Wow!
Mike Brown protesters from Ferguson disrupted the St. Louis Symphony last night in St. Louis City. It all happened as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus were preparing to perform Brahms' Requiem just after the intermission.

The group stood up after intermission and sang,

"Which side are you on? Justice for Mike Brown."

They called it a Mike Brown 'flash mob.' The activists then displayed three hand-painted banners referencing Mike Brown.

Judging from the audience's reaction, they did not have much support from the crowd.

Scientists have used Ebola disease spread patterns and airline traffic data to predict a 75 percent chance the virus could be imported to France by October 24, and a 50 percent chance it could hit Britain by that date.

Those numbers are based on air traffic remaining at full capacity. Assuming an 80 percent reduction in travel to reflect that many airlines are halting flights to affected regions, France's risk is still 25 percent, and Britain's is 15 percent.

"It's really a lottery," said Derek Gatherer of Britain's Lancaster University, an expert in viruses who has been tracking the epidemic - the worst Ebola outbreak in history.

The deadly epidemic has killed more than 3,400 people since it began in West Africa in March and has now started to spread faster, infecting almost 7,200 people so far. Nigeria, Senegal and now the United States - where the first case was diagnosed on Tuesday in a man who flew in from Liberia - have all seen people carrying the Ebola haemorrhagic fever virus, apparently unwittingly, arrive on their shores.

Fire burned through an area of the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Somerset County, on Friday, destroying three administrative buildings that housed a portion of the memorial's prized artifacts.

The collection, which includes the American flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that was presented to the park just last month, was kept in fireproof safes, according to National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst. The collection's condition, however, cannot be assessed until investigators are able to enter the memorial site sometime this morning, he said.

The affected buildings served as the park's headquarters and included the superintendent's office on Park Headquarters Road, Mr. Litterst said. A fourth building was damaged but saved, local fire officials said.

Local fire officials will hand off investigation of the fire to a team of National Park Service investigators today, Mr. Litterst said. No estimate has been made yet of the buildings' replacement and repair cost.

A Congressional gold medal awarded to the memorial was kept offsite and was not damaged, according to Mr. Litterst. Neither were the portions of the park that visitors see, which are approximately 2 miles from the administrative buildings that were destroyed.

"The sacred ground, the wall of names, the construction of the visitors center, the educational center have not been affected in any manner," said Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93 and brother of Edward Felt, who died on-board the flight. "[Memorial superintendent] Jeff Reinbold has assured me the memorial will be open first thing in the morning to accept visitors, and the experience that guests have who come to pay their respects won't be changed at all."

An ex-police commander who oversaw the torture of more than 100 black men in Chicago police custody walked out of federal prison Thursday, after serving just three and a half years of his sentence.

Jon Burge left the minimum-security prison in North Carolina to report to a halfway house in Florida until his sentence officially runs out in February of 2015, the Chicago Tribune reports.

After the 66-year-old was convicted in 2011 of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about police torture, several members of the Chicago City Council called for a reparations fund of $20 million -- roughly the amount Burge and his "midnight crew" of detectives have cost Chicago taxpayers over the years in legal defense fees and settlements alone. Aldermen renewed those calls on Thursday, saying it's time for the city to "make amends."

Anthony Holmes was one of the victims Burge personally tortured -- with methods including electric shock -- into giving a confession to a murder he says he didn't commit. Holmes, who is now pushing 70, spent 30 years behind bars as a result and has yet to see any compensation because the statute of limitations on the torture has run out.

"At least he's got a pension," Holmes said of Burge, according to DNAinfo Chicago. "We came out of there with nothing."

Two Destrehan High School teachers were arrested Wednesday on charges of having group sex with a student at one teacher's apartment in Kenner. Rachel Respess, 24, and Shelley Dufresne, 32, are accused of engaging in an illicit tryst with the 16-year-old boy after the Destrehan-Helen Cox High football game Sept. 12.

Kenner Police Chief Michael Glaser said the ménage à trois happened at Respess' apartment at 1354 W. Esplanade Ave. Respess, accompanied by her attorney, surrendered to authorities Wednesday at about 10:30 a.m. Dufresene had already been arrested Tuesday for allegedly having sex with the boy at a home in Montz, where she lives.

Kenner police booked both women with carnal knowledge of a juvenile, indecent behavior with a juvenile and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile, Glaser said. If charged and convicted on those complaints, the teachers face 0 to 17 1/2 years in prison.

Glaser said the two women were friends, and both had been teachers of the student. Respess was his English teacher last year, Dufresne his English instructor until this week, the chief said.

Authorities said they were tipped to the allegations on Friday, when school system officials told the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's Office that a male student was "bragging to other students that he was having a sexual relationship with teachers." Detectives interviewed the student, who said the encounter was consensual and gave the officers an account of the events, Glaser said. Notwithstanding his statement, the legal age of consent in Louisiana is 17.

Whether it is due to the sheer deferred Ebola panic (we warned in June it was only a matter of time before the "world's worst Ebola epidemic" made it to US shores, which promptly got us branded as fearmongers as usual), or the administration's bumbled attempt at damage control with a very confused and mostly pointless press conference on Friday afternoon, but three days ago, a petition was launched on the White House website demanding that the "FAA ban all incoming and outgoing flights to Ebola-stricken countries until the Ebola outbreak is contained." As of this moment, over 4,000 people have already signed it.

