I have been on this earth for 19 years, and not once had I ever felt that the United States was the greatest country in the world. All my life, I have never experienced a time of peace, prosperity, and freedom. I live in an era of recession, restricted freedoms, and war. To many, my sentiment towards the country I call home may seem unpatriotic. This is not true. I am an outspoken critic of the United States because I am a lover of my birth country. I care for it. I speak up when we do wrong. I speak up when we do wrong, because I want us to do better. I want us to succeed; indeed, I want us to become the greatest country in the world. I am patriotic. Before my time, we used to be the leaders, the revolutionaries, and the free; the land we call home used to be the path to opportunity, prosperity, and liberty - but we have lost the way.

They have taken away our literature, our ability to let our minds interpret freely and gave us propaganda, and force-fed our brains to accept policies that harm our interests. They have taken away our family members and sent them far off to a foreign land to fight a war based on twisted lies and hidden truths. They have taken away our right to property and prosperity, and they have tricked us to believe that capitalism is not only equated to corporatism, but that it's the root of our economic recession. They have taken away our vested powers to make the decisions for our country and gave those powers to failed organizations made up of leaders of foreign nations. They have taken away our ability to love whoever we were destined to love and have distracted us from realizing that marriage is a fundamental liberty that can never be interfered with. They have prohibited us from the victimless use of marijuana and have imprisoned many peaceful, productive members of society. They have taken away our belief that we can make a change and have sadly proven that our vote no longer counts.

A Georgia man that suffers from Tourette's says that police deactivated a device that controls his symptoms and then beat him for their own amusement. He is suing Chatham County Sheriff officials for negligence and infliction of emotional distress.

Charles Ray, 34, says Sheriff's deputies near Savannah, Georgia ignored his pleas and then purposely attacked him after he was arrested in July 2010 on drug possession charges.

Upon being brought to the Chatham County jail for processing, Ray alleges that he warned officers that passing through the facility's metal detector would deactivate the battery-powered deep brain stimulator that helps him control the symptoms of Tourette's. If the device does not work, Ray is prone to uncontrollable tics and obscene outbursts typical with the neurological disorder.

"Upon being transported to his cell, plaintiff advised the sheriff's deputies which were escorting him that he should not go through the scanning device as it would affect the batteries in his Tourette's device and render it useless," the complaint, filed this week, reads. "The deputies did not heed plaintiff's warning and forced him to go through the scanning device, which in fact did turn off his Tourette's device and cause the symptoms of Tourette's to evidence themselves, including jerking of his arms and legs, facial tics and other neurological actions which evidenced a lack of control on plaintiff's part."

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon was a self-proclaimed messiah who built a global business empire. He called both North Korean leaders and American presidents his friends, but spent time in prisons in both countries. His followers around the world cherished him, while his detractors accused him of brainwashing recruits and extracting money from worshippers.

These contradictions did nothing to stop the founder of the Unification Church from turning his religious vision into a worldwide movement and a multibillion-dollar corporation stretching from the Korean Peninsula to the United States.

Moon died Monday at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong County, northeast of Seoul, two weeks after being hospitalized with pneumonia, Unification Church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul told The Associated Press. Moon's wife and children were at his side, Ahn said. He was 92.

The church will hold a 13-day mourning period and start accepting mourners Thursday at a multipurpose gym at its nearby religious center, the church said in a statement. The funeral will be held on Sept. 15, and Moon will be buried at nearby Cheonseung Mountain, where his home is located, the statement said.

Moon founded his Bible-based religion in Seoul in 1954, a year after the Korean War ended, saying Jesus Christ personally called on him to complete his work.

The church gained fame - and notoriety - by marrying thousands of followers in mass ceremonies presided over by Moon himself. The couples often came from different countries and had never met, but were matched up by Moon in a bid to build a multicultural religious world.

The St. Paul police chief has placed a second officer on leave amid an investigation prompted by a video that shows a suspect being kicked while on the ground and then slammed onto the hood of a squad car, police said Friday, Aug. 31.


Officer Matthew Gorans has been disciplined in the past for using excessive force and was once named in a lawsuit filed by a man who was injured in a confrontation with police. The city settled the suit for about $250,000.

On Wednesday, officer Jesse Zilge was placed on administrative leave after he was identified as the officer shown in a video kicking Eric Hightower during his arrest Tuesday in the city's North End.

The Los Angeles Police Department has placed no fewer than five of its officers under investigation as law enforcement officials search for answers in the mysterious death of a 35-year-old black mother who died last month while being detained.

