A man knocks at your door. You answer and he tells you he is an encyclopaedia salesman.

'I have the largest and most comprehensive encyclopaedia the world has ever seen', he says.

'Tell me about it!'

'It has more editors and more entries than any other encyclopaedia ever. Most of the contributors are anonymous and no entry is ever finished. It is constantly changing. Any entry may be different each time you go back to it. Celebrities and companies pay PR agencies to edit entries. Controversial topics are often the subject of edit wars that can go on for years and involve scores of editors. Pranksters and jokers may change entries and insert bogus facts. Whole entries about events that never happened may be created. Other entries will disappear without notice. Experts may be banned from editing subjects that they are leading authorities on, because they are cited as primary sources. University academics and teachers warn their students to exercise extreme caution when using it. Nothing in it can be relied on. You will never know whether anything you read in it is true or not. Are you interested?'

'I'll think about it', you say, and close the door.

A new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault, and women are often the perpetrators.Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn't a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn't explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.

The mother of a young man with Down syndrome who was killed by police officers in Maryland told Congress on Tuesday that federal standards were needed to ensure law enforcement agents received the training they needed.

"I want to tell you that I am here as a grieving mother. It's been 15 months. I'm not sure that it will ever stop," Patti Saylor testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights.

Saylor's son, Ethan, tried to stay for a second viewing of the movie Zero Dark Thirty in January 2013. But movie theater staff called security because Ethan hadn't purchased a second ticket. Three off-duty Frederick County sheriff's deputies forcefully removed Ethan from the theater, even though an aide told them that Ethan had Down syndrome and his mother was on her way.

"The one officer approached him, nicely at first, but demanded that he leave," Saylor told the senators. "Ethan was trying to buy a ticket using his cell phone. He had no money, he did not drive for himself. He needed to depend on others to get the things he wanted in life, and he wanted to stay and watch the movie."

"The officers proceeded to physically remove him from the theater, dragged him from his seat, tried to handcuff him, when that didn't work while he was standing, they placed him on the ground, put handcuffs on, and my son died of asphyxiation on that floor of that movie theater for that $10 ticket."

In her written testimony, Saylor said that her son died after his throat was crushed by the officers.

"While anyone, disability or not, could have been injured or killed in Ethan's situation that evening, our family also remains deeply concerned that Ethan's rights, as an individual with a disability, were violated. The autopsy showed that Ethan's larynx was crushed while being restrained by the officers. The manner in which Ethan was restrained that evening, with his hands behind his back and forced to lie face down on his stomach, has for years been considered excessive due to the chance of positional asphyxia."

It was soon the Ides of March and I was showering. No, this is not a tawdry attempt at Roman erotica.

I'd felt like shit for weeks going on months. Insomnia, night sweats, gut issues. I'd recently moved to Vancouver and I wasn't happy about it. I attributed it to depression and skimping on food and water. I also pride myself on my high tolerance for pain. But when I've been compelled to write, it's been about friends and artists who got sick and died young. Tragic, infuriating nonsense, often related to living fast and being poor.

Something is up.

The soap slid around my arm pit, and, lo, a lump. Obviously, this thing, the size of a baseball, had been around a while.
"Well, what the f***."

And so started my life on cancer. It's been a month of sudden calls - "Your urgent PET Scan is tonight at 6pm. Don't eat anything. And avoid contact with all children for 6 hours afterward. That requires me figuring out how to not see my child and make sure she is well cared for. I booked a hotel.

New York - Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan's lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, "This debate is going to end." He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said "is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute" the prosecution's charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. "I'm totally handicapped," Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists' forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

Long Beach police were pursuing a man fleeing from a Target Store security guard for a "a crime allegedly committed at the store," the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said late Sunday.

When deputies arrived to help security officers locked in a struggle with the man, he pulled out a large pair of scissors, according to a department statement.

The man then fled to his vehicle and led the police on a chase which ended at the 1800 block of East Ocean Boulevard.

The department claimed that he was refusing commands to exit his vehicle and allegedly got out of his car with a "large wooden stick."

When the man began to flea police they initially fired a stun bag at him, which showed to have no effect.

At this point the Long Beach Police claim to have "encountered the man" and shot him. However the video shows no such encounter. The man is completely isolated and it appears that he was shot in cold blood, in the back.

It doesn't get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees. Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we're told the information constitutes "trade secrets."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy of a 25 year old male with a Bachelor's degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But in the past five months, five highly educated JPMorgan male employees in their 30s and one former employee aged 28, have died under suspicious circumstances, including three of whom allegedly leaped off buildings - a statistical rarity even during the height of the financial crisis in 2008.

There is one other major obstacle to brushing away these deaths as random occurrences - they are not happening at JPMorgan's closest peer bank - Citigroup. Both JPMorgan and Citigroup are global financial institutions with both commercial banking and investment banking operations. Their employee counts are similar - 260,000 employees for JPMorgan versus 251,000 for Citigroup.