A modern historian looking to chronicle the destruction of the America we all once knew could do no better than to deconstruct the U.S. education system today.

Along with providing American students a middling education at best - we rank 17th in the world and well-below-average for developed nations - what's really wrong with America's education system is the fact that we're engineering the next generation to become acclimated to what this country is becoming ...

And it's becoming a police state, where tolerance is zero and everyone is presumed guilty. The notion of innocence? To hell with that!

This will not end well for you or me, or our children.

As a parent - I have two kids in school - I am always on the lookout for examples of governmental transgressions ... so these days, of course, I am paying an inordinate amount of attention to American school systems. In few domestic settings will you find such misconduct (and downright ignorance) percolating through our country.

Can It Get Any Worse Than This?

Consider these three solutions taken recently in America's schools to address so-called deviant acts of misbehavior:

1. Threaten to hold back a straight-A student for serving her country. A 13-year-old, straight-A student in the Washington D.C. school system was recently labeled a truant. Her crime: excelling at the piano. The young girl is so gifted musically that she has played around the world and was hand-picked to serve as an international music ambassador by a prestigious foundation. So, she travels a good bit. But ... she has maintained straight-A grades anyway. Though the D.C. school district does have the ability to override its attendance policy for extenuating circumstances, the wise owls atop the failing district decided that being a prodigy on a global level just doesn't cut the mustard.

Political summer holidays aren't all about body-boarding and pointing at fish for the cameras. For most in the front rank of British public life, their fortnight in the sun is when they begin the work of drafting the Big Conference Speech.

It's important to them because, despite the many ways politics has changed with television and the internet, no one is considered leadership material unless they can successfully deliver a 50-minute speech to a roomful of supporters.

The speech, reporters are always told in advance, is 'their most personal yet', probably because 'they wrote most of it themselves'. If the message is 'Serious Leader, Serious Times', it will be delivered static, from a lectern. If it's 'From The Heart', it will be done pacing around the stage, with a backdrop of diverse and photogenic people hanging on every word. A spouse should be somewhere in shot, eyes wet with pride.

Attempts to be a 'Serious Leader From The Heart' by coming out from behind the lectern halfway through tend to look as though the politician has lost their train of thought and hopes to find it at the front of the stage.

Aside from its delivery, the contents of the conference political speech are a minefield, as the politician strives to avoid upsetting the competing interests in their party while looking dynamic and ideally saying something at least slightly appealing to the general public.

Fortunately, help is at hand. My new book, Would They Lie To You?, explains Uncommunication - the art of getting from having something you don't want to say to having something you haven't quite said.

Deaths from heroin overdose doubled in two years throughout much of the United States, according to a new US government study. Meanwhile, deaths from prescription opioids, while still more than heroin, are falling.

From 2010 to 2012, heroin overdose deaths in 28 states shot up from 1,779 to 3,665, a death rate of 2.1 people for every 100,000 in the US.

The 28 states assessed make up more than half of the US population and more than half of the country's drug overdose deaths, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found. Overdose death statistics for all states will be released in the coming months, the agency said.

Heroin deaths in the studied time period rose for both men and women, among all age groups, and for blacks, Hispanics, and whites.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline this morning reads: "Payroll employment increases by 248,000 in September; unemployment rate declines to 5.9%."

How can this be? As I reported yesterday, US corporations are investing in buying back their own stocks, not in new business ventures that produce new jobs.

According to the Census Bureau's Poverty Report, US real median family income has declined to the level of twenty years ago.

Consumer credit and real retail sales are not growing. Construction is limited to rental units. Construction shows 16,000 new jobs, half of which are "specialty trade contractors" or home remodelers.

The payroll jobs report lists 35,300 new jobs in retail trade. How is this possible when J.C. Penny's, Macy's, Sears, and the dollar store chains are in trouble and closing stores, and shopping centers are renting space by the day or hour?

At a time when there is a surfeit of office buildings and only 500 new jobs in "heavy and civil engineering construction," the jobs report says 6,000 new jobs have been created in "architectural and engineering services." What work are these architects and engineers doing?

The 4,900 computer systems jobs, if they exist, are likely short-term contracts from 6 to 18 months. Those who have the jobs are not employees but "independent contractors."

The payroll jobs report gives an unusually high number - 81,000 - of "professional and business services" jobs of which 60,000 are "administrative and waste services," primarily "temporary help services."

"Health care and social assistance" accounts for 22,700 of the new jobs, of which 63 percent consist of "ambulatory health care services."

"Performing arts and spectator sports" gave the economy 7,200 jobs, and 20,400 Americans found employment as waitresses and bartenders.

State governments hired 22,000 people.

Let's overlook the contribution of the discredited "birth-death model" which overstates on average the monthly payroll jobs by at least 50,000, and let's ignore the manipulation of seasonal adjustments. Instead, let's assume the numbers are real. What kind of economy are we looking at?