After nearly a century in business, the Bay Area's last major slaughterhouse facility has once again closed its doors, for the second time in less than a month.

Following a massive recall of 8.7 million pounds of beef and the launch of an investigation into potential criminal charges, Rancho Feeding Corporation in Petaluma has ceased its operations while they retrieve the meat. The financial burden of reimbursing clients could mean the plant may not reopen, multiple ranchers said, posing a threat to the region's beef and dairy producers.

Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture announced a recall of all cattle slaughtered at the plant on a single day in January; on Saturday, a second recall was initiated for a year's worth of beef, totaling approximately 8,742,700 pounds. U.S.D.A. inspectors maintain Rancho processed "diseased and unsound" animals that received only a partial inspection or were not examined at all, rendering the meat "adulterated" and "unfit for human food."

Four police officers in Hawthorne, California used a taser on a man who was attempting to tell them that he was deaf via sign language.

The Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness is filing a lawsuit on behalf of Jonathan Meister, who was charged with assault as a result of the incident. According to the lawsuit, Meister was retrieving boxes he had left at a friend's house when police, alerted by a neighbor to a possible burglary, arrived.

Officers Jeffrey Salmon, Jeffrey Tysl, Erica Bristow, and Mark Hultgren allegedly ordered Meister to stop loading the boxes into his car, but Meister could not hear the order. One of the officers then grabbed Meister by the hand, who responded by attempting to use American Sign Language to communicate with the officer.

The officers interpreted his sudden movements as resistance, so they "struck Meister with fists and feet, and forcibly took him to the ground." Once he was on the ground, one of the officers allegedly shot him twice with a taser. Another officer then delivered a "drive stun" to Meister's abdomen.

They continued to beat Meister until he was unconscious, then escorted him to the hospital, where he was charged with assaulting the officers. The charge was later dropped.

A Valentine's Day outing turned tragic for one Oklahoma family who claims five police officers beat their father to death during a confrontation outside a local movie theater.

The death is currently under investigation, and three police officers have been placed on administrative leave as the probe unfolds.

The incident occurred February 14 in Moore, Oklahoma, when an argument erupted between Nair Rodriguez and her daughter Lunahi. Nair slapped her daughter during the dispute and ended up leaving the theater. When Luis Rodriguez chased after his wife in a bid to stop her, law enforcement officials intervened and asked for his identification.

According to NewsOK, police claim that Luis Rodriguez attempted to fight with police and that led to a physical altercation. Nair and Lunahi, however, told local media outlet News9 that allegation is false, and that Luis simply tried to bypass officers to keep his wife from driving off in anger.

As the confrontation escalated, five police officers allegedly beat Luis Rodriguez beyond recognition, a situation captured on a video by Nair's cell phone.

"They jumped on him like he was some kind of killer or drug dealer and beat him up," Lunahi Rodriguez said to NewsOK. "He never fought the officers, they beat him on the head and that's how he lost his breath."

"When they flipped him over you could see all the blood on his face, it was, he was disfigured, you couldn't recognize him," she added to News9.

Originally published on Feb 13, 2014. Original text is below:

In the early morning hours of June 27, 2013, a team of Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies pulled up to the home of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer living in the rural outskirts of Los Angeles county with his wife Tonya Pate and stepson Adrian Lamos.

The deputies crashed through the front gate and began executing a search warrant for methamphetamine on the property. Detective Patrick Hobbs, a self-described narcotics expert who claimed he "smelled the strong odor of chemicals" downwind from the house after being tipped off to illegal activity from an anonymous informant, spearheaded the investigation.

The deputies announced their presence, and Pate emerged from the trailer where she'd been sleeping to escape the sweltering summer heat of the California desert. Lamos and a couple of friends emerged from another trailer, and a handyman tinkering with a car on the property also gave himself up without resistance. But Mallory, who preferred to sleep in the house, was nowhere to be seen.

Deputies approached the house, and what happened next is where things get murky. The deputies said they announced their presence upon entering and were met in the hallway by the 80-year-old man, wielding a gun and stumbling towards them. The deputies later changed the story when the massive bloodstains on Mallory's mattress indicated to investigators that he'd most likely been in bed at the time of the shooting. Investigators also found that an audio recording of the incident revealed a discrepancy in the deputies' original narrative: Before listening to the audio recording, [Sgt. John] Bones believed that he told Mallory to "Drop the gun" prior to the shooting. The recording revealed, however, that his commands to "Drop the gun" occurred immediately after the shooting.

When it was all over, Eugene Mallory died of six gunshot wounds from Sgt. John Bones' MP-5 9mm submachine gun. When a coroner arrived, he found the loaded .22 caliber pistol the two deputies claimed Mallory had pointed at them on the bedside table.

Mallory had not fired of a single shot. The raid turned up no evidence of methamphetamine on the property.

To find out more about this case, including details about what the police did find, watch the above video, featuring Mallory's widow Tonya Pate. Pate has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, an agency plagued by prison abuse scandals, questionable hiring practices, and allegations of racial profiling and harassment in recent years.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department declined multiple requests to comment on this story.

The mind has a way of making traumatic experiences seem like distant dreams to those who survive them. As it goes, the more traumatic the experience, the quicker the paramedics in one's mind rush to dress wounds, resuscitate and stabilize the victim; the victim being you.

