27-year-old Stephen Jacobs of Wauwatosa faces one count of physical abuse of a child, sexual assault of a child, physical abuse of a child by a child care provider.

Officials spoke with the child's mother, who said her child suffers from severe autism and had been receiving treatment through a company called Autism Intervention Milwaukee for several months.

The child's mother told officials that she was advised by her child's doctor that he may be more mentally handicapped that previously diagnosed, and that his treatment needed to change. This, according to the criminal complaint.

The criminal complaint says the child received in-home treatment from four different therapists and neither she, nor her husband were allowed to be present for the therapy.

The complaint says the child is non-verbal, and unable to communicate what happens at therapy sessions. The child's mother and father became concerned that the child's treatment was not having the desired effect, so they placed a web camera in the treatment area to record his treatments on December 12th, 13th and 14th.

The complaint says that on December 14th, the child's mother observed therapist Stephen Jacobs physically assault her son.

"When they told me people were still coming in that gas station, stepping over my child in the doorway, I couldn't believe it; I couldn't believe it," says victim's mother.



In order to help convict a shooting suspect, Michigan prosecutors revealed a disturbing surveillance video showing people ignoring the dead body of 31-year-old victim Jheryl Wright in the doorway of a convenience store in Kalamazoo.

In the video, multiple people look at Wright's body and ignore it completely. People are continuously stepping over Wright and continuing on with their business in the store as if they didn't notice him.

Jheryl's mother, Jackel Wright, found out about the video although she hasn't been able to watch it quite yet.

"When they told me people were still coming in that gas station, stepping over my child in the doorway, I couldn't believe it; I couldn't believe it," she said. "I just can't believe people in this world would do something like that. I can't."

Jackel doesn't understand how no one bothered to try to help her son.

"How can you step over someone lying in the doorway and not help; how would they feel if that was one of their loved ones sitting there," she said. "I hope God have mercy on your soul because you was wrong, sitting there and not helping my son, like he was just a doormat; walking over him, laying there dead. I hope y'all can't sleep at night because that was awful. Just plain awful."

Broward County - A Florida judge presiding over misdemeanor drug cases reportedly showed up to work intoxicated and had to be removed from court. In a palpable irony, even a person who has dedicated her career toward meddling in other people's lives and using the force of government against them is herself incapable of keeping herself sober at work.

The judge faces no legal consequences and instead of being carted off to jail like so many of the recreational drug users she has dealt with, she will voluntarily put herself in rehab.

Judge Gisele Pollack, who founded Boward County's misdemeanor drug court in 2005, was seen verbally assaulting her judicial assistant and yelling for her car keys to be returned before another judge intervened, according to an unidentified source.

The tirade followed Pollack's abrupt dismissal of the day's session after only serving an hour and a half on the bench, during which time she began slurring her words while addressing defendants.

One can only speculate how many cases Pollack, an admitted alcoholic, may have presided over while under the influence. She says she will address what she calls "health issues" during an intensive two week outpatient program before returning to the bench.

Not everyone in the legal community feels that's quite an adequate remedy.

Two months after she moved a second hand couch into her bedroom, a Grand Rapids woman discovered a boa constrictor was living under the cushions.

Holly Wright says she doesn't know where the snake came from; she found the couch on the curb outside a house in Heritage Hill.

Wright, along with her boyfriend, videotaped the discovery. "It's been living in the couch for like two months in my bedroom and I had no idea and it looks pretty big."

Wright says the couch was along the curb with a free sign in front of it. She didn't think twice about bringing it home. "We smelled it and everything-- it looked OK. We peeled off the cushions, cleaned it up, never saw anything," said Wright.

• The first train - carrying 112 cars of soybeans - derailed at around 2pm

• A second train carrying 106 cars of oil struck multiple cars of the first derailed train

• Multiple explosions sent flames and toxic clouds hundreds of feet in the air

• North Dakota town of Casselton evacuated

A train derailed Monday afternoon and burst into flames after being hit by another train just outside the North Dakota town of Casselton - which authorities have now ordered to be fully evacuated.

As many as a dozen train cars carrying the highly flammable cargo jumped the tracks at around 2pm before the second train filled with oil barreled into them, causing multiple massive explosions.

