A radio reporter was shot and wounded in the southern Philippines after using a broadcast program to accuse police of being in cahoots with drug dealers.

Cagayan de Oro city police chief Gerardo Rosales said James Licuanan of DXIF radio was shot in the chest as he was heading home on a motorcycle after his radio program late Thursday.

He fell off the bike and was shot again before taking shelter in a nearby fire station. The gunmen then fled the scene on motorcycle.

A Philippine media watchdog says that 123 journalists have been killed in the country since 1986.

A prominent Egyptian-born U.S. columnist said local police sexually assaulted, beat and blindfolded her after she was detained Thursday near Tahrir Square during clashes, leaving her left arm and right hand broken and in casts.

Mona Eltahawy, 44, lives in New York and is a prominent women's rights defender, a lecturer on the role of social media in the Arab world and a former Reuters journalist. Eltahawy describes herself as a liberal Muslim who has spoken publicly in the U.S and other countries against violent Islamic groups, particularly in the wake of 9-11. She is known as a scathing critic of the former Egyptian regime.

Eltahawy arrived in Egypt Wednesday evening and went straight to Tahrir Square, getting close to the front lines of clashes between protesters and the police at the nearby Interior Ministry. She was detained outside the ministry in the early morning hours of Thursday and released about 12 hours later.

"They hit me with their sticks on the arms and head. They sexually assaulted me, groping my breasts and putting their hands between my legs," she told The Associated Press. "For a moment I said 'this is it. No one is around. I am finished.'" As she struggled, shouting: "No! No," her attackers dragged her by her hair from the street to the Interior Ministry, cursing her.

"What I experienced is just the tip of the iceberg of the brutality Egyptians experience everyday," she said, considering herself lucky because her dual nationality might have played a role in sparing her further abuse. "This is just the type of brutality that our revolution came about to fight."

Eltahawy is a vocal supporter of the Egyptian revolution and has visited the country at least twice since the January uprising. Known for her harsh criticism of the regime of the ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Eltahawy continued to denounce the new military rulers in post-Mubarak Egypt. She warned in public speeches that one Mubarak has been replaced with "1,800" others, in reference to the military council.

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

When it set up its campsite at Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street was facing in only one direction: toward the financial heart of the planet two blocks away. The police, who promptly surrounded the encampment and organized their own occupation of the neighborhood, were in a sense facing in the other direction: toward Ground Zero, where new glass-sheathed towers were rising to replace those destroyed on September 11, 2001. The police, up-armored in full riot gear, with the sort of surveillance paraphernalia, helicopters, and high-tech cameras that were a far more minimal aspect of domestic policing before 9/11, were clearly thinking counter-terrorism.

They were the representatives not just of New York's billionaire mayor and the bankers and brokers who had previously made the area their own, but of the ever more militarized national security state that had blossomed like some errant set of weeds in the ruins of the World Trade Center towers. They were domestic grunts for a new order in Washington as well as New York that has, by now, lost the ability to imagine solving problems in a civil and civilian fashion.

They represent those who have ruled this country since 9/11 in the name of our safety and security, while they made themselves, and no one else, safe and secure. It is an order that has based itself on kidnapping, torture, secret prisons, illegal surveillance, assassination, permanent war, militarized solutions to every problem under the sun, its own set of failed occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the closest of relations with a series of crony capitalist corporations intent on making money off anyone's suffering as long as the going is good.

Major legal battle pending ahead of next month's pre-trial hearing as aprepare to fight prosecution of WikiLeaks suspect

The defence team for WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning is planning to call 50 witnesses at next month's military hearing, promising to turn the proceedings into a detailed legal battle over the merits of the prosecution case against him.

The Bradley Manning support network, a group of sympathisers of the US soldier that has paid for the bulk of his legal fees so far, revealed that attorneys are preparing to launch a vigorous defence at the pre-trial hearing scheduled to take place at Ford Meade in Maryland on 16 December. Many legal angles will be pursued, with witnesses ranging from experts on whistle blowing to IT specialists who can comment on technical details relating to Manning's access to intelligence databases.

The strategy is unusual for such pre-trial hearings, known in the army as Article 32 proceedings. It is common at this stage for defence teams to limit their engagement to a minimum, in order to withhold from the prosecution elements of their approach that could be crucial in any eventual trial.

The bound and gagged bodies of 26 men were found dumped before dawn Thursday in the heart of the picturesque city of Guadalajara, a sign that full-scale war between drug cartels may have come to the metropolis that hosted last month's Pan American Games.

Law-enforcement officials said the men were found, shot execution-style, in two vans and a pickup truck abandoned near the Milennium Arches, one of the most recognizable landmarks in Mexico's second-largest city.

Best known as the home of mariachi music and tequila, Guadalajara also sits on the main highway running through western Mexico from the methamphetamine-producing state of Michoacan north toward the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa. In recent months, security officials and analysts have worried that the city could become a target for the Zetas drug cartel, which has been using paramilitary-style tactics and headline-grabbing atrocities in a national push to grab territory from older organized crime groups.

"These acts of barbarism show how the war between cartels, and crime, is getting more brutal," Guadalajara's mayor, Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval, told reporters.

A message was found with the bodies in one of the vehicles, said Luis Carlos Najera, public security secretary for the state of Jalisco. He provided no details, but Mexican cartels frequently leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims as a way of sowing fear and taking credit for their actions.

Around 6,000 people were evacuated Thursday after an explosion at a chemical plant near the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, state media reported.

The accident occurred early afternoon at the Futian Chemical Company in Panyu district, Xinhua news agency said, quoting the local government.

Residents were evacuated after "a small amount" of toxic hydrogen chloride gas was detected in the air following the blast, Xinhua said.

Industrial accidents are common in China and people who live close to industrial sites frequently express concern about the effect of hazardous pollutants on their health.

Fourteen workers were killed Saturday in an explosion at a chemical plant in east China.

The Occupy movement is demonstrating its durability and perseverance. Like a Daruma doll, each time it is knocked off balance it serenely pops back up. The movement has been seeking justice for the 99 percent, and justice is an essential element of peace.

For decades, our country has been in permanent preparation for war, spending over half of the total annual discretionary funds that Congress allocates on "defense," our euphemism for war.

World military expenditures exceed $1.5 trillion annually, and the United States spends more than half of this amount, more than the rest of the world combined.

Scotland Neck - A 61-year-old Halifax County man died Tuesday, a day after police shocked him with a stun gun while he was riding his bike, family members said.

Scotland Neck Police Chief Joe Williams said they received a call Monday night about a man who fell off of his bicycle and injured himself in the parking lot of the BB&T bank, 1001 Main St. The caller was concerned that the man was drunk.

When Officer John Turner arrived, he saw Roger Anthony pedaling away along 10th Street. He followed Anthony in his patrol car, briefly put on his sirens and lights and yelled out of the window for him to stop, but Anthony continued to ride away, police said.

Williams said Turner then saw Anthony take something out his pocket and put it into his mouth. At that time, Turner got out of the car and yelled for Anthony to stop. When Anthony didn't stop, the officer used a stun gun on him, causing him to fall off of his bike.

Anthony was transported to Pitt County Memorial Hospital, where he was declared brain dead, his sister Gladys Freeman said. He was taken off of life support on Tuesday.

Has anyone else noticed that America seems to be going crazy? I'm not talking about the "woo hoo - let go out and have some fun" kind of crazy. I'm talking about the "lock them up in the looney bin" kind of crazy. Our society is rapidly coming apart at the seams and people are seriously starting to lose it. Criminals are going crazy, young people are going crazy, children are going crazy, law enforcement authorities are going crazy and the federal government is most certainly going crazy.

Way too many Americans seem to be losing all sense of what is right and what is wrong. Way too many Americans seem to be losing all sense of what it means to treat others with dignity and respect. Yes, the economy is falling apart and people are feeling the stress of hard times, but it goes much deeper than that.

It is almost as if some sort of mental illness is spreading throughout our society that is expressing itself in thousands of different ways. We are seeing anger, rage, malice and brutality rise to very dangerous levels. Our population has become way too greedy, proud, selfish and hateful. America is on a very dangerous road and we need to wake up.

The following list could contain thousands of examples, but hopefully the 20 signs listed below will be enough to convince you that America is rapidly going crazy....

Last week the parents of a Wisconsin boy sued Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker for charging their son with first-degree sexual assault, a Class B felony, after he played "butt doctor" with a 5-year-old girl. He was 6 at the time. When the boy's lawyer tried to have the charge dismissed, Riniker replied: "The legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute if it wanted to. The legislature did no such thing."

According to the complaint (PDF), the girl is "the daughter of a well-known political figure in Grant County," and her brother, who is the same age, also was involved in playing doctor but was not charged. In addition to Riniker, the lawsuit names as defendants retired Grant County Sheriff's Sgt. James Kopp and Jan Moravits, an investigator with Grant County Social Services "whose regional supervisor...is the political figure's wife's sister-in-law" - i.e., the aunt of the alleged victim.

Although the boy, now 7, is too young to be prosecuted or named in a juvenile delinquency petitition, Madison.com reports, county officials are using the felony charge to force his parents into accepting "protection or services" for him. The lawsuit says that once he turns 18, he will be listed as a sex offender.

I noted a similar case in my July Reason story on sex offender laws.