Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.

More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages.

"The strength of 'The New Jim Crow' by Michelle Alexander is that, by equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically impossible to defend it," said Naomi Murakawa, author of "The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America," when we met recently in Princeton, N.J. "But, on the other hand, there is no 'new' Jim Crow, there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation."

"We should talk about what we are empowering police to do, not how they are doing it, not whether they are being nice when they carry out arrests," she said. "Reforms are oriented to making violence appear respectable and courteous. But being arrested once can devastate someone's life. This is the violence we are not talking about. It does not matter if you are arrested politely. Combating racism is not about combating bad ideas in the head or hateful feelings. This idea is the perfect formula to preserve material distributions in their exact configuration."

Comedian Bill Cosby said in a court testimony he obtained sedatives with the intent of giving them to women he wanted to have sex with. He admitted giving the drug to at least one woman.

Cosby's testimony comes from court documents obtained by the Associated Press on Monday, which themselves stem from a 2005 sexual abuse lawsuit filed by Andrea Constand. Constand was a former employee of Temple University, where Cosby, now 77, was on the board of Trustees until he resigned.

The AP had gone to court to compel the release of a deposition in the case.

Cosby's lawyers had objected to the release of the material, arguing it would embarrass him. But the Pennsylvania court judge unsealed a small portion of the deposition.

More than 1,000 doctors convicted for a range of criminal offences, including possession of child pornography and drug dealing, are still being allowed to practice medicine in the UK, an investigation has revealed.

Some doctors have committed crimes such as fraud, perverting the course of justice, cruelty to a child and death by dangerous driving.

Figures released by the General Medical Council (GMC) after a Freedom of Information request by the Mirror newspaper found 1,068 doctors and surgeons continue their work with a criminal record.

The GMC said it has asked the government for the power to automatically strike off doctors convicted of specific crimes.

The number of convicted doctors has risen by nearly 150 since December 2012, according to the Mirror.

The most common offence in the data is drink driving, with 360 convictions, followed by 189 for dangerous driving and 211 for "unspecified" offences.

A number of doctors have convictions for violent crimes, trafficking drugs and even cruelty to children.

A walker who was killed by a bolt of lightning during a thunderstorm on the Brecon Beacons may have been struck because he was carrying a selfie stick, it has been claimed.

Two men died and two were injured on the mountain range in Powys, Mid Wales, after separate lightning bolts in several parts of the park.

Sources close to the rescue said one of the dead men had been carrying a metal selfie stick, which may have attracted an electrical strike.

It emerged on Monday that one of the victims was leading children on a Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme.

The man, who was in his 50s, is thought to have been a Duke Of Edinburgh (DofE) Award assessor. The second fatality was a male walker who was walking up the Cribyn peak when he was caught in the storm.

U.S. law enforcement agencies rank the threat of violence from anti-government extremists higher than the threat from radicalized Muslims, according to a report released by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security (TCTHS).

The report, "Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremism Threat," was based on survey research by Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Schanzer, director of TCTHS and associate professor of the practice at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy.

The survey — conducted by the center with the Police Executive Research Forum — found that 74 percent of 382 law enforcement agencies rated anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction. By comparison, 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations as a Top 3 terrorist threat.- From Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy

She is one of only two living people in the world who was born in the 1800s - and puts her longevity down to eating bacon and eggs every morning for over a century.

Susannah Mushatt Jones, the world's oldest person, celebrated her 116th birthday on Monday.

At the time of her birth on July 6, 1899, William McKinley was President of the United States, the Spanish-American War had recently ended, and WG Grace had just played his final Test for England.

Miss Jones was one of 11 children born to a father who picked cotton in Alabama. After leaving school she joined him in the fields before heading to New York where she worked as a nanny in the Roaring Twenties.

She lived through two world wars, technological revolutions, the civil rights movement, and the election of America's first black president.

The last three decades have been spent at a public housing complex for the elderly in Brooklyn, New York, where she took part in tenant security patrols until she was 106.

Miss Jones went blind 15 years ago but is not bed-bound and visits a doctor only three times a year.

The only medication she takes is for high blood pressure.

Every morning she starts her day with a breakfast of several strips of bacon, scrambled eggs, and ground corn.

A sign on her kitchen wall reads "Bacon makes everything better".

DaJuawn Wallace was on a late night drug store run to get medicine for his sick girlfriend when he was targeted for a traffic stop.

Saginaw Valley State University Police Officer Leon Wilson had seen a car driving on the sidewalk on the SVSU campus earlier that night. Despite not knowing the make nor the model of the car, Wilson decided to pull over Wallace, citing that he "fit the description."

"I was uncertain about the make and the model of the vehicle, but this vehicle looked like the same color and was leaving the immediate area," Wilson wrote.

As Wilson turned on his lights to pull Wallace over, Wallace decided that it would be far safer to wait to pull over until he was in a well-lit area.

"I live in Detroit, and I know some people who were robbed by fake police officers," Wallace said. "I was taught to find a well-lit area to pull over in."

In fact, Detroit police have even gone on record and said that you have permission not to stop if you don't believe a real cop is trying to pull you over.

Besides the risk of the cop being fake, there is also the danger of the cop simply being a cop. Just south of Kochville, in Inkster, Michigan, 57-year-old Floyd Dent was pulled over on a dark road, in March of this year. He was subsequently beaten, framed and charged with multiple counts including resisting arrest, assault on an officer, and fleeing police. Dashcam video eventually proved his innocence.

Wallace had driven an extra 1.5 miles after the initial turning on of Wilson's police lights. He never once accelerated, nor did he turn off his lights, try to turn, or make any attempt at all to evade Wilson. He did, however, signal Wilson with his hand from out of the window, suggesting that he would be pulling over ahead.

Nigeria made history by outlawing female genital mutilation. The ban falls under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 that was passed in Senate on May 5 and recently enacted into law.

This was one of the last acts by the outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan. His successor, Muhammadu Buhari, was sworn into office this past Friday, May 29.

Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is the act of either partially or totally removing the external female genitalia or causing injury to the female genital organs for non-medical purposes.

According to UNICEF: "More than 130 million girls and women have experienced FGM/C in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is most common."

With the help of community activism, campaigns and numbers of organizational efforts to end this practice, UNICEF reported that teenage girls were now one-third less likely to undergo FGM/C today than 30 years ago.

For a public radio service, NPR is notoriously known for its lack of diversity within its staff, audience and guests invited onto their shows—problems that NPR has itself acknowledged (6/30/14).

A new FAIR study finds that NPR's diversity problem also extends into the board of trustees of its most popular member stations: Two out of three board members are male, and nearly three out of four are non-Latino whites. Fully three out of every four trustees of the top NPR affiliates belong to the corporate elite.

FAIR studied the governing boards of the eight most-listened-to NPR affiliate stations, based on Arbitron ratings (Cision, 2/13/13). The stations and their broadcast regions are KQED (San Francisco), WAMU (Washington, DC), WNYC (New York City), KPCC (Los Angeles), WHYY (Philadelphia), WBUR (Boston), WABE (Atlanta) and WBEZ (Chicago). (Two top-rated public stations, KUSC in Los Angeles and WETA in Arlington, Va., were not included in the study because they mainly play classical music rather than having a news/talk format.) Board members were coded by occupation, ethnicity and gender.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, DC is on lockdown as police investigate a report of an active shooter. The hospital provides long-term care for wounded veterans, including those with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Shortly before 1 p.m. local time, federal law enforcement told the media they received an order to stand down, after finding "no indication of a shooter."