The LAPD has opened a probe to see what role, if any, its officers had in the July 22 death of Alesia Thomas. The South Los Angeles resident suffocated to death while in the backseat of a departmental patrol car after officers attempted to detain her for alleged child endangerment.

A video captured the arrest showing officers knocking a woman to the ground. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has mandated the video be shown department-wide.


LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has downgraded a police commander and censured him as "severely deficient in his response" after two of his officers were caught on video knocking a woman to the ground after stopping her for allegedly using her cell phone while driving.

US Special Operations Command decided that downtown Minneapolis would be a perfect location for military games involving Black Hawk helicopters and dozens of troops.


Low-flying Black Hawk helicopters conducted military training exercises in downtown Minneapolis Monday night, hovering majestically outside of apartment windows of surprised local residents.

Some Minneapolis residents have taken videos of the Army's utility helicopters as they passed over bridges, hovered outside their windows and flew over the city.

"Yep, that's the view outside my window," said one YouTube user as two of the giant vehicles stopped outside his 28th floor window for 10 seconds before soaring down Marquette Ave.

On August 6, 2012, the Saudi Industrial Property Authority (MODON) issued a press release which highlighted, once again, the utter absurdity of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This writer has written previously on the rampant corruption, perversity, cruelty, and utter criminality of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and this latest insight into the workings of the House of Saud - i.e. the family that runs this gulag - defies rationality and further exposes the insanity of the rulers of this captive nation. Once again, we see how monarchy distorts the mind, corrupts the body politique, and deforms society into bizarre contortions as it attempts to reconcile its contradictions.

MODON's press release stated that it had initiated work on planning and development of "the first industrial city being readied for women workers in the Kingdom. It will be launched in Al-Ahsa 2nd Industrial city which is located in Hofuf near Al-Ahsa airport," reads the release. And while the press notice indicated that job opportunities would be created for "both men and women," it was the focus on the separation of the sexes in the workplace that caught the attention, and outrage, of news agencies and observers from around the world. With an estimated costs of 500 million riyals or about $133 million, the new city is expected to create only about 5000 new jobs.

"The city," the development authority announced "is distinguished from other industrial cities for its proximity to residential neighborhoods to facilitate the movement of women to and from the workplace. It is also characterized by allocating sections equipped for women workers in environment and working conditions consistent with the privacy of women according to Islamic guidelines and regulations."

WARSAW, Poland - It was pretty much all the money Bozena Oracz had after a working life as an accountant: the equivalent of $15,000. She placed it in a fund investing in gold, with the hope of paying for her daughter's studies and getting treatment for a bad knee.

Those dreams were dashed when she discovered she had fallen victim to an elaborate fraud scheme that has left thousands of Poles, many of them elderly, facing financial ruin.

The so-called Amber Gold affair is one of the biggest financial scandals to hit Poland since the fall of communism in 1989. The extent of wrongdoing is still murky, but it seems to have some elements of a pyramid scheme, meaning the financial institution used funds from new clients to pay off older clients rather than investing them.

Consumed with anger and desperation, 58-year-old Oracz traveled last week from a small town near Warsaw to a law firm in the capital to consider whether, after losing 50,000 zlotys, she should risk another 3,000 zlotys ($920; (EURO)730) on the fee to join a class-action lawsuit seeking to recover some of the losses.

"This was a lot of money to me - it was my savings," Oracz said, fighting back tears. Now retired and living on a small pension, she sees no way of building another nest egg. "My pension barely covers my needs," she said.

New York - It is difficult for me, as an advocate against rape and other forms of violence against women, to fathom the laziness and willful ignorance that characterize so much of the media coverage of the sexual-assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. To report that we are simply witnessing Swedish justice at work, one must be committed to doing no research - not even the bare minimum of picking up a phone. In fact, we are witnessing a bizarre aberration in the context of Sweden's treatment of sex crime - a case that exposes the grim reality of indifference, or worse, that victims there and elsewhere face.

If I were raped in Uppsala, where Assange is alleged to have committed his crime, I could not expect top prosecutors to lobby governments to arrest my assailant. On the contrary, "ordinary" Swedish rapists and abusers of women should assume that the police might not respond when called. When I tried the rape-crisis hotline at the government-run Crisis Center for Women in Stockholm, no one even picked up - and there was no answering machine.

According to rape-crisis advocates in Sweden, one-third of Swedish women have been sexually assaulted by the time they leave their teens. Indeed, according to a study published in 2003, and other later studies through 2009, Sweden has the highest sexual-assault rate in Europe, and among the lowest conviction rates.