Garrison Keillor, the former host of "A Prairie Home Companion" and a legend in public radio circles, said he had been fired by Minnesota Public Radio over allegations of improper behavior.

Keillor, who hosted the show for 42 seasons, was fired over "a story that I think is more interesting and more complicated than the version MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) heard," he told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

A small Norwegian town above the Arctic Circle has witnessed at least 151 cases of sexual assault since 1953, police revealed. Victims ranged between four and 75 years old, and mostly belonged to the indigenous Sami community.

All the incidents took place in the Tysfjord municipality in Norway, with a population of less than 2,000 residents. The police probe started after a report in the local VG newspaper in 2016.

An 89-year-old German woman was sentenced to 14 months in prison for incitement of racial hatred after losing an appeal on a prior conviction.

Ursula Haverbeck, often referred to in the German press as the "Nazi Grandma," is known for extremist views that have run afoul of German hate speech laws in the past-with courts having previously given her fines and another suspended sedition sentence, according to Fox News.

In Germany, anyone who publicly denies, endorses or plays down the extermination of Jews during Adolf Hitler's regime can be sentenced to a maximum of five years in jail for incitement of racial hatred.

Wikipedia explains German hate speech laws as:

Volksverhetzung, in English "incitement of the masses", "instigation of the people", is a concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population. It is often applied to, though not limited to, trials relating to Holocaust denial in Germany.

According to a report by German state-run broadcaster, Deutsche Welle (DW):

A German court in Detmold has sentenced Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck to 14 months in prison, after the 89-year-old woman lost her appeal to a prior conviction on Tuesday. However, four months were shaved off her original conviction of 18 months. Prosecutors wanted the sentence upheld, Haverbeck's lawyers were seeking exoneration.

The Detmold court had initially sentenced Haverbeck to eight months imprisonment in September 2016, after she sent a letter to the town's mayor, Rainer Heller, claiming that Auschwitz was not a concentration camp.

Following the trial, the octogenarian handed out pamphlets to journalists, as well as the judge and prosecutor, entitled "Only the truth will set you free," in which she once again denied the Nazi atrocities. Haverbeck was handed an additional 10-month sentence for the stunt.

A young man was recently attacked by court officers after attempting to pay a parking fee of $10. After the court refused to accept his payment they allegedly asked him to leave, and on security camera footage you can see him turn to walk away just before he is attacked. The video shows the guards grabbing him and choking him out, then slamming him to the ground. The attack knocked the man unconscious, and when he awoke moments later he had found that he soiled himself.

To add insult to injury, the victim, Anthony Sevy, was then charged with Disturbing the Peace and assault, and while the assault charge was dropped, he was forced to plead no contest to the other charge, fearing that it would be his only chance of escaping a 2 year prison sentence for assaulting a court officer.

Now, Sevy plans on filing a lawsuit against Royal Oak and the guards involved.

"He wasn't happy about [the fee] so, in symbolic protest, he brought back penny rolls to pay for his ticket. The clerk wasn't too happy about that, they refused to allow him to pay with penny rolls. As he was leaving the courthouse with his back to the officer, the court officer began to choke him out, grabbing him, brought him to the ground. Mr. Sevy passed out and defecated himself," his attorney Jonathan Marco said.

"I don't think anyone paying in penny rolls, whether it's a preferred thing to do for a court clerk, warrants this type of this assaultive behavior and violation of constitutional rights. I think the more profound and long-lasting injury is the psychological injuries he's suffering as a result of this. He's supposed to be in a safe place. I don't think that in everyday course of business, we poop our pants or go around defecating ourselves," Marco added.

Muslims are projected to increase as a share of Europe's population - even with no future migration

In recent years, Europe has experienced a record influx of asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in Syria and other predominantly Muslim countries. This wave of Muslim migrants has prompted debate about immigration and security policies in numerous countries and has raised questions about the current and future number of Muslims in Europe.

To see how the size of Europe's Muslim population may change in the coming decades, Pew Research Center has modeled three scenarios that vary depending on future levels of migration. These are not efforts to predict what will happen in the future, but rather a set of projections about what could happen under different circumstances.

The baseline for all three scenarios is the Muslim population in Europe (defined here as the 28 countries presently in the European Union, plus Norway and Switzerland) as of mid-2016, estimated at 25.8 million (4.9% of the overall population) - up from 19.5 million (3.8%) in 2010.

Even if all migration into Europe were to immediately and permanently stop - a "zero migration" scenario - the Muslim population of Europe still would be expected to rise from the current level of 4.9% to 7.4% by the year 2050. This is because Muslims are younger (by 13 years, on average) and have higher fertility (one child more per woman, on average) than other Europeans, mirroring a global pattern.

A second, "medium" migration scenario assumes that all refugee flows will stop as of mid-2016 but that recent levels of "regular" migration to Europe will continue (i.e., migration of those who come for reasons other than seeking asylum; see note on terms below). Under these conditions, Muslims could reach 11.2% of Europe's population in 2050.

A member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee has defended the use of abortion to eliminate babies with Down syndrome and other disabilities as a "preventive measure" to "avoid the handicap."

In a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Committee this month, Mr. Yadh Ben Achour, a Tunisian lawyer and committee member, argued that one can be an advocate for handicapped people while still encouraging abortion in the case of fetuses with permanent disabilities.

