On Friday afternoon, Maria McKay of Valencia Park notified local San Diego Station 10News that two Pit Bulls belonging to a neighbor attacked and killed her daughter's little pug, Suki, at about 11 a.m. that morning. She said the attack occurred in front of a house where Deborah Kirby runs a daycare and also just across the street from an elementary school. (Valencia Park is a community in the southeast area of the city of San Diego.)

Kirby confirmed that her own children were almost attacked by the same Pit Bulls about two months ago while they were walking home. She said she screamed and told the kids to run.

Another neighbor, Nancy Marquez, told 10News that she lives only a couple of doors away from the pit bulls and they killed her Chihuahua several years ago in her own backyard. Marquez' father, Cipriano Marquez, said the owners of the Pit Bulls had never even apologized.

Lieutenant Dan DeSouza of San Diego County Department of Animal Services told 10News later that both pit bulls have been impounded four times while running loose and each time they were returned to the owners.

The 10News team went to the home and tried to talk to the couple who owns the Pit Bulls, who said their dogs were locked up all day in their backyard on Friday. However, a neighbor told a different story.

A fraudster serving 10 years in prison has alleged that two former attorney generals accepted thousands of dollars worth of free meals, hotel stays and other expenses from him after putting him behind bars.

Businessman Marc Jenson, who is serving time for swindling millions of dollars from investors, claims he has receipts proving that former Utah Attorney Gen. Mark Shurtleff and his successor, John Swallow, accepted expenses on his behalf.

"I'm telling you right now: they were extorting me, and they were from the very beginning," Jenson told the Salt Lake Tribune in an interview from prison. The former businessman was charged with six felonies and was imprisoned after failing to pay $4 million in restitution.

Jenson claims that Shurtleff and Swallow pressured him to provide them with costly vacations, meals and other expenses. The current and former attorney generals allegedly promised to help the businessman with his legal troubles in exchange for lavish gifts.

The requests allegedly began after Jenson was convicted in 2009, but before he was imprisoned for failing to provide the restitution.

Shurtleff and Swallow vacationed at Pelican Hill, an upscale southern California resort where Jenson had his own villa, on multiple occasions. The fraudster says his receipts show both men signing for thousands of dollars worth of food, massages, golf outings, and supplies at the Newport Beach resort.

Two people are reported injured after an explosion rocked a supply company in Putnam County, West Virginia Monday. Emergency crews responding to the blast, which came at approximately 3:00 pm local time, reported high flames in the area.

Investigators are still unsure what caused the initial explosion but a spokesman from the Putnam County, West Virginia emergency management office told the Charleston Gazette that as many as fifty canisters of acetylene, a colorless gas commonly used for welding and torch-cutting, blew up.

One man suffered burns to his face and the other burns to his arms. Both victims were hospitalized, although the full extent of their injuries is not yet known.

The explosion took place at the Airgas supply company, the largest US distributor of industrial medical and specialty gases, including welding supplies and other equipment, according to WOWK-TV in West Virginia. The plant is located in the town of Bancroft, where surrounding businesses have been evacuated as a safety precaution.

This shocking story-- of yet another "huge humiliation" of a non-Jew at Ben Gurion airport-- was posted by Mira Awad, an Israeli Palestinian singer, on her Facebook page, in Hebrew, today. Ami Kaufman at +972 provided a translation of the entry, and notes that Awad is a celebrity in Israel. Awad in translation:

So, I was checked at the airport, they asked the questions, put the stickers on, and I proceeded to the X-Ray machine. Suddenly, the young security man comes to me: "Mira? Mira Awad?"

Me: "Yes?"

Security man: "Can I see your passport? There's a mistake with the sticker."

I almost told him: "No, you're not mistaken, I see you put the right one on - the sticker for Arabs", but I didn't say that (security people have their humor extracted during their preparatory course). I gave him my passport, he opens it, takes off the sticker in the passport and on the suitcase and puts on a new one, different, the same color but smaller.

Now the dilemma. On the one hand it's obvious the young man has just made my life easier by putting on the sticker for Jews. On the other hand, it's one of the things that it's hard to say thanks for. I mean, thank you for not considering me a terrorist any more? Thanks that someone whispered to you, "it's Mira Awad," so the "Awad" isn't scary anymore? Thanks for upgrading me to a Class A citizen? I turned into one of "ours," or actually one of "yours." A small sticker that carries with it such huge humiliation, and today even enfolds stupidity. Because since they cancelled the stickers with different colors, which we protested, they made new stickers with less recognizable differences to the inexperienced eye, and here they are embarrassing themselves with unaware patronizing like, "Let's award you with the status of a privileged person!" - so you don't say that we aren't humane. By the way, it happend to me also last week, when a senior security man who wanted to "show off" (maybe you'll say he wanted to joke around, but we've already concluded that he doesn't know how to joke around, see earlier "extraction of humor") and asked one of his employees to get me one of the "regular" stickers and then winked at me as he continued to speak him: "Can't you see it's Mira Awad?"

So, the conclusion is, if you're Israeli and your name is Awad - you better be famous! If not, forget about the duty free! Yalla, I'm out of here. For now.

Thanks to Ofer Neiman.

A Baltimore woman is suing some city police officers after she claimed they illegally thwarted her efforts to record police activity.

The peacock is an emblem of pride, arrogance, vanity, and flaunted fashion. These sentiments apply a little less to poor old Phyl, a pet peacock whose owner sexually abused him. The bizarre incident, which ended with Phyl's body being discovered in the garage of 63-year-old David Beckman, is merely one of many charges the strange man is facing.

Beckman is also facing three charges of harassment by telephone, unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, two counts of possessing marijuana, and even an attempted indecent solicitation of a child between the ages of 13 and 17, on top of his charge of cruelty to animals - not to mention two counts of battery, as NBC Chicago reported. A real winner, this one.

Video: A Philadelphia doctor accused of performing illegal, late-term abortions in a filthy clinic has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies born alive but acquitted in the death of a fourth baby.

Abortion provider Kermit Gosnell was convicted Monday of three counts of first-degree murder for severing the spinal cords of infants born during abortions at his West Philadelphia clinic.

Gosnell also was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 death of 41-year-old Virginia woman Karnamaya Mongar, who died from an overdose of drugs while undergoing an abortion at the clinic. Prosecutors described the clinic as a "house of horrors" because of the unsanitary conditions and unsafe practices that defined it.

One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. The two had known each other since the early '90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam; now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the university's School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenberg's door, Stapel wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend.

Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. "What's up?" Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. "They suspect you have been committing research fraud."

There is no shortage of petty hall monitors, arrogant bureaucrats and paternalistic politicians who know what is good for us, will threaten us into compliance with their lifestyle choices, and discipline us into shutting up if we feel differently.

Ball State University is the latest institution to participate in the finger wagging of the nanny state elite. The trustees recently announced that students and employees of the college will no longer have the right to consume legal tobacco products on campus grounds. Smoking is permitted only in automobiles with all windows rolled up. Any adult who breaks the seal and allows the slightest streak of smoke to waft into the open air will face a $50 fine.

The following article originally appeared in the February 2002 issue of HIGH TIMES Magazine

Marley knew the drill - in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press downsizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death squad rule and, as Grenada's Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA's "pernicious attempts [to] wreck the economy."

"Destabilization," Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, "is the name given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence."