Arrests and ticket violations in New York City are dropping over the New York Police Department's purported political protest against the mayor, but investigative journalist Matt Taibbi says the slowdown is exposing weaknesses in normal police policy.

The number of arrests across the city last week plunged to just over 2,000 - compared to over 5,000 during the same time one year ago - with parking- and driving-related tickets down more than 90 percent, according to NYPD data. There has also been a drop in new inmates, with only 618 entering the system compared to over 1,000 a year ago.

Sometimes the (nasty) truth surfaces, even on Fox News. They sometimes use code words to express their discriminatory views, but sometimes the truth just slips out. It looks like it did on Wednesday. Fox News host, Shannon Bream, wants to know how (on earth) are we suppose to spot the "bad guys" if we cannot see the "tone of their skin"?!

From the New Civil Rights Movement:

On Fox's "Outnumbered" Wednesday, the cast got into a discussion about how Paris police didn't have enough weapons, which enabled - they claimed - the Islamic extremist terrorists to massacre 12 people.

Enter Fox News anchor Shannon Bream, a former corporate attorney and graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

Bream, speaking unscripted, wondered how police would be able to identify "bad guys" if they had ski masks and couldn't "even know what color," what "the tone of their skin was?"

"That's my question about these guys because if we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had, you know, ski masks on, do we even know what color they were?," Bream asked. "What the tone of their skin was," she tried to clarify - as if that were less racist. "I mean what if they didn't look like typical bad guys?"

That is pretty overt and obvious, IMO.

• The accused thief was caught with three accomplices robbing a home in the town of Tehuacan, central Mexico
• Furious residents stripped them and beat the four with sticks and metal pipes before tying them to trees
• The four criminals included a teenager and a woman believed to be pregnant
• One of the adult male criminals died of his injuries

An accused thief was beaten to death by a mob in central Mexico after the furious crowd caught him and three accomplices, including a pregnant woman and a teenager, robbing a home.

A crowd of some 100 people discovered the four allegedly robbing electronics at a home in the town of Tehuacan, in the state of Puebla.

The residents seized the four - two men, a male teenager one woman said to be pregnant - and stripped them.

Then they beat them with sticks and metal pipes before tying them to trees.

The woman, who said she was pregnant, was 'struck in the face' while the teenager was tied by his hands and feet and beat up, local reports say.

He suffered wounds to his abdomen, legs, back and head.

'We warned them of what would happen if they returned to rob from us,' local neighbors, who said they were tired of thieves after a recent string of robberies, told local newspaper Excelsior.

The four alleged thieves included a woman (red pants) who was 'beaten in the face because she said she was pregnant' and teenage boy

Local cops tried to stop the brutal beatings but were pushed back by the crowd. State police had to intervene to bring the situation under control.

One of the four suspects died of his injuries.

A guru who ordered 400 of his followers to undergo castrations he said would bring them closer to God is under investigation by police in India.

The country's top crime fighting agency registered a case against Gurmeet Ram Rahim - known as the 'guru in bling' for his penchant for garish clothes and jewellery - over the operations at his ashram.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said Rahim is being investigated for criminal intimidation and causing grievous bodily hurt after an alleged 400 castrations were carried out.

The guru, who heads the Dera Sacha Sauda organisation based in Haryana state, is already facing trial for conspiracy over the murder of a journalist in 2002, as well as with claims of sexually exploiting female followers.

A police officer was recently found to have acted "inappropriately" after he pulled over an intoxicated Native American woman, and then drove her to his house to have a "personal relationship" with her.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer was disciplined, and given seven days off off work without pay. The Canadian CBC News reported that adjudication documents said that "RCMP Const. Kevin Theriault took an intoxicated woman he had arrested out of a cell and drove her to his northern Manitoba home to pursue a personal relationship."

Theriault and another officer had arrested the woman at a party back in 2011 according to the report. They placed her in a cell "to sober up" but six hours later Theriault came back, out of uniform, and requested that the woman be released into his custody.

The RCMP report says that he drove the woman to his house in his personal car, while officers taunted him via text message to find out "how far he would go" with his prisoner.

One of these officers even "jokingly made a comment about having a threesome," according to the report.

One officer said that all of this "wasn't right."

But he eventually even conceded: "You arrested her, you can do whatever the f*ck you want to do."

It's not clear what shocked people most about the report in Fortune that Whole Foods Market sells goat cheese and tilapia prepared with prison labor - the horrendous exploitation of prisoners for a base rate less than one-tenth of Whole Foods' starting wage, or the fact that even after paying prisoner-workers sixty cents an hour, that tiny wheel of goat cheese still costs upward of seven dollars. Whichever reason it was, for many the story disturbed the experience that Whole Foods carefully cultivates for its customers.

