A 84-year-old Texas woman in jail for theft was charged on Monday with attempting to hire a hit man to kill the local district attorney who filed the theft charge and to make the killing look similar to the recent murder of a district attorney in Kaufman County.

Dorothy Canfield was charged with solicitation to commit capital murder after she allegedly paid an undercover officer, posing as a hit man, $5,000 to kill Montgomery County Assistant District Attorney Robert Freyer.

Canfield was also charged with solicitation to commit aggravated assault on a public servant for allegedly agreeing to pay the undercover officer $2,500 to injure Montgomery County District Attorney Brett Ligon.

"Threats against public servants are a direct threat against criminal justice system itself," Ligon said Monday during a news conference announcing the charges.

As more affluent Indians travel the world and their country's growing economy and population gain more global attention, they are increasingly embarrassed about one of India's dirtiest features: its cities.

It is not uncommon to see piles of putrefying garbage lying along the streets, in front of fancy malls and luxury car showrooms, and at the gates of many exclusive neighborhoods. But just as common is the sight of Indians walking past the smelly heaps, covering their noses with the edge of their saris or handkerchiefs and waving the flies away.

Many Indians routinely throw empty cigarette packs, plastic wrappers or cans from their car windows. Even at religious sites, waste is often dumped into rivers, lakes or the streets. Open, stinking drains in residential neighborhoods are choked with household trash.

With India's creaky municipal management system stretched thin and government response to the teeming trash patchy at best, the problem will only worsen, analysts say. More than 600 million Indians will live in cities by 2030, compared with a little more than 350 million today. Indians generate more than 55 million tons of solid waste every year, and that figure will increase to 240 million tons by 2047, according to the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi.

But there is a new push for change from some quarters.

Neighborhood volunteers, schools and activists in big cities are organizing like rarely before to clean up India. They are staging sporadic cleanup drives at markets, beaches and railway stations. They are urging people not to litter, asking families to separate waste from recyclables and using smartphones to photograph and report uncollected garbage to the government.

Even the federal Tourism Ministry launched a campaign to keep areas around heritage monuments clean.

It's an awful catch-22: employers won't hire you if you've been out of work for more than six months

Close your eyes and picture the scariest thing you can think of. Maybe it's a giant spider or a giant Stay Puft marshmallow man or something that's not even giant at all. Well, whatever it is, I guarantee it's not nearly as scary as the real scariest thing in the world. That's long-term unemployment.

There are two labor markets nowadays. There's the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional. That was the conclusion of recent research I highlighted a few months ago by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed and a PhD candidate in economics at Northeastern University, and William Dickens, a professor of economics at Northeastern University, that looked at Beveridge curves for different ages, industries, and education levels to see who the recovery is leaving behind.

A Louisiana fried chicken joint has joined a trend of restaurants across the country offering free food or discounts to customers who agree to bring their guns to dinner - but is it turning off other patrons?

Randal Neel, the owner of Chicken Express in Bossier City, told KLVT that he was making a statement in support of gun rights as the Louisiana Legislature considers more than a dozen new gun laws, including efforts to make firearms easier and cheaper to sell.

"You don't get a chance often to be heard," Neel explained. "We've had probably our busiest Saturday we've ever had."

A Costa Mesa, California neighborhood had to be evacuated Sunday night after a resident allegedly killed himself with a homemade bomb.

KTLA-TV reported on Monday that authorities found the unidentified man laying on his front lawn earlier in the evening, but refused medical attention and went back inside his home.

"Neighbors were trying to convince him to go to the hospital," one resident, Laurie Raphoon, told KNBC-TV. "An hour or two later we heard an explosion."

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) has refused through a spokesperson to endorse one town's first-ever integrated high school prom, saying that he would rather not take sides on the issue. According to Atlanta's WMAZ Channel 13, politicians from both parties have stated their support for black and white students from Wilcox, Georgia, but Deal declined to join them.

Raw Story spoke to activist Bryan Long of the progressive group Better Georgia, whose group has asked Georgia elected officials "to publicly support the students of Wilcox County who are fighting to end a 'separate-but-equal' high school prom."

"We thought it would be nice if our elected officials would support these students," said Long. "They're taking a great stand in their community. We thought that officials all across the state should send a message to the nation that we've moved beyond the racial divisions of the '50s, '60s and '70s."

He added, "We were surprised to read that the governor's spokesperson said that he wouldn't be 'taking sides' on this issue. I didn't know that there were sides to take."

The former top drugs adviser to Britain's parliament told UK newspaper The Telegraph on Sunday that risk-taking behaviors behind the financial crisis of 2008 were driven by excessive cocaine consumption by the world's banking elite.

"Bankers use cocaine and got us into this terrible mess," Professor David Nutt said. "It is a 'more' drug." He added that cocaine has the effect of making its users feel "overconfident," encouraging risk-taking behaviors.

About 3,000 people gathered in the rain in Trafalgar Square on Saturday night to "celebrate" the demise of Margaret Thatcher. The party was a surreal coming together of everyone from the Durham miners to young protesters who weren't even born when Thatcher came to power.

The narcissism and the nonchalance are both indicators, says The First Post's psychoanalyst

Through 11 months of court appearances in Perugia, Amanda Knox's behaviour ranged from composed to flamboyant. Only after Judge Giancarlo Massei read out the jury's decision late on Friday night, and sentenced her to 26 years in jail for murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher, did she show signs of distress, shouting out, "No, no, no!" as she was led to the prison van by her guards.

There is considerable dispute about the strength of the evidence presented against Knox and about the prosecution's insistence on highlighting Knox's sexual history. An entry from the American girl's diary listed seven sexual partners, three of whom she met after she had moved to Italy, excluding her co-defendant, Rafaelle Sollecito. She had had sex with one of the men on the train as she was travelling to Perugia.

After inviting Knox, a Jesuit-educated student, to live with her and two other English students in their cottage, Meredith Kercher soon began having reservations about Knox, particularly about her bringing "strange men" to the house.

Former Kaufman County Justice of the Peace Eric Williams, 46, was arrested Saturday after authorities discovered what they're calling "strong evidence" linking him to the killings of two Kaufman County prosecutors and the district attorney's wife.

Williams was the first person authorities publicly acknowledged questioning in the murder investigation, which many believed the work of a white supremacist prison gang that prosecutors in Kaufman County were bringing cases against.

However, police told Dallas ABC News affiliate WFAA-TV on Sunday that "strong evidence" has been found linking Williams to the killings of former District Attorney Mike McClelland and prosecutor Mike Haase, although Williams has not yet been charged.