Riding a bicycle on a sidewalk - that's the crime that left 20-year-old City College student D'Paris Williams battered after he was attacked by the San Francisco police.
Last Friday, Williams was riding his bicycle down the sidewalk on the street where he lived. He was coming back from the Make a Wish Foundation's Bat Kid festivities when two plainsclothes officers approached him. Uptown Almanac, a blog about San Francisco culture, described the scene:
The officers said something to DJ about riding his bicycle on the sidewalk as he was pulling up to his home in the complex. It is unclear whether the officers identified themselves or not, but did proceed to get out of their car, grab DJ from behind as he was entering the home and beat him for no apparent reason. A police search uncovered a cupcake and juice that DJ had just purchased from the corner store. ... He was immediately taken to S.F. General Hospital for treatment, and then to the 850 Bryant police station. ... Furthermore, three residents came to DJ's aid when they saw officers beating him up, only to find themselves also under attack by officers. By this time, uniformed backup had arrived on the scene. Including DJ, a total of four individuals were beaten and arrested by officers.
Williams' family said that Williams could not hear the officers because he was listening to music through his headphones. Williams sister, who was carrying a newborn, witnessed the scene. She was also pushed by officers when she approached the door where her brother was assaulted. After officers shoved Williams' head in his door, they dragged him to continue the beating.
Society's Child
© Reuters
Philip Chism, 14, faces a first-degree murder charge
Philip Chism, 14, faces a first-degree murder charge
The 14-year-old accused of murdering his young math teacher at Danvers High School allegedly raped 24-year-old Colleen Ritzer before killing her, prosecutors said Thursday in outlining a first-degree murder indictment against Philip D. Chism.
Chism, a top junior varsity soccer player at the Massachusetts school, allegedly attacked Ritzer after she asked him to stay after school in October to prep for an upcoming test. The teen is accused of stabbing Ritzer to death in a school bathroom before dumping her body in a patch of woods behind the school.
© AP
Danvers High School teacher Colleen Ritzer was allegedly raped before a 14-year-old student killed her with a box cutter.
Danvers High School teacher Colleen Ritzer was allegedly raped before a 14-year-old student killed her with a box cutter.
He allegedly stole her credit cards, iPhone and her underwear after sexually assaulting Ritzer with an object and killing her, prosecutors contend.
© GLOUCESTER SHERIFF'S DEPT.
Brian Gore, 29, and Shannon Gore, 25, face child abuse and murder charges.
Brian Gore, 29, and Shannon Gore, 25, face child abuse and murder charges.
UPDATE: Since this story was originally published in 2011, Brian and Shannon Gore plead guilty to aggravated malicious wounding and child abuse charges in March 2013. They were later sentenced to a total of 30 years in prison.
A young girl was found caged and attempting to eat herself in a mobile home in Virginia, and cops say her parents are responsible.
The malnourished girl, believed to be either 5 or 6, was discovered in a crib that was converted into a makeshift cage after police arrived at the home in Gloucester County to investigate a burglary last week.
The girl's parents, Brian and Shannon Gore, were arrested and charged with felony child abuse. The mother was also charged with attempted capital murder.
© Alon Ron/Haaretz
Shalom Domrani, the reputed head of the prominent Israeli crime family the Domrani organisation, in court.
Shalom Domrani, the reputed head of the prominent Israeli crime family the Domrani organisation, in court.
Simon was standing in his shop in sight of Ashkelon's football stadium when he heard the bomb go off.
At first, said Simon - who declined to give his surname - he thought it was a Palestinian missile from Gaza, a short distance along the coast. "I shut the shop and smoked a cigarette to calm myself," he said. After a few minutes, puzzled he had not heard the air-raid siren, he stuck his head out of his door to see the flaming shell of a car. Its passenger, and the target of the blast, was a member of prominent Israeli crime organisation the Domrani family.
The car bomb on Ort Street, close to a school, was not a solitary incident. In the space of a fortnight spanning the final week of October and the beginning of this month, two car bombs detonated in the southern port city, both targeting Domrani family members.
Ashkelon is not the only Israeli town to be rocked by mob violence this year. On 7 November, a device attached to the car of a prominent state prosecutor, well-known for pursuing Israel's crime families, detonated in Tel Aviv.
