The town clerk of Roper, population 617, knows the community has suffered from layoffs and foreclosures. When they don't pay utility bills, she has to cut off their services - a job she hates.

Every time Bishop Robert Mallory walks into Town Hall to pay his overdue water bill and get his water turned back on, Town Clerk Dorenda Gatling asks, "House or church?"

She lives just up the street from Mallory's house and across the street from his church. But that doesn't keep Gatling from cutting off town water to either one when he can't afford to pay the bills.

"Ask me how that feels - a woman of faith cutting off water to the church," Gatling says, putting her head in her hands inside the cramped town clerk's office at the one-story Roper Town Hall.

Several times a month, Gatling is forced to cut off water to a friend or neighbor. In Roper, population 617, she knows just about every one of them personally, and she feels a pang of guilt and regret each time.

It's probably no accident that the minimalist brown cover of Occupying Wall Street, the new title from OR Books about the now world-famous Manhattan movement, resembles the posters that, for a few months in 2011, came to define Zuccotti Park's skyline. The title and subtitle - "The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America" - are written in black scrawl, adding extra authenticity to the stylization. It's not just a book you're holding, a reader soon realizes, it's also a mini-protest sign.

Fair warning up front: A little rectangular box on the back cover reads, "All profits from this book will be donated to Occupy Wall Street." If you're certain you disagree with OWS and don't want to support their cause, then this book is probably not for you. But if you're at all interested in how the now-global movement began, there's probably no better resource than this.

Though Occupying's author is a collective of roughly 60 unnamed people calling themselves "Writers for the 99%," the book is not a disjointed assortment of individual essays. Rather, and perhaps surprisingly, it acts as a concise historical account that sheds light on the varied and interesting minutia of OWS, covering everything from the guidelines of the General Assembly to the infamous Brooklyn Bridge protest to the drama created by class and racial tensions within the movement. So thorough is Occupying that even the thousands of people who lived in Zuccotti's tent city themselves last year could probably learn something about the inner workings of the mass they once helped compose, or reinvigorate the fire that brought them there in the first place.

• Location of bones was revealed by Westley Shermantine after a bounty hunter promised to pay him $33,000


• Officials already identified two female victims buried on Calaveras County property

Serial killer Wesley Shermantine has claimed that he knows of even more sites where the bodies of murder victims were buried in an extraordinary letter to a California television station.

Shermantine, one of the so-called Speed Freak Killers, told CBS-13 that two burial sites used by his accomplice Loren Herzog have not yet been discovered.

The letter, sent from Death Row, also contained a lengthy complaint about Shermantine's media portrayal and about the behaviour of his sister - and it ends, 'Have a nice day.'

For an agency that claims to have "zero tolerance" for criminal behavior, TSA agents sure spend a lot of time declaring their guilt.

I was reminded of that unfortunate fact a few days ago after a screener reportedly faced accusations of stealing $5,000 from a passenger's jacket as he was going through security at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The agent, Alexandra Schmid, hasn't confessed yet even though officials have it all on videotape. But a closer look at the TSA's rap sheet reveals that often, employees accused of crimes simply roll over and play dead when someone points a finger at them.

Take Coumar Persad and Davon Webb, accused of swiping $40,000 from a piece of luggage in January 2011. They were charged with grand larceny, obstructing governmental administration and official misconduct. Last month, they pleaded guilty and were sentenced to six months in jail and five years' probation.

Speaking of theft, how about the TSA supervisor and screener accused of taking between $10,000 and $30,000 from luggage at Newark Liberty International Airport. A federal judge sentenced the supervisor, Michael Arato, to 2 1/2 years in prison and his subordinate, Al Raimi, to six months of home confinement, after both pleaded guilty.

Or Randy Pepper, the TSA supervisor who worked at Seattle-Tacoma, an airport with what many passengers would argue has the worst TSA workforce in the country?

Some people seem to leave their common sense at home when they head to the airport. Just use this past week as a perfect example.

The Transportation Safety Administration has had several unusual incidents at security checkpoints across the country.

According to the agency's blog , a man tried to take a spear gun onto a plane at Newark Liberty International Airport this week, thinking it was just fine since it wasn't a bullet-firing gun.

Another guy thought humor would help him get through security faster at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip. A passenger referring to his bag reportedly told the TSA officer: "Yeah, I got a bomb in it." It was not the best way for him to try to make his flight on-time.

Richard Heinberg's recent Museletter 237, "The Fight of the Century," includes a curious point about criminalization: ". . . It will increasingly be up to households and communities to provide the basics. . . This is a strategy that will . . . in many cases be discouraged and even criminalized by national authorities." The question is whether such localization can survive our political leadership. Yet the localized economy is probably one of the few self-evident proposals for a future that seems to have a rather slim number of options.

