John Davis faces a $500 fine for littering after accidentally dropping a dollar on the ground as he was giving it to a panhandler.


John Davis didn't come up with the phrase, "No good deed goes unpunished," but it's understandable if he now believes.

Davis, who lives in Elyria, Ohio, recently exited a freeway offramp when he saw a man in a wheelchair holding a sign with a religious sentiment and also a request for help.

Having a brother who is paralyzed, Davis sympathized with the man's plight, reached into his wallet and grabbed a couple of bucks to give to the man.

Once upon a time, the largest U.S. cities were the envy of the entire world. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Sure, there are areas of New York City, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles that are still absolutely beautiful but for the most part our major cities are rapidly rotting and decaying. Cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland were all once places where middle class American workers thrived and raised their families.

Today, all of those cities are rapidly being transformed into cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness. Millions of good jobs have left our major cities in recent decades and poverty has absolutely exploded. Basically, you can turn out the lights because the party is over. In fact, some major U.S. cities are literally turning out the lights. In Detroit, about 40 percent of the streetlights are already broken and the city cannot afford to repair them. So Mayor Bing has come up with a plan to cut the number of operating streetlights almost in half and leave vast sections of the city totally in the dark at night. I wonder what that will do to the crime rate in the city. But don't look down on Detroit too much, because what is happening in Detroit will be happening where you live soon enough.

A recent Bloomberg article described Mayor Bing's plan to eliminate nearly half of Detroit's streetlights....

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can't afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing's plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

What this means is that there are going to be a lot of neighborhoods that will have the lights turned off permanently.

So which neighborhoods will those be?

According to one top Detroit official, "distressed areas" are going to be on the low end of the totem pole....

"You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population," said Chris Brown, Detroit's chief operating officer. "We're not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas."

City officials know that they cannot force people to move from "distressed areas", so they are going to encourage them to leave by cutting off services.

But turning off the lights is not the only way that Detroit is trying to save money.

Recently, officials in Detroit announced that all police stations in the city will be closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

It is so sad to see what is happening to what was once such a great city.

A 60-year-old man and his 90-year-old mother jumped off the roof of their apartment block in Vathy Square, near central Athens, early on Thursday in a double suicide that appeared to have been prompted by financial woes.

No suicide note was found but a short despair-filled text was uploaded onto a poem-sharing website late on Wednesday by a man called Antonis Perris. "I don't see any way out. I have property but no cash at all, so what am I going to do about food?" he wrote, adding that his mother had Alzheimer's while he had a terminal illness. "I don't have many days left, I am very sick," he wrote. The note is followed by a string of comments posted afterward by readers wishing him well and then notes of sorrow as of Thursday morning.

After a study published last year labeled viewers of Fox News as grossly misinformed, the researchers who conducted the poll have expanded their work and now confirm, again, that the network's audience might want to consider changing the channel.

Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University conducted a study last year that yielded some inarguably unsurprising information about Fox News' viewership. At the time, researchers concluded that, based off of a study that sampled residents of New Jersey, people that only watch Fox News are less informed on current events than people that don't watch cable news at all. Now only months later, the school's researchers have published their finding of a similar study that calls on a sample of participants from coast-to-coast and, according to the results, confirm that their earlier report wasn't a fluke.

According to the latest study, Americans who watch only Fox News to learn about current events are indeed less informed than most everyone else.

The report reveals that, on average, American's are able to correctly answer 1.8 out of 4 questions on international news and 1.6 of 5 questions when quizzed on domestic issues. For those that disregard the television for taking in daily newscasts, they averaged 1.22 answers correctly.

Fox viewers, of course, were a different story.

A fire on a $900 million nuclear submarine stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard caused injuries to six people and was still burning early this morning.

The cause of the fire in the nuclear-powered USS Miami attack submarine remained unknown as of an 11:30 p.m. news conference, said Capt. Bryant Fuller, commander of the shipyard.

"While the fire is not out, the situation is improving," Fuller said.

Shipyard firefighters were first called to the dry docks at 5:41 p.m. The fire started in the forward compartment, which Fuller said consists of primarily living quarters and command and control spaces. All nonessential personnel were ordered to evacuate, officials said.

Just after 10 p.m., the fire aboard the submarine, docked at Dry Dock 2, went to four alarms and fire dispatchers were describing the fire as "moderate."

