US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrest people when they appear in court to pay traffic tickets, get married, or make themselves known in other ways, violating Department of Homeland Security policy, according to civil liberties advocates.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote a letter to the Homeland Security Department pressing officials to end the policy of "abusive arrests" employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The document asserts that such apprehensions are in direct violation of ICE's alleged policy forbidding officers from making arrests at "sensitive locations," a list including hospitals, schools, and places of worship.

The ACLU asked ICE, the investigative unit in the Department of Homeland Security, to add courthouses to the list of sensitive locations, claiming sudden ICE raids are "causing significant harm in the Kern County," California community, as quoted by Courthouse News.

"The arrests have prevented residents from complying with their obligations to pay citations and appear for court hearings, and from obtaining restraining orders, marriage licenses and other essential court services," wrote ACLU attorney Michael Kaufman. "Moreover, ICE's actions have created a culture of fear, deterring residents from exercising their constitutional right and civic duty to appear for court hearings or seek court services."

The latest school shooting has renewed calls for gun control laws and security measures. But the age of the boy who killed a teacher before he shot himself -- 12 -- also raises questions about the brain's development: How could a young boy portray such seeming lack of empathy?

Recent research helps explain what seems so unimaginable. Psychologists talk about two types of empathy, cognitive and affective. Simply put, cognitive empathy is the intellectual ability to understand others' points of view, whereas affective empathy is the emotional capacity to respond to the mental states of others.

Although girls seem to develop more cognitive empathy at age 13, most boys don't show signs of it until age 15. Boys also experience a dip in affective empathy between the ages of 13 and 16, according to a six-year study published recently in Developmental Psychology.

"Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?" the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay "The Idea Is the Thing." "If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them."

Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public's imagination.

A man with special needs is speaking out after he was left badly bruised by police.

Twenty-two-year-old Gilberto Powell, who has Down Syndrome, is left with horrible bruises and scars on his face after he had an encounter with police outside his home. "That's my son. That's my baby. I really love this little boy. He's my love," said Powell's mother, Josephine.

According to the family, they were inside their Southwest Miami-Dade home last Saturday when Powell, who is also called Liko, called his parents on his cell phone to let them know he was walking a block from his friend's house. On his way home, Liko said, "The police followed me." Liko said, the officer smacked him in the face with an open hand and knocked him to the ground. "His whole hand," he said. According to the police report, a Miami-Dade Police officer noticed a bulge in Liko's waistband. The officer attempted to conduct a pat down, and Powell tried to run away. "I said, 'Didn't you know he was a Down Syndrome kid?' And he said, 'No, I'm not a doctor. I don't know.' And I said, 'Well, you can see it in his face that he is a Down Syndrome kid,'" said Josephine."

Marines are decrying a new look President Obama has planned for their uniforms - namely, a unisex-style cap that they say looks more French than American, more "girly" than hard-charging.

"We don't even have enough funding to buy bullets and the DoD [Department of Defense] is pushing to spend $8 million on covers that look like women's hats," one senior Marine said to The New York Post. "The Marines deserve better. It makes them look ridiculous."

One estimate is that the new hats could cost about $8 million.

The hats are thinner and smaller, aimed at looking equally good on females as well as males. They're called the "Dan Daly" hat, in honor of a Long Island sergeant who earned the Medal of Honor during World War I.

But the present hat has been a Marine Corps fixture since 1922, and it's not just tradition that has some decrying the new hat. It's the feminine feel of the proposed cap.

An Obamacare phone operator announced Thursday on Sean Hannity's radio show that she had been fired after Hannity aired a prior phone call with her earlier this week.

On Monday, Hannity called an Obamacare hotline and had a conversation with the woman, Erling Davis, in which he pressed her for details about the lackluster rollout of Obamacare.

That phone call led to her termination from the private contractor where she worked, Davis said when Hannity interviewed her Thursday. Hannity then promised to give her a year's salary.

"They fired me from my job," Davis said.

