Japan) Economies To Bypass Dollar, Engage In Direct Currency Trade", "China, Russia Drop Dollar In Bilateral Trade", "China And Iran To Bypass Dollar, Plan Oil Barter System", "India and Japan sign new $15bn currency swap agreement", "Iran, Russia Replace Dollar With Rial, Ruble in Trade, Fars Says", "India Joins Asian Dollar Exclusion Zone, Will Transact With Iran In Rupees", and "The USD Trap Is Closing: Dollar Exclusion Zone Crosses The Pacific As Brazil Signs China Currency Swap."

And while previously the focus was on Chinese currency swap arrangements, the uniqueness of this weekend's news is that it promotes outright convertibility of the Yuan: something China has long said would happen but many were skeptical it ever would. That is no longer the case, and with Australia setting the precedent, expect many more Asian countries (at first) to follow in Australia's footsteps, because while the developed world is far more engaged in diluting its currency as a means to spur "growth", Asian and developing world nations are still engage in real, actual trade, where China is rapidly and aggressively becoming the world's hub.

The "American empire" will fall this year, the head of Iran's Basij forces claimed Sunday, a message that was approved by the Islamic regime's supreme leader.

"America should not think that with some diplomatic dialogue it can solve its dossier (problem) with the nation of Iran," Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi said. "The path of this land is directed by the martyrs. America with its hollow slogans ... thinks the Iranian nation will believe it."

The Basij commander was speaking to an audience of the 10th conference of "Journey of Enlightened Land" commemorating the "martyrs" of the eight-year war with Iraq, according to the Journalist Club, an outlet run by the Revolutionary Guards intelligence division.

Naghdi called President Obama's actions deceitful, saying, "Obama in letters sent to the Islamic Republic promised to put an end to the Iranian nuclear dossier but ... reacted in a different way."

Two F-22 fighter jets now in South Korea could allow the U.S. to support a limited counterattack if North Korea follows through on its threats of recent weeks, according to military analysts.

In 2010, South Korea responded to artillery fire from the North with its own shelling, said Bruce Bennett, a military analyst at the RAND Corp. think tank. The F-22s, the world's most advanced warplanes, could be used to destroy artillery command and control facilities deeper inside North Korea, Bennett said.

"The aircraft could reach those targets pretty securely," Bennett said. "And they could deal with it promptly. Only sending a couple says we're not starting a major war."

Nonetheless, an airstrike on North Korean soil would be a significant escalation that could trigger an even larger response by the nuclear-armed regime. The hope, Bennett speculated, is that the presence of the radar-evading jets will be enough to prove U.S.-South Korean resolve and prevent an attack from the North.

China has placed military forces on heightened alert in the northeastern part of the country as tensions mount on the Korean peninsula following recent threats by Pyongyang to attack, U.S. officials said.

Reports from the region reveal the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) recently increased its military posture in response to the heightened tensions, specifically North Korea's declaration of a "state of war" and threats to conduct missile attacks against the United States and South Korea.

According to the officials, the PLA has stepped up military mobilization in the border region with North Korea since mid-March, including troop movements and warplane activity.

China's navy also conducted live-firing naval drills by warships in the Yellow Sea that were set to end Monday near the Korean peninsula, in apparent support of North Korea, which was angered by ongoing U.S.-South Korean military drills that are set to continue throughout April.

North Korea, meanwhile, is mobilizing missile forces, including road-mobile short- and medium-range missiles, according to officials familiar with satellite imagery of missile bases.

This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing "wealth gap" in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. Johnson, who cut his film teeth at NYU and made the Emmy®-nominated 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich, here sets his sights on exploring the political, moral and emotional rationale that enables a tiny percentage of Americans - the one percent - to control nearly half the wealth of the entire United States. The film Includes interviews with Nicole Buffett, Bill Gates Sr., Adnan Khashoggi, Milton Friedman, Robert Reich, Ralph Nader and other luminaries.