Both JPMorgan and Citigroup also own massive amounts of bank-owned life insurance (BOLI), a controversial practice that pays the corporation when a current or former employee dies. (In the case of former employees, the banks conduct regular "death sweeps" of public records using former employees' Social Security numbers to learn if a former employee has died and then submits a request for payment of the death benefit to the insurance company.)

Wall Street On Parade carefully researched public death announcements over the past 12 months which named the decedent as a current or former employee of Citigroup or its commercial banking unit, Citibank. We found no data suggesting Citigroup was experiencing the same rash of deaths of young men in their 30s as JPMorgan Chase. Nor did we discover any press reports of leaps from buildings among Citigroup's workers.

Given the above set of facts, on March 21 of this year, we wrote to the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), seeking the following information under the Freedom of Information Act (See OCC Response to Wall Street On Parade's Request for Banker Death Information):

The number of deaths from 2008 through March 21, 2014 on which JPMorgan Chase collected death benefits; the total face amount of BOLI life insurance in force at JPMorgan; the total number of former and current employees of JPMorgan Chase who are insured under these policies; any peer studies showing the same data comparing JPMorgan Chase with Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.

The OCC responded politely by letter dated April 18, after first calling a few days earlier to inform us that we would be getting nothing under the sunshine law request. (On Wall Street, sunshine routinely means dark curtain.) The OCC letter advised that documents relevant to our request were being withheld on the basis that they are "privileged or contains trade secrets, or commercial or financial information, furnished in confidence, that relates to the business, personal, or financial affairs of any person," or relate to "a record contained in or related to an examination."

The ironic reality is that the documents do not pertain to the personal financial affairs of individuals who have a privacy right. Individuals are not going to receive the proceeds of this life insurance for the most part. In many cases, they do not even know that multi-million dollar policies that pay upon their death have been taken out by their employer or former employer. Equally important, JPMorgan is a publicly traded company whose shareholders have a right under securities laws to understand the quality of its earnings - are those earnings coming from traditional banking and investment banking operations or is this ghoulish practice of profiting from the death of workers now a major contributor to profits on Wall Street?

As it turns out, one aspect of the information cavalierly denied to us by the OCC is publicly available to those willing to hunt for it. On March 24 of this year, we reported that JPMorgan Chase held $10.4 billion in BOLI assets at its insured depository bank as of December 31, 2013.

A rabbi of the United Kingdom, who fled to Israel after being charged with child rape, will be deported, the Israel Supreme Court has ruled.

48-year-old Todros Grynhaus of Salford, is set to stand trial in Manchester after the Israeli court ruled that he can be deported instead of being extradited.

Grynhaus fled last year after he was charged with seven sexual assaults on children. He was arrested in Jerusalem, after an international manhunt when he jumped bail on a false passport.

The fugitive hired two teams of Israeli lawyers to use all means to fight deportation, including trying to obtain Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.

A county court in Pennsylvania ruled against a widow who lost her house over a $6.30 late fee. The property was sold for $116,000 to cover the debt, in what the woman argued was an improper move by the authorities.

The home of Eileen F. Battisti, 53, was sold at a September 2011 tax sale to cover the paltry debt, which arose from an interest rate charge on Battisti's 2009 tax bill. Beaver County auctioned off the house, with an estimated value of $280,000, selling it for $116,000 to SP Lewis.

"I paid everything, and didn't know about the $6.30," she told AP. "For the house to be sold just because of $6.30 is crazy."

Battisti appealed the move, saying she didn't know she owed the past due charge until she was notified that her home would be sold. Beaver Country court initially denied her evidentiary hearings on the case, but Battisti turned to the Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg, which in August 2013 ordered the county court to review the case.

Last week, County Judge C. Gus Kwidis ruled against Battisti, saying she had been properly notified of her debt and that the sale followed state law. In his six-page order, the judge said the former homeowner is entitled to $108,039 in proceeds from the sale after her tax obligations are met.

"She's going to get that money, but she's going to lose her house. All the notice requirements were met," Kwidis said on Friday as cited by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "In tax assessment laws, even if I feel sorry for her, I can't do anything to help her. ... Everyone felt bad about it."

Battisti plans to appeal the ruling before the Commonwealth Court, she said.

Joe Askar, Beaver County's chief solicitor, said the judge got the decision right.

"The county never wants to see anybody lose their home, but at the same time the tax sale law, the tax real estate law, doesn't give a whole lot of room for error either," Askar said.

Gordon Lafer, a political economist and University of Oregon professor who has advised Congress, state legislatures, and the New York City mayor's office, landed at the airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late last night bringing with him a briefing paper on school privatization and how it hurts poor kids.

Lafer's report, "Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education Than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin," released today by the Economic Policy Institute, documents the effects of both for-profit and non-profit charter schools that are taking over struggling public schools in Milwaukee.

"I hope people connect the dots," Lafer said by phone from the Milwaukee airport.

Lafer's research, commissioned by the Economic Policy Institute to evaluate the school-privatization push in Milwaukee, is a sweeping indictment of the growing private charter school industry -- and other schemes backed by rightwing groups and big business -- that siphon public funds out of public schools and enrich corporate investors at the expense of quality education for poor children.