Captured on videotape, the commissioner defended the inviolable right of women to an abortion, especially when her child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome or another disability.

Mr. Ben Achour said in French:

If you tell a woman, "Your child has Dow..." - what is it called? Down syndrome, Dawn syndrome - if you tell her that, or that he may have a handicap forever, for the rest of his life, you should make this woman... it should be possible for her to resort to abortion to avoid the handicap as a preventive measure:

While describing himself as "an ardent defender of the handicapped," Ben Achour insisted that the State must do everything possible to protect the handicapped "and ensure they have a life, a possible living."

"But that does not mean that we have to accept to let a disabled fetus live," he said. "This is a preventive measure."


Advocating the abortion of handicapped children "doesn't mean that we are against the disabled or that we won't help the disabled when born disabled," Ben Achour said.

The commissioner went on to contend that the key difference lies in catching the disability before the child is born so that it can be aborted because afterward society is obliged to defend the child's right to live-even if the child has a genetic anomaly.

"So this is where we will find the difference between the birth of the human being. Once he is born, it is finished; with a handicap or without a handicap, he must live and we must protect absolutely, in an absolute manner, his right to life," he said.

"So us, we defend the right of the handicapped, but, but we can avoid the handicaps, and we must do everything we can to avoid them," he added. "And it is not contradictory."

In response to Mr. Ben Achour's speech, a young woman with Down syndrome made her own YouTube video in response, suggesting that the commissioner apologize for his "horrible comments."

"I'm a human being just like you," said the woman, identified only as Charlotte. "Our only difference is an extra chromosome."

"My extra chromosome makes me far more tolerant than you, sir," she said. "If any other heritable traits, like skin color, were used to eradicate a group of people, the world would cry out. Why are you not crying out when people like me are being made extinct? What have we done to make you want us to disappear?":

"As far as I know, my community doesn't hate, discriminate, or commit crimes," Charlotte said. "What you are suggesting is eugenics. It's disgusting and evil."

"You need to apologize for your horrible comments," the woman continued. "You should also be removed from the Human Rights Committee as an expert. You are not an expert about Down syndrome. You, sir, do not speak for my community."

"I will fight for our right to exist for the rest of my life," she said.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome

School officials refuse to clarify how and why policy will be implemented

Brown University is implementing a change to its graduate school application that will allow applicants to "self-identify" as persons of color. Multiple efforts by The College Fix to clarify the details of this change were ignored by campus officials.

The policy comes as a result of complaints made by graduate students on the Graduate School advisory board that international and Asian American students are not treated as members of historically underrepresented groups by the university, according to The Brown Daily Herald.

One graduate student, Lydia Kelow-Bennett, told The Herald that this decision has led to "institutional invisibility" for these students. Brown defines historically underrepresented groups as "American Indian, Alaskan Native, African American, Hispanic or Latinx and Native Hawaiian and/or Pacific Islander." The school's diversity initiatives are intended to benefit members of these groups.

Brown's criteria for historical underrepresentation "caused some students to not receive invitations to certain events, such as a multicultural student dinner," The Herald reported.

How allowing applicants to self-identify as persons of color will affect policy relating to the diversity initiatives, and whether the university will take any steps to verify applicants' self-identification, remain unclear. The Fix reached out multiple times to Brown's graduate admissions office to inquire into how Brown would ensure that applicants were telling the truth about their self-identified ethnicity. The office did not respond.

Bristol, Conn. (AP) ESPN is eliminating 150 production and technical employees as the sports broadcasting giant continues to shift its focus to a more digital future.

The company says the layoffs, which were announced Wednesday morning in a memo to employees, don't include on-air talent and will have a minimal impact on the network's signature SportsCenter news program.

"The majority of the jobs eliminated are in studio production, digital content, and technology and they generally reflect decisions to do less in certain instances and re-direct resources," ESPN president John Skipper wrote in memo. "We will continue to invest in ways which will best position us to serve the modern sports fan and support the success of our business."

Courts in two states are finally admitting that dangerous early-morning raids conducted by SWAT teams searching for cannabis are illegal and unwarranted.

Courts in both Florida and Michigan have admitted that the dangerous early-morning raids conducted by SWAT teams searching for cannabis were completely unwarranted, and the overeager actions of the officers involved made their searches illegal.

In one case in Florida, Collier County Sheriff's Deputies arrived at the home of Juan Falcon before 7 a.m. and within 20 seconds of knocking on the front door and announcing themselves, they broke down the door with a battering ram and threw two flash bang grenades inside the house. As a report from Reason noted, the purpose of the raid was to gain access to two dozen cannabis plants that were reportedly growing in Falcon's backyard.

Florida's Second District Court of Appeal ruled that the methods the officers used to obtain those cannabis plants violated the state's law on "knock-and-announce" searches. In a unanimous decision from the three-judge panel, Judge Susan Rothstein-Youakim noted that when the deputies conducted the raid, they were aware that Falcon lived in the home with his family, which included his two children.

Taxi service Uber had a team of employees spying on rival companies to steal trade secrets, a former employee testified in US federal court in San Francisco.

According to Uber's former manager of global intelligence Richard Jacobs, the company hired former CIA agents to help infiltrate computers of rivals. Jacobs said it was done overseas.

Jacobs, who was fired seven months ago after working as the manager of global intelligence since March 2016, did not specify the companies Uber wanted to hack but said drivers were involved.