Walk into any Whole Foods Market and the messaging is clear. Colorful panels above neatly displayed quarts of organic chicken broth boast that Whole Foods pays the highest minimum wage in the grocery business ($10 an hour, which is still a poverty wage for most workers). Pamphlets outside the meat cases detail the company's animal welfare rating system and explain why it doesn't sell shark meat and other seafood that can't be fished sustainably. Workers in a seemingly casual but carefully tailored uniform set out "Whole Trade" bananas while smiling and making small talk with customers. Along the walls, posters introduce you to different vendors whose products the store stocks. When you check out, a cashier may ask you to donate to the Whole Planet Foundation - a program to give microloans to women entrepreneurs in developing countries. The stores are designed, from the crates used to display produce to the boat-deck-style overalls worn in the seafood department, to give you the impression of a highly compressed supply chain, carefully monitored for quality and decentralized to produce "win-win" relationships with vendors.

Whole Foods portrays this experience as the natural state of affairs in a bastion of so-called conscious capitalism - a strategy that has contributed in no small part to the company's incredible success. It pioneered a new model for grocery stores that based its marketing not only on the products it sold but on its image as an "activist" company that "revolutionized" the way the grocery business was run. The real secret of Whole Foods' success, however, is far less novel or glamorous: it has essentially profited from scamming its customer base.

Police tackled and restrained the teenage sister of 12-year-old Tamir Rice when she rushed to her dying brother after a Cleveland, Ohio cop fatally shot the boy in November, according to newly released video footage of the now notorious incident.

The Cleveland Police Department shared the 30-minute recording on Wednesday night, lending credence to claims made by the Rice family about how law enforcement acted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. This comes in the midst of a wave of similar tragic officer-involved incidents that have unfolded across the United States in recent months.

"This has to be the cruelest thing I've ever seen," Akron-based attorney Walter Madison, a representative of the Rice family, told the Northeast Ohio Media Group when he viewed the video footage.

On November 22, 2014, the Cleveland Police Department received reports concerning a male with a gun at an area playground, and a cruiser, with Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, arrived on the scene shortly after.

Police said Loehmann engaged when Rice reached into his waistband, and that officers didn't learn until after the fact that the boy only had a non-lethal airsoft pistol. An abbreviated, 2.5-minute video clip, taken from a nearby surveillance camera and released by the police days after the incident, showed previously that Loehmann, 26, fired two shots at Rice in just as many seconds. This happened as soon as the officer got out of his vehicle, fatally wounding the boy.

According to the new footage made available this week, roughly one minute after Rice was shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann, the victim's 14-year-old sister sped to his aid but was intercepted by another cop, forced to the ground and eventually detained in a nearby patrol car only a few feet from her dying brother.

How can any American living here in the supposed "land of the free" honestly believe we still are?

The Connecticut Supreme Court has now ruled that yes, the government has the power to force a minor to undergo chemotherapy treatments even if she doesn't want to.

That's right. The court has unanimously determined that a 17-year-old patient cannot refuse chemotherapy treatment, even if her mother agrees they want to seek alternative treatment, for her Hodgkin's lymphoma.

We aren't just a fascist oligarchy and a police state, but we absolutely a medical tyranny.

Let's just try to overlook the fact (even though it's huge and deserving of its own article) that we even live in a society where the number children getting cancer these days is skyrocketing.

Were accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev imprisoned in another country and barred from speaking to the outside world, he'd doubtlessly be described as "being held incommunicado."

Yet since he's an accused terrorist being held in the United States, the Justice Department-ordered gag on him has barely been noticed. And were anyone to ask why he's forcibly been kept silent, they'd be told he's been subjected to "Special Administrative Measures."

Don't be fooled by the innocuous sound of that. The phrase refers to a law that allows the government to restrict a prisoner's communications in ways that:

"may include housing the inmate in administrative detention and/or limiting certain privileges, including, but not limited to, correspondence, visiting, interviews with representatives of the news media, and use of the telephone, as is reasonably necessary to protect persons against the risk of acts of violence or terrorism."

The law was established to prevent presumably dangerous inmates - those accused of terrorism, espionage, mob or gang activity - from communicating to the outside plans that could result in death or bodily harm.

A Florida man driving toward a bridge over Tampa Bay pulled his car over early Thursday, took his 5-year-old daughter from the back seat, pressed her head to his chest, and tossed her over the rail, according to police in St. Petersburg.

John Nicholas Jonchuck, 25, faces first-degree murder charges. His daughter, Phoebe, fell about 60 feet over the Sunshine Skyway bridge into the bay just after midnight, St. Petersburg police Chief Anthony Holloway said at a news conference

An officer heading home after his shift saw Jonchuck's vehicle speed past at nearly 100 mph, Holloway said. The officer prepared to pull the PT Cruiser over, but by the time he caught up with it, Jonchuck had pulled over on the side of the road.

Holloway said Jonchuck got out and started toward the officer, who pulled his weapon. But Jonchuck went around to the passenger side of the car and got the child out.

The officer "thought he heard the child scream, but he wasn't sure," Holloway said. The officer then saw the man throw the child over, into the strong bay current.

Her body was recovered about a mile from the bridge and hour and a half later. Rescue crews tried to revive her, but she was pronounced dead at 2:44 a.m.