A men's rights group is encouraging its followers to falsely accuse a sexual assault victims advocate of rape in a stunt intended to undermine the veracity of all rape accusations.

Paul Elam, founder of the website A Voice For Men, hosted an online discussion Wednesday with his site's editor-in-chief, John Hembling, and feminist critic Karen Straughn to discuss their plan to harass executive director of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton.

"I have looked at a number of cases where people have reported alien abductions were they were prodded and poked and had different orifices in their bodies explored by aliens in spaceships, and a common theme among these is that it turns out, in most of these cases, it was Karen Smith," Elam said. "It wasn't aliens."

The men's rights movement has been angry at Smith since at least this summer, when she helped promote the "Don't Be That Guy" rape prevention campaign that inspired imitators in other cities and a counter campaign blaming women for their own sexual assaults.

Men's rights activists also conspired to shut down a website that allowed the anonymous reporting of sexual assaults by flooding the system with false complaints.

When members of Congress come back from recess, they could put our nation's 11.7 million undocumented immigrant workers on a path to citizenship. But if they refuse to, as they did in 2013, they'll be pushing US workers further down the path to becoming like low-wage immigrant workers. After all, our economy is already headed in exactly that direction.

Move over, farmers, factory workers and technology "creatives" - the emblematic American workers are now low-wage immigrant day laborers and guest workers. More and more, Americans are trapped in the uncertainty and injustice that immigrant workers know all too well, whether they're here on temporary work visas cleaning luxury condos or undocumented and scrambling for daily construction jobs.

Increasingly, from an economic standpoint, office parks and store aisles in America are coming to resemble the street corners where day laborers gather and the labor camps where guest workers are trapped. We can either continue to pretend that low-wage immigrant workers are on the fringes of our economy - that their problems are theirs alone - or we can face the fact that their conditions are what we're all moving toward, and what millions of US-born workers already face.

Immigrant workers have long experienced vulnerability and instability, and have long been treated as disposable by their employers. Today, roughly one-third of American jobs are part-time, contract or otherwise "contingent." And the number of contingent workers in the United States is expected to grow by more than one-third over the next four years. That means more and more families are without the benefits of full-time work, such as health insurance, pensions or 401(k)s. And more of us are without the employment certainty that leads to economic stability at home - and to the consumer spending that drives the economy.

The brain tissue was taken from the Indiana Medical History Museum, site of the former Central State Hospital, which treated patients with psychiatric and mental disorders from 1848 to 1994.

The details sound like the plot of a bad horror movie: Desperate for cash, a young man breaks into a warehouse to steal the brains of dead mental patients, and the body parts are later sold on eBay.

This story line, however, is real.

Authorities say David Charles, a 21-year-old Indianapolis resident, is accused of breaking into the Indiana Medical History Museum multiple times last year and stealing jars of human brain tissue and other preserved material. A tipster who paid hundreds of dollars on the online auction site helped bring the organ entrepreneurism to an end.

The museum is the site of the former Central State Hospital, which served patients with psychiatric and mental disorders from 1848 to 1994. Indianapolis police had investigated several break-ins at the museum's storage facility before a California phone call led police to Charles.

A conservative Facebook group this week suggested that the lynching of President Barack Obama should be made into a "national holiday."

Earlier this week, Examiner.com's Robert Sobel pointed out that the Facebook group "America the next generation" had posted a photo of the president in a noose with the caption "The making of a National Holiday." The image was apparently a composite of Obama's head and a frame from the leaked video of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein being executed.

After some discussion between members of the "America the next generation" group and criticism from other Facebook users, the photo was eventually taken down. Some group members feared that lynching the president could make him into a "martyr."

An Iraq War veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder became the first person to legally buy recreational marijuana under a new Colorado law that went into effect New Year's Day.

Sean Azzarti, of Denver, who helped campaign for Amendment 64, a voter-approved measure that permits anyone over 21 to buy or consume marijuana, purchased an eighth of an ounce of Bubba Kush marijuana and a pot-infused truffle for $59 from one of the two dozen stores that started selling up to an ounce of the drug Wednesday morning.

"I feel amazing. This is a huge step forward for veterans," said Azzarti, who was unable to purchase medical marijuana under his diagnosis. "Now I get to use recreational cannabis to alleviate my PTSD."

Long lines began forming outside the stores later in the morning, and at least one shop raised prices for an eighth of an ounce - from $25 to $45 - as demand soared.

Police reported no problems in the first day of legal sales in spite of the large crowds.

"What I love about it is the peacefulness of the crowd ... and the diversity," said Denver City Councilman Albus Brooks.

At least 37 shops across the state are fully licensed to sell marijuana for any purpose, according to the Denver Post.

Want to understand the failures of the "free market" and the key to getting a decent wage? Here's the real story.

Let me tell you the story of an "unskilled" worker in America who lived better than most of today's college graduates. In the winter of 1965, Rob Stanley graduated from Chicago Vocational High School, on the city's Far South Side. Pay rent, his father told him, or get out of the house. So Stanley walked over to Interlake Steel, where he was immediately hired to shovel taconite into the blast furnace on the midnight shift. It was the crummiest job in the mill, mindless grunt work, but it paid $2.32 an hour - enough for an apartment and a car. That was enough for Stanley, whose main ambition was playing football with the local sandlot all-stars, the Bonivirs.

