A northern California police chief joined a protest Tuesday against police brutality.

Chris Magnus, chief of Richmond police, held a sign that read "#BlackLivesMatter," a Twitter hashtag used by civil rights advocates, as other officers joined in the peaceful protest, reported the Contra Costa Times.

"I've never seen anything like it, not in Richmond, not anywhere," said resident Mary Square. "All these police, and the police chief, holding signs calling for an end to police violence."

Magnus has been hailed for his approach to community policing, which has helped reduce the city's crime rate and the use of force by police.

"I spoke with my command staff, and we agreed it would be nice to convey our commitment to peaceful protest and that black and brown lives do matter," Magnus said. "And to help bridge the gap that we understand sometimes exists between police and community around certain issues."

Daily Show host Jon Stewart dissected Fox News Andrea Tantaros' argument that the discussion surrounding the CIA's torture of detainees was being fueled politically to cast the U.S. as not being "awesome."

"First of all, this administration doesn't want us to have this discussion," Stewart said. "And also, that's the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard."

On Tuesday, Tantaros and her fellow Outnumbered panelists accused Senate Democrats of releasing the report detailing abuses levied against detainees following the 9/11 attacks in an effort to make the country look bad.

"The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome," Tantaros said at the time. "But we've had this discussion. We've closed the book on it, and we've stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we're not awesome."

In the space of nine days, two grand juries in two different towns found it unassailable for a cop in one town to shoot and kill an unarmed man 12 times, and for a bunch of cops in another to brutalize an unarmed man as one of the cops put him in a fatal chokehold. In both cases the murdered men were young and black. In both cases their killers were white cops. And of course in both cases the prosecutors who were supposed to get an indictment from the grand jury used the proceedings instead to run interference for the cops they work with every day.

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight reports that in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available, federal grand juries declined to return indictments 11 times - out of 162,000 cases. In other words, grand juries failed to return an indictment 0.007 percent of the time. But two prosecutors walked off with a 100 percent whitewash rate for their cops. They covered for them. They gave them a pass. And killers walked free, because they had a badge, and because their victims were, after all, just black. That tells us where we are in this color-blind society. Blind is right: it's the blindness of the smug.

We have a black president, but that's been the irony in chief of a decade when too many whites take it as proof of their favored delusion: that we're in a post-racial society. This in a country where the wealth gap between whites and blacks is wider than it was in South Africa under apartheid, and has gotten 40 percent worse since Nixon became president, and in a country where young black men without a high school diploma are more likely to be in prison than at a job. (Nicholas Kristoff outlined the facts you'll never hear on Fox's nightly hours of white self-pity in his "Whites Just Don't Get It" series.)

Of course it's blacks' fault. They're the jobless. They're the moochers. They're the criminals. There's some truth to that when looking at the raw numbers, but only if you choose to cherry-pick and limit your historical perspective to yesterday's brown-shirted version of talk radio. There's more damning truth in the fact that blacks get sentenced to far longer terms than whites do for the same crimes, that a presumption of guilt shadows a black man far more than it does whites. What white person has experienced the assumption of threat that every black man has to live with in most whites' eyes when they see him on the sidewalk, entering the elevator, waiting his turn at the ATM? None of that has changed in half a century of civil rights gains and Martin Luther King holiday sales, gains that effectively went into reverse, along with so much else in what George Packer calls America's "unwinding," since the Reagan years. Whether they're a Harvard professor or a fat man selling cigarettes on a street corner, Blacks are still three-fifth suspects first and human beings last.

That's what led to the killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island in July, Michael Brown in Ferguson a few weeks later, and of course Trayvon Martin in Sanford in 2012 and Jordan Davis in Jacksonville the same year. At least a man was convicted for the killing of Jordan. And to appease the cynics, let's concede that there was some ambiguity in the homicides of Martin and Brown, in the sense that only their killers really knew what happened. But there was no such ambiguity in the killing of Garner, which was caught on a clear and indisputable video.

A Texas mother suspected something was wrong with her toddler son when she saw him stumbling around the backyard. Instead of ignoring this and other symptoms, Whitnie Strauss reportedly brought her two-and-a-half-year-old son Reid to a doctor - and then to 19 more doctors - until he was finally diagnosed with a rare disorder.

Strauss says she refused to believe her son's problem was an allergy, autism, a seizure disorder, a gastrointestinal problem or an immunodeficiency, reports Yahoo! News. Instead of accepting doctors' suggestions, the mother of three reportedly drove two hours with Reid, from outside of Austin to Houston, to get him to an emergency room.

After spending two days at Texas Children's Hospital, a pediatric neurologist named Dr. Michell Holick said she wanted to work with the family to figure out what was making Reid sick.

A Utah state trooper helped an elderly woman travel nearly 200 miles to visit her ailing son in a hospital after stopping her for a traffic violation.

Trooper Jeff Jones pulled over 87-year-old Helen "Skeeter" Smith on Friday night after she passed a stopped police cruiser with its light flashing on the side of Interstate 15 in Millard County, authorities said.

Utah law requires drivers to slow down and move away from stopped police vehicles to prevent crashes.

Jones issued the Panaca, Nevada, woman a verbal warning, but the trooper said Smith accidentally backed into his patrol car as she attempted to drive away.

Smith told the trooper she had very bad eyesight and could hardly see, and the trooper told the woman it would probably be unsafe for her to continue driving.