Since returning from Palestine 36 hours ago, I find myself confronted with feelings of detachment and minimization of what I encountered. My subconscious has decided the horrors I witnessed in the 'Holy Land' were nothing serious-horrors which include a 26-foot-tall concrete wall enclosing the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank, and the sniper towers seemingly on every other corner of this open-air prison.

This was my first trip to Palestine-most westerners call it Israel, but I'll address that topic shortly. I had never been to the country, but I read enough to know the basics: Palestinians and Israelis were fighting over land. The Israeli government was formed in 1948 as part of a vision set forth by a secular European colonial political movement called Zionism, founded by Hungarian Theodor Herzl in 1896. Herzl, an atheist, sought to free the Jews from European oppression and anti-Semitism, with the ultimate goal being the creation of a Jewish state. He first proposed East Africa's Uganda as the location of the Jewish state. This proposal also found the approval of the British government which controlled Palestine since the First World War. Herzl, however, later identified Palestine as the country of choice. I knew this.

The history of Palestinians was something I was familiar with as well, only because in high school, my friend's parents were Moroccan Jews with staunch right-wing Zionist views. They'd go on about how Palestinians were worth shit and how they were sucking off the land they stole, and how they were not from Palestine, but Jordan. Truth be told, my friend's parents' passion about their 'homeland' made me sick. As a black person living in the United States, I could not relate to their love for their proclaimed homeland because I never had one. My ancestors were captured from various regions of Africa and forced onto ships bound for the Americas. Therefore, when questioned about the geographic origins of my ancestors, my answers were as vague as Africa is big.

Military surgeons are being sent to Denmark for the controversial training on live animals - even though the practice is illegal in the UK.
Pigs are being shot so British Army medics can learn to treat battle wounds.

Military surgeons are sent to Denmark for the controversial training on live animals - even though the practice is illegal in the UK.

Animal rights group PETA has slammed the "cruel" practice.

A live pig dangles from a wooden frame as a soldier shoots it to inflict horrific injuries.

Military medics then operate on the animal's traumatic gunshot wounds while it is still breathing.

The shocking photos taken in Denmark have put the country at the centre of another animal cruelty row after the controversial killing of a giraffe at Copenhagen Zoo.

The Israeli army is both respected and feared as a fighting force. But now the country's military is facing a backlash at home and abroad for its treatment of children in the West Bank, occupied territory.

Coming up, a joint investigation by Four Corners and The Australian newspaper reveals evidence that shows the army is targeting Palestinian boys for arrest and detention. Reporter John Lyons travels to the West Bank to hear the story of children who claim they have been taken into custody, ruthlessly questioned and then allegedly forced to sign confessions before being taken to court for sentencing.

He meets Australian lawyer Gerard Horton, who's trying to help the boys who are arrested, and talks to senior Israeli officials to examine what's driving the army's strategy.

The program focuses on the stories of three boys. In two cases the army came for the children in the middle of the night, before taking them to unknown locations where they are questioned. A mother of one of the boys described the scene

"Every soldier stood at the door of a room. I was telling him 'What do you want with him?' He said 'Shut up woman.' And then they started hitting him and pulling him out of bed."

"They started kicking me with their boots in my stomach, slaps on my face. They pulled me up by my t-shirt and took me out of bed." - Arrested boy

A federal investigation into a county courthouse has revealed a shocking catalogue of claims that sex assault victims were routinely discriminated against and ignored.

In one case, it is alleged a prosecutor in Montana left a five-year-old rape victim's mother horrified when he explained away the attack by saying 'boys will be boys'.

According to a report, the mother of the child said she wanted to know why the boy who raped her daughter was only getting a slap on the wrist.

Hundreds of children are dying needlessly from cancer or being left with debilitating conditions because life-saving drugs are only tested on adults, health experts have warned.

Since 2007, of the 28 new cancer drugs which have been given European approval, half cannot be licensed for children because youngsters were not included in their trials.

Pharmaceutical companies argue that it is pointless testing drugs for adult cancers, such as lung cancer, on children because they do not develop them in childhood.

But oncologists say that the underlying genetic triggers are the same and so the new treatments would be beneficial.

The lung cancer drug Gefitinib, for example, which has been approved by Nice, targets mutations of the EGFR gene. The same mutations appear in the childhood cancer neuroblastoma, which affects around 100 children each year in Britain and the drug is likely to be effective, but cannot be prescribed.

The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London is urging the EU to change the law so that drug companies are forced to test all new medications on youngsters.

"Kids are dying," said Professor Alan Ashworth, Chief Executive of the ICR. "We are getting to a situation where there are effectively no new drugs for children, and we are no longer advancing in the treatment of childhood cancer.

The century is still young and the Bush-Bama administration were such masters of lying its hard to pick one...Iraq...9/11...the "healthy: economy... swine flu

But one of the most amazing - and vicious - lies of all time has to be that Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.

Amazing because it flies in the face of all evidence and eye witness accounts.

Vicious because it removes the liability (and thus the potential of compensation) from the guilty parties: the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Federal Government, and the Wall Street Corporate interests that own both.

Changing public opinion after a well-crafted and heavily promote lie has made its way around the world is one of the hardest things on earth to do, but if you stick with it long enough, you can do it.

Last week, as the result of a relentless, grass roots campaign, a judge finally agreed: It wasn't Katrina that devastated New Orleans, it was the systematic failure of the multi-billion dollar tax payer federal levee system.