The toxic plume of flames and smoke has led officials to have the entire town evacuated. Casselton is a suburban town about 25 miles west of Fargo and has a population of about 2,500 people.

In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.

But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.

So the conceptualization of possibilities is something that I take very seriously. That's why I, and many people, think it's way past time to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED.

So my TED talk is not about my work or my new book - the usual spiel - but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn't work.

The first reason is over-simplification.

To be clear, I think that having smart people who do very smart things explain what they doing in a way that everyone can understand is a good thing. But TED goes way beyond that.

Julian Stevenson, who confessed to murdering his two children, found hanged in fitness room at Corbas jail in Lyon

A Briton who confessed to the gruesome murder of his two young children, when involved in an acrimonious custody battle with his French ex-wife, has hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in Lyon.

Julian Stevenson was arrested in May after slitting the throats of his son Matthew, 10, and daughter Carla, 5, with a kitchen knife. He was remanded in custody after being placed under investigation.

Stevenson, 48, was found hanged on Monday morning in the prison fitness room reserved for prisoners in solitary confinement at Corbas jail in a Lyon suburb, according to Pascal Guinot, the Lyon deputy prosecutor. "He was alone in the room, and used one of the fitness machines there to commit suicide," he said.

Dear Readers,

On behalf of nearly 100 volunteer editors located around the world, we would like to wish you all very happy holidays and a fruitful New Year. That's the standard holiday greeting, but let's not kid ourselves: obviously, from SOTT's perspective, a mass awakening of humanity and unified action to take back control of our lives from the psychopaths steering our planet to destruction is what would make the coming year fruitful and happy for all. The task can be compared to turning an ocean liner around: as big as it is (over 200,000 tons), it only takes a rudder to do it! Nothing is impossible with your support!

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Thanks to you, our readers, the information about psychopathy in power which we began publishing back in 2002, has spread so far and wide that now, the mainstream media is being forced to deal with the issue with concerted programs of damage control! Thanks to YOU, our readers and supporters, the words "Political Ponerology" have entered the lexicon of cyberspace and we are sure it won't be long before they, too, receive a directed reaction from the psychopaths in power. In short, SOTT is making waves, even in the face of long-term and ongoing efforts to slander and marginalize us.

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A Pennsylvania woman lost an arm due to injuries she claims were inflicted on her by sheriff's deputies and ignored by jail staff. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Amy J. Needham, 35, filed suit in Allegheny County Court on Monday after events in April of this year left her arm amputated above the elbow.

Needham was arrested on a warrant in April because she failed to appear at a preliminary hearing on charges of simple assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. Her attorney told the Post-Gazette that the woman was using the bathroom when sheriff's department officers broke down the door, shocked her with a taser and bound her in wrist and arm restraints that were too tight.

The rough treatment and confinement caused Needham's left arm to develop compartment syndrome, a medical condition in which muscle tissue is injured and swells, cutting off circulation to a compartment of the muscle.

Deprived of oxygen and nutrients, the muscle tissue in the blocked compartment dies and becomes necrotic. The damage then spreads to other tissues. Left unchecked, compartment syndrome can cost limbs and lives.

An official from the Chinese government announced Monday that approximately 3.33 million hectares, or 8 million acres, of China's farmland is now too polluted to grow crops, according to a Reuters report from Beijing.

China's Vice Minister of Land and Resources Wang Shiyuan reportedly told a news conference that current farming on the now-too-contaminated land - roughly the size of Belgium - will be halted and rehabilitated in order to ensure food safety. It was unclear late Monday whether food that had already been grown on that land would be sought out or recalled.

"These areas cannot continue farming," Wang said, noting that the Ministry of Environmental Protection had deemed all of the 8 million acres as having "moderate to severe pollution."

The Chinese government has said that the country needs at least 120 million hectares of arable land to ensure it is able to meet the vastly populated country's food needs. Though China started 2013 with a strong 135 million hectares of arable land, contamination - paired with recent efforts to convert farmland to forests, grasslands and wetlands - has caused the amount of stable cultivated land to drop to 120 million hectares, Wang said. Wang also said the country is committed to spending "tens of billions of yuan" a year for projects aimed at rehabilitating polluted land.