The illegalities of the "localized" life begin with the fact that many of the changes that need to be made to house design, in our post-nearly-all-materials world, are in fact illegal, if not strictly criminal. Here in Canada, one cannot legally build or inhabit a house that does not have conventional plumbing and electricity, for example. And the insurance companies have their say: a house will not be insured if it is heated mainly by wood. To be respectable, one must use our declining fossil fuels, it seems. In fact, insurance companies now look for all sorts of certification, most of which cannot be considered related to alternative approaches, but all of which are expensive.

The same problem of illegality applies to many other activities, even if these are just common sense. Localized agriculture, as I learned first-hand a few years ago in Ontario, is increasingly plagued by pointless rules related to processing, packaging, labeling, and similar issues, to the extent that small-scale farmers are simply forced out of business. Much of this is done in the name of "health," but such farmers do not have the ability to set up the required laboratories and other equipment that would make their businesses compliant with these ever-expanding regulations.

Crews cleaned up Oakland's historic City Hall on Sunday from damage inflicted overnight during violent anti-Wall Street protests that resulted in about 400 arrests, marking one of the largest mass arrests since nationwide protests began last year.

At a press conference on Sunday, Oakland police and city officials said they did not have a final tally of arrests. Earlier in the day, the city's emergency operations office put the figure at around 400. The skirmishes injured three officers and at least one demonstrator.

Police said a group of protesters burned an American flag in front of City Hall, then entered the building and destroyed a vending machine, light fixtures and a historic scale model of the edifice. The city's 911 emergency system was overwhelmed during the disturbances.

"While City Hall sustained damage, we anticipate that all city offices will be open for regular business tomorrow," said Deanna Santana, Oakland city administrator.

Asfouriyeh was the first mental asylum in Lebanon. Today, the historic property is being converted into a residential development site by Hariri-founded Solidere.

There are no people in Asfouriyeh today. It has become a sanctuary for birds who find refuge among the pine trees and ruins of the old buildings.

Asfouriyeh was built by American missionaries in 1890 with permission from the Ottoman Sultanate. It stretches over 130,000m2 of green space and includes 46 buildings in the area of Hazmieh, east of Beirut.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was the largest mental hospital in the Middle East.

It may be the size of the asylum that made the word stick in the collective memory of the Lebanese, for whom Asfouriyeh became synonymous with any mental hospital.

The Right-Wing Propagandist Charles Murray Exposes the Truth About Conservatives -- They Hate Poor People, White and Black. As usual, Charles Murray twists and invents economic arguments to demonize poor people. But this time, his targets are white.

Charles Murray, a leading right-wing polemicist, has spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, is an act of more equal opportunity opprobrium, arguing that white working class America is in crisis because it has a fucked up and backward culture. And his main example is Philadelphia's Fishtown.

Murray published summaries of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010 in the Wall Street Journal and another in the right-wing New Criterion. His argument is a mean and vicious slander against the people of Fishtown and working class people everywhere, detailing the decline of what he calls the "Founding virtues" of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion amongst the rabble. It's based on the Philadelphia neighborhood, but Murray uses "Fishtown" as an exemplar to generalize about white Americans with "no academic degree higher than a high school diploma...[and unemployed or working in] a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation."

Murray complains that Fishtown residents are increasingly less moral than people in Belmont, based on the wealthy white Boston suburb full of "successful people in managerial and professional occupations―the elites who are in positions of influence over the nation's economy, media, intellectual life, and politics." Which is where Mitt Romney lives―so I suppose he offers a lesson in hypocrisy, avarice and greed, huh? But beyond Murray's poisonous politics, the biggest problem is that his argument is wrong.

He says that the real Fishtown went from "a tightly knit, family oriented, hard-drinking, hard-working, hard-fighting blue-collar neighborhood" in the 1950s to a "a neighborhood that had experienced the decline of industriousness among males, the drop in marriage, rise in nonmarital births, rise in crime, and falling away from religion" today.

Imagine this scenario: A developing nation decides to selectively share its precious natural resource, selling only to "friendly" countries and not "hostile" ones. Now imagine this is oil we're talking about and the nation in question is the Islamic Republic of Iran...

Early news reports on Wednesday claimed that Iran pre-empted European Union sanctions by turning off the oil spigot to six member-states: the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Portugal.

The reports were premature. According to a highly-placed source in the country, Iran will only stop its oil supply to these nations if they fail to adopt new trading conditions: 1) signing 3 to 5-year contracts to import Iranian oil, with all agreements concluded prior to March 21, and 2) payment for the oil will no longer be accepted within 60-day cycles, as in the past, and must instead be honored immediately.

Negotiations are currently underway with all six nations. Iran, says the source, expects to cut oil supplies to at least two nations based on their current positions. These are likely to be Holland and France.