Dog Expert Victoria Stilwell "Shocked" At Lennox's Health Condition

Victoria Stilwell, celebrity dog trainer and presenter of hit TV show "It's Me Or The Dog" has openly spoken out in support of Lennox since hearing of his plight in 2010. After extensively studying all Lennox assessment videos Victoria also submitted her own report as an expert dog behaviorist to the Northern Ireland courts stating that Lennox poses no danger to public and that he clearly demonstrates amazing self control even while put under stressful circumstances, however as we now know Judge Rodgers in the September 2011 appeal hearing decided to ignore all expert evidence presented to him from such experts as Sarah Fisher, Victoria Stilwell and past evidence held on record by David Ryan, instead Judge Rodgers accepted the non expert evidence from Peter Tallack a retired police dog handler who admits not having any behavioral expertise.

In the October 2011 edition of Victoria Stilwell's Positively Podcast the main topic was Lennox. In this edition Victoria spoke about many things regarding the Lennox case and she also expressed concern regarding Lennox's current skin condition after she had witnessed his poor fur condition and awful sores visible on his skin whilst she had been compiling her report from various assessment videos.

Lennox always had a slight skin condition and such was well controlled and treated by his family while at home and many people who know Lennox and had seen Lennox prior to his seizure by the Belfast City Council dog warden would not have been at all aware that he had a skin aliment due to the ongoing treatment and quality of care his family had been giving Lennox. Speaking to her co-host about Lennox's skin condition whilst in the so called care of Belfast City Council.

Iran's navy helped a U.S.-flagged cargo ship that was attacked by pirates off the United Arab Emirates, according to the vessel's owner, Maersk Line Ltd.

The Iranian navy was the first to respond to the initial distress call from the Maersk Texas, Kevin Speers, senior director of marketing at Maersk Line, said by phone today. The vessel was attacked by several skiffs and armed guards on board returned fire, the company said in an earlier statement.

The incident happened at about noon northeast of Fujairah, the biggest port in the Middle East for refueling oil tankers, Maersk said. Iran's navy provided guidance to the crew of the Maersk Texas by radio, Speers said, declining to comment further pending a debriefing.

Sexual misconduct by male correctional staff toward inmates at Alabama's Tutwiler Prison for Women is "commonplace" and has resulted in numerous women becoming pregnant while incarcerated, a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Justice alleges.

Equal Justice Initiative, a private nonprofit organization, filed the complaint about the all-female prison in Wetumpka, Ala., Tuesday after receiving dozens of claims of sexual misconduct involving male staff between 2004 and 2011.

In interviews with more than 50 women incarcerated at the prison, EJI said it discovered "frequent and severe officer-on-inmate sexual violence," ranging from women being coerced into performing sexual favors in exchange for contraband goods to rape by a male correctional staff member while another male officer served as a lookout.

Even in instances in which abuse was confirmed, perpetrators received little more than a slap on the wrist, EJI Executive Director Bryan Stevenson told msnbc.com.

US, California - A Silicon Valley software executive has been charged with four felony counts of burglary after allegedly printing his own discount bar codes and pasting them on Lego toys he would later resell online.

Thomas Langenbach, 46, declined Tuesday to enter a plea when he was formally charged. A hearing was scheduled for June 20.

"In his house, we found hundreds of boxes of unopened Lego sets," Mountain View police spokesman Liz Wylie told the San Jose Mercury News.

Langenbach and his partner Maggie Hoang lived in a $1.8 million house on Sudan Lane in San Carlos, Calif., near the Palo Alto offices of German software giant SAP (Systems, Applications and Products), where he had worked since 1988.

Langenbach allegedly sold 2,100 Lego toys on eBay over the last 13 months for $30,000, police said.

"I don't think it's money," said Supervising Deputy District Attorney Cindy Hendrickson, who is prosecuting Langenbach.

"Money might have been a part of what brought him pleasure, but I think all indications are there's something way more complex here," Hendrickson was quoted by the San Jose Mercury News.

"Remember, he's going out and paying for these things. This is something that he did in a painstaking way, and it took time, it took effort and it took expense. I don't think you do that just for the money. There had to be something else. Beating the system? An element of compulsion?"

German police arrested an armed 14-year-old boy after he opened fire in his school with a handgun, threatening to "shoot them all".

The boy was arrested in the Bavarian town of Memmingen following a stand-off with dozens of heavily armed police officers during which he fired at least 20 shots and threatened to shoot himself.

He had earlier caused panic at his school when he produced two pistols, telling one boy that if anything bothered him today he would "shoot them all". He also threatened a teacher and fired a shot into the ground.

As news of the gunman spread through the school around 280 teachers and pupils locked themselves in classrooms, and waited for the police.

The incident triggered painful memories of the 2009 Winnenden massacre in Germany when 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer shot 16 children dead at his old school before turning his gun on himself.