Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, did several stints in rehab after crashing his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill in 2006, a headline-making event that revealed the then - US congressman for Rhode Island had been abusing prescription drugs, including the painkiller OxyContin. Kennedy went on to make mental health - including substance abuse - a cornerstone of his political agenda, and he is reportedly at work on a memoir about his struggles with addiction and mental illness. In 2013, he also helped found an advocacy group, Project SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana), which has barnstormed the country opposing the growing state and federal efforts to legalize pot.

Taking the stage to rousing applause last February, Kennedy joined more than 2,000 opponents of marijuana legalization a few miles south of Washington, DC, at the annual convention of the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA), one of the largest such organizations in the country.

"Let me tell you, there is nothing more inconsistent with trying to improve mental health and reduce substance-abuse disorders in this country than to legalize a third drug," Kennedy boomed. The former congressman also praised his fellow speakers for standing up to the "extremist responses" from legalization advocates.

Given that CADCA is dedicated to protecting society from dangerous drugs, the event that day had a curious sponsor: Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxy-Contin, the highly addictive painkiller that nearly ruined Kennedy's congressional career and has been linked to thousands of overdose deaths nationwide.

Prescription opioids, a line of pain-relieving medications derived from the opium poppy or produced synthetically, are the most dangerous drugs abused in America, with more than 16,000 deaths annually linked to opioid addiction and overdose. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more Americans now die from painkillers than from heroin and cocaine combined. The recent uptick in heroin use around the country has been closely linked to the availability of prescription opioids, which give their users a similar high and can trigger a heroin craving in recovering addicts. (Notably, there are no known deaths related to marijuana, although there have been instances of impaired driving.)

A Florida judge who is being investigated for sending a Facebook "friend" request to a woman whose expensive divorce case she was deciding is asking the state's Judicial Qualifications Commission to dismiss the charges against her, The Orlando Sentinel reports.

In an August 25, 2014 hearing, Circuit Judge Linda Schoonover was charged with three dozen counts of improper conduct. Schoonover claims that all the charges should be dismissed because three allegations were removed from official court documents, which she believes means the Judicial Qualifications Commission needs to formally restart its entire investigation.

The charges stem from behavior that fellow lawyers and judges described to The Orlando Sentinel as "bizarre," "inexplicable," "disruptive," and "paranoid."

For example, Schoonover secretly installed a camera in chambers because she believed employees at the courthouse had bugged her office, and she wanted to record video of them retrieving the recording equipment. She contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and turned over the video. The FDLE reported that there were men in the crawl space above her courtroom, but they were heating and air conditioning contractors.

She also punished a local real-estate agent with a harsh debt and property ruling after the woman refused her Facebook "friend" request. Schoonover is also accused of refusing to listen to the testimony of a litigant because "he annoyed her."

Russell Hershkowitz, who is one of 17 lawyers whose cases Schoonover is barred from hearing, said that "she's got too much power and lacks the ability to control herself."

Only time will tell, but is it too soon to guess whether the Ferguson, Missouri shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown will mark a turning point in our march toward tyranny in America? There are signs that this could be the case. Yes this could be an overly optimistic assumption about the current direction of the police state in America, but there is a slight chance that the consciousness that came with the Ferguson shooting may have been a badly needed cure to the metastasizing police state problem.

Before anyone makes assumptions of how naive I'm being or overly optimistic, let's clarify. We are in a battle of competing paradigms and competing consciousness. One important thing to note about the police state is that authority, control, intimidation and police state madness is itself a real-time live form of consciousness. In this police state consciousness we can confirm the typical officer becomes consumed in their role. This disconnected behavior had been confirmed in previous psychology experiments, and we know how governments carefully train police to do as they are told. Add to that, the influence of the culture of police and what we see is a group of people acting within their own (twisted) consciousness to oppress others without consequences. We saw this in Nazi Germany and many other examples throughout history.

Extraordinary Tales, Extraordinary Writers: My name is Cara St.Louis and this is my show. Conversations with some of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. You will be seeing it as an acquisition elsewhere later. Please feel free to share. I bring you World Class Illustrator and Writer, Bridget Marzot and World-Renowned Jazz Artist and philosopher, Gilad Atzmon.

