At least four students have been tased by police officers just over a month into the school year, adding their cases to some worrisome statistics: Since 2011, nearly 100 US children have been tased by school-based officers.

An electroshock weapon was last used on a 15-year old student at Middleton High School in Wisconsin on September 22. The teenager reportedly spotted people he knew trying to enter the school during lunch time. He became agitated and got into a fight with the group, with whom he'd previously had problems. Police tried to break up the fight and at one point, one of the officers shocked the 15-year-old with a Taser.

Weeks before that case, a school-based police officer tased two female students when deputies at a Florida high school tried to break up a fight.

In the wake of the recent police killing of Alfred Olango, for allegedly holding a vaping device in a threatening manner, violent protests broke out in El Cajon last night as police continued to refuse to release video of the shooting.

On Friday, after a night of violence, the El Cajon police department relented and decided to release the footage of the killing to the public.

Prior to the shooting, Alfred Okwera Olango "was not acting like himself", according to his sister, allegedly walking into traffic on Broadway in the San Diego suburb. She repeatedly called for assistance early Tuesday afternoon, with two El Cajon Police officers responding to the call, and finding Olango behind a restaurant, said Chief Jeff Davis, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Reality Check: 70% of protesters arrested in Charlotte were from out of state? Ben Swann brings forward the facts behind those numbers and why these protests are not "astro-turf":

Police say a villager in southwest China killed his parents and then 17 neighbors in an attempt to cover up his crime, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

An investigation found that Yang Qingpei argued with his parents over money on Wednesday evening and killed them, Xinhua said. Fearing he would be identified as the killer, he then murdered 17 neighbors in the village of Yema, it said, citing police in southwestern Yunnan province where the village is located.

Xinhua didn't say how Yang, who is 26 or 27, allegedly killed the villagers.

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an "economics of contempt" that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]


The forces normalizing and contributing to such violence are too expansive to cite, but surely they would include: the absurdity of celebrity culture; the blight of rampant consumerism; state-legitimated pedagogies of repression that kill the imagination of students; a culture of immediacy in which accelerated time leaves no room for reflection; the reduction of education to training; the transformation of mainstream media into a mix of advertisements, propaganda, and entertainment; the emergence of an economic system which argues that only the market can provide remedies for the endless problems it produces, extending from massive poverty and unemployment to decaying schools and a war on poor minority youth; the expanding use of state secrecy and the fear-producing surveillance state; and a Hollywood fluff machine that rarely relies on anything but an endless spectacle of mind-numbing violence. Historical memory has been reduced to the likes of a Disney theme park and a culture of instant gratification has a lock on producing new levels of social amnesia.

An Arkansas politician who helped pass state legislation protecting people who film the police, has been arrested for... filming the police.

Representative John Walker was arrested by Little Rock police on Monday for filming the arrest of a driver and his passenger following a traffic stop and charged with "obstruction of government relations".

"I'm just making sure they don't kill you," said Walker to the driver being pulled over and subsequently arrested for an outstanding warrant, according to the police report.

"I ordered Walker several times to leave or be arrested. Walker replied 'arrest me' at which point I did," wrote the arresting officer.

Russian space producer RSC Energia announced it will create a state of the art rocket for the Sea Launch program taken over by the Russian S7-group, with a launch price tag of $5mn.

At a press conference on Friday, director of RSC Energia Vladimir Solntsev said that his company is already working on a brand new "super-heavy carrier rocket" for the project run by S7. According to the official, the development could last up to five years.

The rocket in question, named Sunkar, is currently being developed by RSC Energia and can be created within five years if there is enough financing, Izvestia reports citing an earlier statement by Solntsev.

On September 27, Russia's largest private aviation holding company S7 Group signed a deal to purchase the Sea Launch space program, operated by RSC Energia. S7 Group CEO Vladislav Filev called the deal a "ticket to space" for his company.

The project includes the ship Sea Launch Commander, the Odyssey Launch Platform, as well as various pieces of support equipment and a port facility in Long Beach, California. With the deal, S7 plans to revive space launches from the platform, which were halted in 2014.

S7 has also signed a separate contract with RSC Energia, saying it wants to use "the knowledge" of the company to boost the joint project.

A projected 604,000 US veterans will not have health insurance in 2017, according to a new report. About 327,000 of those live in states that have not expanded Medicaid in accordance with the Affordable Care Act.

Thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, this projected number of uninsured veterans would still be lower than the more than 700,000 who went without insurance in 2014, the report, released by the Urban Institute, found. The law's Medicaid provisions have helped boost the number of insured vets, according to the report. Nineteen states have yet to expand Medicaid.

"If Medicaid expansion decisions do not change between now and 2017, we project that approximately 604,000 veterans will be uninsured in 2017 and that 54 percent will be living in states that have yet to expand Medicaid," the report said.

Between 2013 and 2014, the ACA's Medicaid expansion provisions resulted in an increase in insurance among veterans and their families living in states that chose to broaden Medicaid.

Experts have called on the government to publish the science behind its counter-terrorism strategy, after programs such as Prevent proved inefficient and a possible waste of resources and taxpayer money.

According to a report by the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP), thousands of Muslim men and women are being referred to counter-terrorism officials for reasons based on questionable studies.

The RCP is now demanding the Home Office publish the evidence upon which Prevent was built to prove it was based on "peer review and scientific scrutiny."

Doctors warned the policy, which has seen almost 4,000 children referred to the 'early stage' extremism prevention scheme Channel, could be traumatizing. Refugees who might have escaped terrorist groups like Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) were particularly vulnerable to this.

"Those fleeing war-torn parts of the world have a high risk of psychological distress, and many are escaping terrorist violence in their country of origin," said the RCP.

"The College is concerned there should not be a system that overly identifies them with the terrorism from which they have fled, as this could add to their trauma."

Bulgaria's parliament has passed legislation that effectively bans burqas - veils which fully cover the face, worn by Muslim women in public - in a bid to step up security in the country following a series of terrorist attacks in Europe.

The law, put forward by Bulgaria's nationalist Patriotic Front coalition and approved on Friday by the unicameral National Assembly, prohibits "wearing in public clothing that partially or completely covers the face," AFP reported.

Any type of such clothing may not be worn in government offices, educational and cultural institutions, and places of public recreation, except for health or professional reasons.

These who fail to comply will face fines of up to 1,500 leva (approx. $860) and be stripped of social privileges.

"The law is not directed against religious communities and is not repressive," senior lawmaker of the ruling center-right GERB party Krasimir Velchev insisted, according to Reuters.

"We made a very good law for the safety of our children," Velchev added.