After a wave of protests and massive backlash, a Fort Lauderdale judge has temporarily suspended the city's recent ban on feeding the homeless in public places.

Broward Circuit Judge Thomas Lynch on Tuesday suspended the enforcement of the ordinance that forbids people from feeding the homeless in parks and other public places in the city. Specifically, the local law limits the location of outdoor feeding sites and requires groups providing food to supply portable toilets. The decision is valid for 30 days pending mediation, reports AP.

Judge Lynch's ruling comes in response to 90-year-old homeless advocate Arnold Abbott's lawsuit challenging the ordinance. The World War II vet and retired jewelry salesman has been feeding the homeless at the city's beaches with his group, Love Thy Neighbor, for the last 23 years.

"We're elated the judge has entered the stay," Abbott's attorney, John David, was quoted as saying in the Sun-Sentinel, Ft. Lauderdale's main daily, on Tuesday.

Police arrested on Tuesday a former Norman High School student charged with raping a fellow classmate. The sexual assault, and other rape accusations, spurred a mass walk-out at the Oklahoma school in November in support of the alleged victim.

Tristen Kole Killman-Hardin, 18, has been charged in Cleveland County District Court with two counts of first-degree rape of a 16-year-old victim who was unconscious at the time of the attack, police said, according to Reuters.

Two other girls have accused Killman-Hardin of rape, according to YES All Daughters, an activist group that organized the school demonstration.

More charges could be filed against Killman-Hardin, a prosecutor told local media.

Construed as vandalism...

Three Coastal Carolina University students were handcuffed on Monday when university officers discovered they were writing messages in chalk pertaining to the recent events in Ferguson, Mo.

The officers who did not identify themselves asked the students what they were doing and were told, "drawing." Senior student, Taylor Wright, was finishing the word "justice" when he was told by officers to stand up, and place hands behind the back. They were told not to resist and received no answers to their questions for the arrest.

According to the police report, the students were told that they are not allowed to chalk the sidewalks without "proper approval." Wright, who had never heard of having to get a stamp of approval first, felt it was a thinly veiled form of censorship.

Many of our nation's sheriffs have been brainwashed that America is a "war zone" so all of our police departments (even for towns of less than 4,000 people) apparently need mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles - which basically look like tanks - straight off the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Though the vehicles cost nearly $750,000, many police departments across the nation have acquired their very own MRAP tanks for pennies on the dollar (and sometimes free) from the Pentagon's controversial surplus program that seeks to dump military equipment into America's neighborhoods.

Now the indoctrination inside our classrooms can compete with the indoctrination on the school's front lawn that America is such a police state war zone, it's totally normal for a school district to also require a tank.

School districts. Are getting. Tanks.

"She's having a heart attack! She's having a heart attack! She needs help!"

Ferguson, Mo. - After the grand jury decision, the police, in an extremely callous and brutal move, opened fire with rubber bullet and tear gas on a group carrying an unconscious woman to the police line looking for help during a protest.

The stunning video, by Tim Pool, shows a group as they approach the police line shouting,

"She's having a heart attack! She's having a heart attack! She needs help!"

But rather than lending needed assistance, officers begin firing rubber bullets at them from a shotgun, followed up by volleys of tear gas.

Is this the type of behavior we should expect from those sworn to uphold the law?

This looks to be simply another lesson that over militarized cops are nothing but agents of repression that are trained to be aggressive and dole out punishment, not assist citizens in need of help.

A trauma dog helped an alleged sexual assault victim as the young girl testified in a criminal trial - a Canadian first seen in a Calgary courtroom Tuesday.

The seven-year-old's father is charged with sexual assault with a weapon and forcible confinement involving the child and his wife.

"I do have a secret," said the girl who cannot be identified. "It's the whole reason I'm in foster care. It's about what my dad did."

Visible on a screen in the courtroom, the girl sat in a remote witness room beside Hawk - the three-year-old Labrador retriever specially trained to work with the victim assistance unit of the Calgary Police Service.

Hawk helps support witnesses and victims of crime, especially children.

Class Dismissed, a new full-length documentary film about homeschooling, was screened in the Boston area on December 1, having already been seen by sold out audiences in November on the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland). It explores the rapidly growing homeschool movement - its challenges and great successes. I was informed about it by my old friend and "unschooling" pioneer Pat Farenga, who appears briefly in the film. He described it in an e-mail:

Class Dismissed follows one family's quest to better their children's lives by pulling them out of one of the highest-rated schools in L.A. Parents Rachel and Todd are frustrated by the rigid state-imposed standards of the modern educational system and hope 21st century technology and new research will provide a means for their two daughters to earn a quality education outside the modern school system. They quickly discover that they must overcome long-standing assumptions about education and face the social ramifications of their bold experiment.

A Baptist pastor in Tempe, Arizona called for the mass extermination of LGBT people on Sunday in a sermon entitled "AIDS: The Judgement of God."

In the sermon, which was uploaded to YouTube on Monday from Faithful Word Baptist Church, Pastor Steven Anderson said that God has ordered in the scriptures that gays should be killed, and that if humanity wants to have an "AIDS-free world by Christmas," he said, that's what should be done.

"Turn to Leviticus 20:13," he says in the video, "because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS."

A New York City grand jury has decided not to indict the New York Police Department officer accused of killing a Staten Island man by putting him in an illegal chokehold. The NYPD is now preparing for more protests stemming from the decision.

Early Wednesday afternoon, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post all reported that a grand jury declined to indict the officer.

Although the special grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the white officer accused of strangling Garner, who was black, the police department can still reprimand Pantaleo under a basic rule that loosely states if an officer does anything to embarrass the department, then they can be disciplined.

"It's sad if they take that position," Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, told Staten Island Live. "I'd be surprised and a bit disappointed if he was used as a political pawn to appease the community."
The incident occurred on July 17, when at least five New York Police Department officers took 43-year-old Eric Garner, a Staten Island father of six, to the ground in an attempted arrest on Staten Island. One put Garner in a chokehold that caused Garner - who suffered from asthma - to lose consciousness and reportedly go into cardiac arrest. He was declared dead at a nearby hospital.

The Staten Island District Attorney's Office convened the grand jury in September, but did not announced the list of potential charges against Pantaleo. But prosecutors outside the district told ABC News that the range could have included second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, felony assault or reckless endangerment. Legal experts and former prosecutors had said that, despite the medical examiner's ruling the death a homicide, murder charges were unlikely, the New York Times reported.

Perhaps the most dangerous nuclear reactor in the U.S. is in partial shutdown following the discovery of a steam leak.

South Florida's ailing Turkey Point nuclear power station is in the news again, with Unit 4, one of its two reactors, taken offline Sunday due to a steam leak, according to a Dec. 1^st update released by Industrial Info Resources online. Conspicuously, as of the writing of this article, there is no indication that this highly concerning event has received mainstream media coverage.

In a recent report, Is Miami on the Brink of a Nuclear Disaster?, we discussed the imminent possibility of a Fukushima-style meltdown at Florida Power & Light's Turkey Point facility, only 41 miles south of Miami near Homestead; a reactor so primitively designed that it uses a 168-mile network of open air canals to cool it's ancient reactors (built in 1972), reminiscent of a Medieval moat system.