Stanley's wages would be the equivalent of $17.17 today - more than the "Fight For 15" movement is demanding for fast-food workers. Stanley's job was more difficult, more dangerous and more unpleasant than working the fryer at KFC (the blast furnace could heat up to 2,000 degrees). According to the laws of the free market, though, none of that is supposed to matter. All that is supposed to matter is how many people are capable of doing your job. And anyone with two arms could shovel taconite. It required even less skill than preparing dozens of finger lickin' good menu items, or keeping straight the orders of 10 customers waiting at the counter. Shovelers didn't need to speak English. In the early days of the steel industry, the job was often assigned to immigrants off the boat from Poland or Bohemia.

"You'd just sort of go on automatic pilot, shoveling ore balls all night," is how Stanley remembers the work.

Stanley's ore-shoveling gig was also considered an entry-level position. After a year in Vietnam, he came home to Chicago and enrolled in a pipefitters' apprenticeship program at Wisconsin Steel.

So why did Rob Stanley, an unskilled high school graduate, live so much better than someone with similar qualifications could even dream of today? Because the workers at Interlake Steel were represented by the United Steelworkers of America, who demanded a decent salary for all jobs. The workers at KFC are represented by nobody but themselves, so they have to accept a wage a few cents above what Congress has decided is criminal.

Police used a stun gun to subdue an Oklahoma man wielding a hammer and a Bible during a fight with another man.

A judge set bond at $35,000 for Mitchell D. Hummingbird, who authorities said could face charges of assault and battery with a deadly weapon, assault and battery on an officer, resisting, and public intoxication.

Cherokee County sheriff's deputies were called to break up a fight Saturday at Butterfly Trailer Park, where they found Hummingbird clutching the weapon, a Bible and another man's shirt collar.

Deputies pulled Hummingbird outside the trailer home, and Deputy Michael Cates drew his gun and ordered Hummingbird to set down the weapon.

National People's Action members recognize that to reverse the economic and political conditions that are crushing American families, we need a long-term strategy. We believe that if we let the challenging circumstances of now lower our expectations of what's possible, we've already lost. Instead, we have decided to completely reimagine what is possible.

That is why 500 NPA members worked for a year to develop the Long-Term Agenda to the New Economy. Family farmers and public housing residents, employed workers and those seeking work, new immigrants and those whose families have been here for generations worked together identifying the structural reforms necessary to change the balance of power to favor people and democracy over corporate interests. Our members provided direction to the process from start to finish, building an agenda that is truly representative of people.

We started by dissecting the agenda of the corporate elites that produced what we call the 1% economy. The economic and political reality of today is not accidental. Corporate CEOs, think tanks, and political operatives created the 1% economy. Their strategy was to expand the focus of corporate America from simply amassing profit to aggregating power. They organized individual companies and families into a corporate infrastructure, working to build power to advance their agenda. Over the course of decades, they have gained control of our political process, government, and media and used them to shape an economy that serves their interests at the expense of the American people.

With that in mind, we built our own agenda. Imagine a new economic ethos in America. Imagine it creates an economy in which the prosperity and well-being of all people is accounted for in our national bottom line. One that lifts everybody up, and is defined by a robust commitment to dismantling the structural barriers that lock poor and working-class people, people of color, and women out of economic opportunity. Envision a society where global sustainability is a defining economic priority. Imagine that the best-case scenario isn't simply hoping to share in the prosperity of corporate elites.

Experts say a steel pipe is at least partly to blame for halting a massive tunnel-boring machine beneath downtown Seattle.

The state Department of Transportation said Friday the 8-inch-diameter pipe was discovered protruding through an opening in the machine's cutter-head. Officials say the pipe is a well casing installed by the department in 2002 to monitor groundwater.

The tunneling machine, known as "Bertha," is digging a new path for State Route 99, one of the region's primary north-south arterials. It's been halted since encountering a mysterious obstruction Dec. 6.

Police in Harvey, Ill., shot a man in the back of the leg without cause, threatened to "shoot the shit out of" a witness with a camera, then shot to death a witness's puppy, the wounded man and dog owner claim in federal lawsuits.

Paul Manning sued the City of Harvey, its police Officer James Sinnot, and Officer O'Shea. In the second lawsuit, Karnischa Miller, who owned the 14-week-old puppy, sued the City of Harvey, Sinnot, and Officer Davres.

Harvey, Il, populations 30,000, a far south suburb of Chicago, is 90 percent black and Latino. Manning claims he was walking down the street on Dec. 30, 2012, when the officers began following him in a squad car.

"Defendant officer stopped his car and told Mr. Manning, 'Come here!', the complaint states. Mr. Manning had done nothing wrong, and, therefore, did not stop. Mr. Manning had no weapon or other objects in his hands.

After a short distance of moving away from the defendant officer, Mr. Manning slipped and fell. As Mr. Manning tried to get up, one of the defendant officers willfully shot Mr. Manning in the back of his leg. Mr. Manning fell again and tried to get up again. Defendant officer then fired more shots at Mr. Manning Mr. Manning suffered excruciating pain from these gunshot wounds. One of the defendant officers then stood on top of Mr. Manning with the full force of his leg on Mr. Manning's back. One of the defendant officers handcuffed Mr. Manning while he was lying down after having been shot."