Some of you may have missed (or not!) the "very special episode" of Eaten Alive this past Sunday on the Discovery Channel, where a man named Paul Rosolie intended to be eaten alive by an anaconda and have it filmed for the world to see. I'm going to spoil the end result for you right now: he did not in fact get eaten alive.

What the viewing public got to see was a man, dressed up like Darth Vader, provoke a poor snake into attacking him and then 15 minutes later call it off when the pain from the constriction became too much (for the man, not the snake). Yes, amazingly, the snake at first wanted nothing to do with Paul. In his own words:

"When I went up to the snake, it didn't try to eat me right away. It tried to escape. And when I provoked it a little bit, and acted a little more like a predator, that's when it turned around and defended itself."

You couldn't really blame the snake, Paul. You're a member of the human race, that is collectively responsible for the extinction of thousands of animals and killings of untold snakes. This particular snake probably realized that you aren't exactly dinner material. But that doesn't matter, because advertising slots must be sold! So Paul attacked until the snake finally decided it had enough and fought back.

Two teenagers who allegedly fed a live cat to two dogs, videotaped the attack and posted it online have been arrested in Kern County on suspicion of cruelty to an animal.

The Bakersfield Californian reports that while the incident apparently occurred over the summer, Animal Control wasn't contacted until Dec. 4 after a person reported receiving the graphic video on a social networking site.

Sheriff's deputies said the video appeared to show two large dogs being fed a live cat while voices in the background encouraged the dogs to attack.

Detectives last week arrested a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old. Both teens were booked into Juvenile Hall.

The investigation is continuing.

After the eruption of large-scale protests which subsequently devolved into chaotic riots in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in response to the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson police, protests began to spread outside of Ferguson to large cities all across the country. Fresh on the heels of the Michael Brown protests, reports of the Eric Garner murder by the NYPD and the non-indictment of the murderer, large-scale protests erupted in New York City and, like the Brown-inspired protests, all across the country as well.

In short, anger, protests, riots and other forms of violence have engulfed cities all across the United States. Years of authoritarianism, a stagnant economy, and police brutality among many other issues are coming to a head, regardless of what one thinks about the methods or even the merits of some of the protesters/rioters.

Flashback to 2011, shortly after death squad operations funded by NATO, the GCC and Israel began in earnest inside Syria. According to Western media, these operatives who were killing Syrians indiscriminately in the streets, implementing Sharia law, and beheading civilians were peaceful protesters. Such widespread chaos in the streets of Syrian cities was used as a justification by Western leaders such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British Prime Minister David Cameron to call for Assad to step down.

According to these leaders, "peaceful protests" across Syria were enough to warrant calls for Assad to step down as President of the country. Such civil unrest was reason enough to demand that Assad "face the reality of the complete rejection of his regime by the Syrian people."

So with the massive civil unrest taking place all across the United States in 2014, one must ask the question, is the logical response to demand that U.S. President Barack Obama step down?

If mass "protests" in Syria are enough to demand that Assad has lost his legitimacy, then why are mass protests across the United States not enough to demand that Obama has lost his own legitimacy?

A National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Walmart managers in California had illegally disciplined employees for going on strike and unlawfully threatened to close a store if many of its employees joined a group demanding higher wages.

In a decision made public on Wednesday, Geoffrey Carter, an N.L.R.B. administrative law judge, also found that a Walmart manager had illegally intimidated workers by saying, "If it were up to me, I'd shoot the union." In addition, the judge said it was unlawful for Walmart managers to tell employees that co-workers returning from a one-day strike would be looking for a new job.

Our Walmart, a union-backed group of Walmart employees, filed the complaint with the labor board, asserting that officials at Walmart stores in Placerville and Richmond, Calif., had illegally intimidated workers.


Kory Lundberg, a Walmart spokesman, said in a statement: "We do not agree with some of the administrative law judge's conclusions." The company said it would appeal parts of the ruling to the full labor board in Washington.

Walmart has a long history of vigorously battling unionization efforts.


Our Walmart is not a union but is affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers union and has mounted a string of protests against Walmart over the last three years. On Black Friday, Our Walmart sponsored protests at more than a thousand Walmart stores, calling for a $15 base wage, more full-time jobs and an end to what it says is illegal intimidation and dismissals.

Five members of a controversial North Carolina church were indicted this week on charges that they kidnapped and assaulted a fellow member because he had been possessed by "homosexual demons."

On Monday, a Rutherford County grand jury indicted Sarah Covington Anderson, Adam Christopher Bartley, Brooke McFadden Covington, Justin Brock Covington and Robert Louis Walker Jr. on charges of second degree kidnapping and simple assault. Anderson was also charged with assault by strangulation.

Matthew Fenner told WSPA that he was a member of The Word of Faith Fellowship church in 2013 when the others physically attacked him for being gay on Jan. 29, 2013.

"I honestly thought I was going to die," Fenner recalled. "My head was like being flung back, my vision was going brown and black... I couldn't breathe and I'm sitting here thinking if I don't get out of this, I'm probably going to die."

According to QNotes, the suspects slapped and strangled Fenner, and they threatened to imprison him for two days to fight his "homosexual demons."

Although the church has been accused of abusing LGBT people in the past, Fenner said that local officials refused to take him seriously or even let him file a complaint at first.

QNotes described the Spindale church as "cult-like" for a technique of "deliverance" in which members are encircled, and subjected to "high-pitched shrilling sounds, screams and prayers."