The 12-year-old boy fatally shot Saturday by Cleveland police did not point a pellet gun at officers who approached him at a playground, police said. The shooting officer, police added, was only ten feet away from Tamir Rice when he fired at the boy.

Police officers were responding to a 911 call about a "man" with a gun that was "probably fake." The caller added, "I don't know if it's real or not." Cleveland Deputy Chief Edward Tomba said Monday he did not know if the dispatcher passed this information to the officers. The president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association said the officers were not informed that the gun was likely fake, AP reported.

The pair of officers approached Rice, who was told to raise his hands. He was shot twice by one of the officers when he reached for the pellet gun in his waistband. He did not, according to official accounts, point the "airsoft" gun at police or verbally threaten the officers.

"Airsoft" pellet guns are designed to resemble actual firearms, but they shoot round plastic pellets. The fake guns are usually distinguished from real weapons by a strip or spot of orange paint, but police said Rice's toy did not have a safety indicator. An Ohio state lawmaker has already proposed legislation that would require all such airsoft guns to come with bright or obvious fluorescent stripes.

"Our officers at times are required to make critical decisions in a split second," Chief Calvin Williams said. "Unfortunately this is one of those times."

The president of St. Petersburg, Florida's Eckerd College has stirred up controversy by telling students that excessive drinking and casual sex are what leads to on-campus rapes.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, Eckerd's President Donald Eastman III urged students in a campus-wide email to "do your part" to prevent sexual assaults by drinking less and being less promiscuous.

"Virtue in the area of sexuality is its own reward, and has been held in high esteem in Western Culture for millennia because those who are virtuous are happier as well as healthier," wrote Eastman in the loftily-worded email on Sunday. "No one's culture or character or understanding is improved by casual sex, and the physical and psychological risks to both genders are profound."

The 69-year-old Eastman went on to say that incidents of rape "are almost always preceded by consumption, often heavy consumption, of alcohol, often by everyone involved in them."

He offered two "fairly simple suggestions" to the 1,800 students at Eckerd.

1. By limiting your own consumption of alcohol, and encouraging your friends to do the same. Socrates included wine at his Symposium, but he did not get drunk.

2. You can be thoughtful about the dramatic and often negative psychological effects that sexual activity without commitment can have. Virtue in the area of sexuality is its own reward, and has been held in high esteem in Western Culture for millennia because those who are virtuous are happier as well as healthier. No one's culture or character or understanding is improved by casual sex, and the physical and psychological risks to both genders are profound.

"I wish each of you good luck in your final weeks of the semester, and a happy, healthy, virtuous 2015," he concluded.

As I write this, three separate protests are happening in NYC, where I live. There's a group in Times Square, another that just blocked off 11th avenue and the Lincoln Tunnel and another group that started in Union Square and marched down 14th Street. There have also been protests in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Oakland, CA and Ferguson, MO. Ostensibly, these are because a grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson of the murder of Mike Brown, however the root cause goes much deeper.

There was a lot to delve through: 70 hours of testimony from 60 witnesses and three medical examiners. Ultimately, the St. Louis County grand jury of nine white and three black members appeared to side with Wilson's view that he was defending himself against a much larger, fast-approaching aggressor.

Said St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch: "The physical and scientific evidence examined by the grand jury, combined with the witness statements, supported and substantiated by that physical evidence, tells the accurate and tragic story of what happened."

Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown at the time of the shooting, disagreed.

"I know exactly what I saw. I was there the whole time, and I definitely saw my friend stop and put his hands up," he told CNN's Erin Burnett OutFront on Tuesday.

Unfortunately we may never know what happened to Mike Brown. There is a lot of reason to believe that the police are lying, that they manipulated evidence, and that the grand jury was only allowed to hear one narrative: Darren Wilson acted in self defense.

There's also the fact that the Ferguson prosecutor's office and the police department have a relationship. It's an obvious conflict of interest, with the prosecutor basically being asked to make against a case 'one of their own'. Anthony Gray, an attorney for Mike Brown's family, made the same point:

An expert hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) argued in court that a 9-year-old girl seeking damages after she was sexually assaulted would be protected from emotional stress by her low IQ.

Court documents obtained by KPCC investigative producer Karen Foshay detailed forensic psychologist Dr. Stan Katz's 2013 testimony in a trial to determine how much in damages the 9-year-old girl would receive after she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a boy at one of the district's schools.

The girl reportedly had an IQ between 64 and 70, but the boy was not developmentally disabled.

According to the transcripts, attorney David Ring, who represented the girl, asked Katz to explain what he meant when he said that the girl's disability "acts as a protective factor."

"There's a relationship between intelligence and depression," Katz replied. "What happens is the more you think about things, you can ruminate, you can focus on things, you can look at the complexities of the matter and become less depressed."

"So because she may be less intelligent than a general education student, she's going to suffer less depression because of it?" Ring pressed.

"Very possible, yes," Katz insisted.

He did agree that the girl would need therapy to cope with the trauma. But he said that he had interviewed the girl in 2012 - two years after the 2010 sexual assaults - and had determined that the crime was not connected to her emotional distress. Instead, he blamed her problems on a lack of a father in her life, and on her mental disability.

In video captured by a bystander in a Brooklyn subway station, a New York City police officer can be seen hitting a young man in the head with his baton after the young man allegedly attempted to avoid paying the fare by jumping the turnstiles.

According to PIX11 - which obtained the video - the man who filmed the altercation said the struggle began after the officer used pepper spray against the young man, identified as 20-year-old Donovan Lawson of Brooklyn.