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Representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (LPR and DPR) said on Monday they will make every effort to preserve Ukraine's unity if Kiev accepts their demands.

Representatives of LPR and DNR have made public their position for the meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine in the Belarusian capital Minsk that begins later on Monday.

They say "equal talks are the only acceptable means for the settlement of the conflict and restoration of peace". They also base on principles worked out at the Geneva meeting of representatives from Russia, the US, the European Union and Ukraine on April 17, 2014.

Vice-Premier of the DPR Andrei Purgin said on Monday he brought proposals for the contact group's meeting to reduce the duration of combat operations and the number of victims. "I've arrived here with proposals to find common points. They contain eight or nine points," Purgin said before the contact group's session. "These are initial proposals for the consultations," he added.

Purgin said he did not expect a major breakthrough at the Minsk meeting. "This is an initial stage. It can hardly end with something drastically big," he added.

Fukushima's governor has officially agreed to allow the country's authorities to store radioactive waste for 30 years in two municipalities in exchange for 300 billion yen ($2.89 billion) in subsidies.

"It's a difficult decision, but I want to accept the construction plan," Governor Yuhei Sato told journalists on Saturday.

Sato told The Japan Times he accepted the plan because he sees it as "necessary to advance decontamination and realize recovery of the environment."

The mayor's formal acceptance should be also sent to Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara and Reconstruction Minister Takumi Nemoto on Monday, and he is also set to meet with the country's premier Shinzo Abe in Tokyo.

On Wednesday, two Fukushima prefecture municipalities made the decision that they would accept the government's package of subsidies, allowing to build the storages.

"We succeeded in greatly deepening (local officials') understanding (of our storage facility plan)," Nobuteru Ishihara, environment minister, told journalists on Tuesday, as quoted by The Asahi Shimbun media outlet, following his meeting with members of the town assemblies of Futaba and Okuma.

The parents of an ill 5-year-old British boy suffering from a brain tumor are under arrest and the child is receiving medical care at a Spanish hospital after police in that country stopped their car Saturday and ended a furious two-day international manhunt, authorities said.

The ill boy, Ashya King, was found safe with "no visible signs of distress" after police in the Malaga region of Spain pulled over their Hyundai at just before 10 p.m. local time, Hampshire constable Chris Shead told reporters. It is unknown why his parents, Brett King, 51, and Naghemeh King, 45, took the child, whose condition requires complex care that police feared the couple would be unable to safely provide on their own.

Agricultural inspectors have seized 1,304 giant African snails, one of the world's most destructive invasive species, from sites around the United States, the Department of Agriculture said on Friday.

The slimy pests, which can grow as big as rats, eat up to 500 different kinds of plants and can damage buildings and humans' health. They are a particular problem in Florida, where an extermination campaign is under way.

The Agriculture Department said in a statement that officials with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service seized an adult giant African snail and 284 juvenile snails on New York's Long Island on June 26.

The snail came from a seller in Georgia who owned 949 of them. He told officials they were originally bought from a British source and were sent to the United States by mail.

All the snails were seized. Based on information from the Georgia man, the inspection service also confiscated one giant snail apiece in Indiana, Pennsylvania and Albany, New York.

Inspection service officials also seized 67 snails in July that had been imported from Nigeria to theUnited States via Los Angeles.

A single-engine airplane that was scheduled to land in Manassas crashed Saturday into the Atlantic Ocean off the Virginia coast, authorities said.

The Coast Guard said the pilot, the only person on board, appeared unconscious as the plane flew southeast, at about 13,000 feet, through Washington's restricted airspace and eventually across Virginia's eastern shore.

The plane eventually ran out of fuel and crashed about 50 miles southeast of Chincoteague, the Coast Guard said.

A Russian aid airplane carrying 15 tons of humanitarian aid arrived in Syria on Thursday, the official SANA news agency reported.

The plane landed in the international airport of the coastal city of Latakia, the latest shipment from Russia in a bid to alleviate some of the suffering of the Syrian people.
Separately, SANA said the Syrian government sent on Thursday a total of 15 truckloads of aid rations to the western and northern parts of the northern city of Aleppo.