A baby girl was forced to live hidden in the boot of her parents' car for almost two years in a case that has appalled France and that investigators say "defies the imagination".

Neighbours and the media today questioned how the tiny child could have been hidden undetected for so long.

Mechanics carrying out repairs on a Peugeot 307 family estate car in Terrasson-Lavilledieu in the Dordogne were alerted to the child's presence after hearing "strange noises that sounded like moans" coming from the rear of the vehicle.

The mother, 45, a Portuguese woman known only as Rose-Marie, claimed that these came from "toys". But the men insisted on opening the boot and were horrified to discover a small, dehydrated and apparently feverish child lying naked in its own excrement.

The mechanic who found the girl, Guillaume Iguacel, said today he was still in shock from the discovery.

"I'm still having trouble sleeping, it was a horrifying sight, seeing this little girl in her own excrement, not able to hold up her head, white as a sheet," he said.

Mr Iguacel said the girl's mother appeared to have little concern for her daughter.

"We were deeply shocked because she didn't find this abnormal. We told her to remove the little girl (from the boot) and give her something to drink right away," he said.

Paramedics were called and she was immediately taken to hospital.

The U.S. Navy had its share of secrets on Treasure Island, but few were better kept than what's taking place on a mysterious barge just off the island.

The barge, with a four-story stack of shipping containers, is out in the open for all to see. But the project's purpose has been kept under wraps, and virtually no one wants to talk about it for the record, from the harbor office at Clipper Cove to the Treasure Island Development Authority to the U.S. Coast Guard.

"I don't know anything about it, honestly I don't," a voice on the intercom at the Clipper Cove told KPIX 5. "It's a complete mystery to me."

There has, of course, been speculation about the barge's purpose, much of it centering on the belief that it's a water-based data center for Google.

KPIX 5 has learned that Google is actually building a floating marketing center, a kind of giant Apple store, if you will - but for Google Glass, the cutting-edge wearable computer the company has under development.

When Alicia Beltran was 12 weeks pregnant, she took herself to a health clinic about a mile from her home in Jackson, Wis., for a prenatal checkup. But what started as a routine visit ended with Beltran eventually handcuffed and shackled in government custody - and at the center of a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a state's fetal protection law.

On July 2, Beltran, 28, met with a physician's assistant at West Bend Clinic at Saint Joseph's Hospital in West Bend, Wis., for her prenatal visit. When asked to detail her medical history, Beltran admitted a past struggle with the painkiller Percocet. But that was all behind her, Beltran said: She had been taking Suboxone, a drug used to treat Percocet dependency. Lacking health insurance and unable to afford the medication, Beltran had used an acquaintance's prescription and self-administered the drug in decreasing doses. She had taken her last dose a few days before her prenatal visit.

According to Beltran, the physician's assistant recommended she renew her use of Suboxone under a doctor's supervision. After Beltran declined, she said she was asked to take a drug test, which was negative for all substances except Suboxone.

Two weeks later, a social worker visited Beltran at home and told her that she needed to continue Suboxone treatment under the care of a physician, said Beltran, who again declined. Two days later, Beltran found police officers at her home, who arrested and handcuffed her.

According to the police report, the officers took Beltran to a hospital, where she underwent a doctor's exam. Her pregnancy was found to be healthy and normal, her lawyers say. Police then took her to Washington County Jail to await a hearing - hours later, she was led into a courtroom, handcuffed and shackled at the ankles, where a county judge ordered her to spend 90 days in a drug treatment center.

"Alicia had no idea she was giving information to the physician's assistant that would ultimately be used against her in a court of law," said Linda Vanden Heuvel of Germantown, Wis., one of Beltran's attorneys. "She should not have to fear losing her liberty because she was pregnant and she was honest with her doctor."

France is in shock after the "imagination-defying" discovery of an infant girl who was kept in the trunk of a car by her parents for about a year and a half since birth.

The girl was naked and dehydrated when she was found and rescued by the mechanics at a garage in the town of Terrasson, southwestern France, on Friday.