At least one person died during a night of fiery chaos in Ferguson.

Police found a body inside a car parked near the Canfield apartment complex in the St. Louis suburb, close to where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead in August.

The victim - an unidentified black male in his 20s - was shot and burned, KTVI reported. Police are investigating the incident as a suspicious death.

It's not clear if he was a victim of Monday's riots, which erupted after a grand jury refused to indict officer Darren Wilson for the August shooting death of the unarmed teenager.

Furious protesters set at least 25 buildings ablaze and looted a slew of local businesses in suburb and greater St. Louis overnight Monday and into early Tuesday.

WOW! That didn't take long. Not three days after the Dutch National Bank announced it had managed to get 122 tons of gold back from Uncle Sam, detailed here, the leader of France's largest party, Marine Le Pen of the National Front, has demanded - via an open letter to the governor of the French central bank - the repatriation of France's gold.

News about this open letter is nowhere to be found on a Google news search (in French), only on the web site of Le Front National.

Yes, the mainstream media in France, just like in the US, only tells the people what it wants them to hear - usually via the 'left' and 'right' wings of the one-party oligarchial state system, cleverly presented to electorates as if they were two separate parties. Thus the puppet in France changes from Sarkozy to Hollande, just as in the US it changed from Bush 2 to Obama. Same circus, same BS! And hence no news about this important letter.

Marine Le Pen asked for the full audit of all French gold, including tests for purity, quantity and where it is stored. She would like to see 20% of foreign currency reserves kept in gold, which is what the Swiss are asking for too. She also sees it as decisive for France's future and, unlike the Dutch, is fully aware that 'cold war hysteria' is being used to thwart the 'threat' of the Western countries developing economic ties with the BRICS countries.

Moreauville, Louisiana - A town in Louisiana has recently voted to ban all Pit Bulls and Rottweilers, calling them "vicious breeds" of dogs.

Current owners of these specific breeds have just one more month to either move out of town, or hand their family pet over to the government to be killed.

While there has traditionally been heavy debate over larger breeds of dogs, in recent years the debate has began to die down, because an overwhelming majority of people now agree that like humans, a dog's temperament and personality are largely based on their upbringing and life experiences.

Sadly, town officials in Moreauville, Louisiana are stuck in a very immature state of mind where they are basically prejudice against breeds of dogs.

Dog owners were notified of the recent ordinance by mail, in a letter which stated that the dogs will be taken away by the local government and killed on December 1st.

East Side Community High School is teaching its students how to interact with the NYPD during stop-and-frisks.
It's Cops 101.

The principal of East Side Community HS invited the New York Civil Liberties Union to give a two-day training session last week on interacting with police.

The 450 kids were coached on staying calm during NYPD encounters and given a "What To Do If You're Stopped By The Police" pamphlet.

NYCLU representatives told kids to be polite and to keep their hands out of their pockets. But they also told students they don't have to show ID or consent to searches, that it's best to remain silent, and how to file a complaint against an officer.

Principal Mark Federman said he brought in the NYCLU because students told teachers they had bad experiences with being stopped by police. He said the training also was relevant to history classes studying the Ferguson, Mo., shooting.

"We're not going to candy-coat things - we have a problem in our city that's affecting young men of color and all of our students," Federman told The Post.

"It's not about the police being bad," he added. "This isn't anti-police as much as it's pro-young people . . . It's about what to do when kids are put in a position where they feel powerless and uncomfortable."

The hourlong workshops - held in small classroom sessions during advisory periods - focused on the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program and how to exercise Fourth Amendment rights when being stopped and questioned in a car or at home.

Recently, there has been much talk of various "epidemics" in America. The three most commonly mentioned are suicide, gun violence, and drug overdose. A close examination of the data, however, reveals two surprises: First, one of them is not actually an epidemic. Second, one of them is a much bigger epidemic than most people realize. (See chart.)
The "suicide epidemic" (red line) has received the most attention as of late. This is for good reason. At a rate of 12.54 deaths per 100,000 Americans, the suicide rate is at a 25-year high WISQARS) from 1999 to 2012, shows that the suicide rate over that period has increased by nearly 19.7%.

Similarly, school shootings and other mass killings result in highly partisan debates about the "gun violence epidemic." However, the CDC data does not show that this even is an epidemic. Instead, the homicide-by-firearm rate (purple line) has been declining from a high of 4.27 per 100,000 in 2006 to 3.76 per 100,000 in 2012, a roughly 12% drop. The average American is more than three times as likely to commit suicide than to be shot and killed.

The most shocking data are the deaths due to unintentional drug poisonings (green line). From 1999 to 2012, deaths by drug overdose increased from 4.00 per 100,000 to 10.54 per 100,000, a whopping 164% increase. While the suicide rate has slowly climbed over the past decade, the death rate from unintentional drug overdoses has skyrocketed. Indeed, the term "epidemic" was invented for trend lines like this. (Note: More detailed information on what exactly constitutes unintentional drug poisoning can be found in the ICD-10 under codes X40-X49.)

It should be noted that accidental drug overdoses include far more people than just celebrities and gangbangers who snort cocaine and guzzle alcohol. Indeed, a substantial proportion of overdoses are with prescription drugs, such as opioids (e.g., OxyContin, Vicodin) and benzodiazepines (e.g., Xanax, Valium, Ativan). Additionally, as reported this week in an article appropriately titled "The Great American Relapse," The Economist notes that heroin is making a comeback. Deaths from heroin overdoses have doubled from 2010 to 2012 as opioid painkiller addicts forgo expensive prescription meds for cheaper heroin from the street.