This rise in incidents has inspired a fierce debate that reached a climax last week with a call from Israel's hawkish public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, for the use of anti-terror tactics usually reserved for Palestinian militants - including administrative detention - against Jewish Israeli crime families. As he made his call, several high-profile arrests took place and a number of businesses associated with mobsters were bulldozed in Ashkelon.
© Jonathon Rosen
About two months later, the family decided to pore through the recordings.
The camera had not caught the petty thief. But it captured something else:
© 2013 Doris Racher
A video still of a nursing home aide stuffing latex gloves into Eryetha Mayberry's mouth.
A video still of a nursing home aide stuffing latex gloves into Eryetha Mayberry's mouth.
An aide stuffed latex gloves into Mrs. Mayberry's mouth, while another taunted her, tapping her on the head, laughing. Hoisting her from her wheelchair, they flung her on a bed. One performed a few heavy-handed chest compressions. On Nov. 1, propelled by the outcry over the Mayberry case, Oklahoma became the third state - along with New Mexico and Texas - to explicitly permit residents in long-term care facilities to maintain surveillance cameras in their rooms.In the last two years, at least five states have considered similar legislation.
Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that's been stripped away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in the first place. "It's the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity," Cerf said. Cerf warned that he was simplifying his views - "I don't want you to go away thinking I am that shallow about it" - but overall, he believes "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."
© Miami Herald
Store owner Alex Saleh, left, with employee Earl Sampson
Store owner Alex Saleh, left, with employee Earl Sampson
He's been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times.
Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana.
Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing.
Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.
But Sampson isn't loitering. He works as a clerk at the Quickstop.
So how can he be trespassing when he works there?
It's a question the store's owner, Alex Saleh, 36, has been asking for more than a year as he watched Sampson, his other employees and his customers, day after day, being stopped and frisked by Miami Gardens police. Most of them, like Sampson, are poor and black.
© Corbis
"God, I hate to go to Texas," Kennedy told a friend, saying he had "a terrible feeling about going."
"God, I hate to go to Texas," Kennedy told a friend, saying he had "a terrible feeling about going."
As utterly shocking and traumatic as the assassination of John F. Kennedy was, the one person who might not have been surprised that it happened was JFK himself.
It's worth remembering, as the 50th anniversary of JFK's death approaches, that the young president had a morbid fascination with sudden death - and sometimes speculated that he would die at the hands of an assassin.
"Thank God nobody wanted to kill me today," he said to a friend half a century ago tonight while flying from Florida to Washington. How would it happen? By someone firing at his motorcade from a high window, he thought.
Kennedy also confided in the friend, Dave Powers, that he really didn't want to go to Texas later that week.
"God, I hate to go to Texas," JFK said, adding that he had "a terrible feeling about going."
And on the morning of his murder, Friday, November 22, that terrible feeling was still with him.
Justina Pelletier with her parents
After a long history of medical problems, a West Hartford teenager is now "trapped" inside a hospital with seemingly no way out.
Fox CT spent the past few months investigating the emotional case.
It has been a bitter custody battle, and nine months after it started, it's still going on.
In December 2012, Justina Pelletier was an active 15-year-old girl who would go ice skating, laughed and spent time with her family.
But just two months later, her family says their nightmare began.
"[Exhales] It's beyond any wildest nightmare that you could think of," says Justina's father, Lou Pelletier.
Her longtime West Hartford psychologist has also been following the case.
"It's the most bizarre situation ... I've ever been involved with," says Dean Hokanson, the clinical psychologist who has worked with Justina the past five years.
President Kennedy delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 1961. The public was not fully aware of what had happened when, on that day, a new administration (that was really a new regime) took over in Washington. Largely inspired by George Pope Morris, the Civil War poet, and by Abraham Lincoln, the new President's Inaugural Address was one of the finest pieces in the history of American literature. This long sermon in blank verse with key words that rhymed was the thunderclap announcing the birth of a new state. It was the advent, not of a dynasty, but of the intellect.
In the enemy camp people listened, people read, people were moved and sometimes shaken, but they preferred to voice their amazement that President Kennedy had invited mostly writers, artists and scientists to the inauguration -- Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, William Inge, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, John Hersey, Robert Frost, Saint John Perse, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Ludwigmies Van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, and one lone journalist, Walter Lippman. "There's nobody left at Harvard" became a popular wisecrack when the composition of the Presidential team was announced. But some only half-laughed. In the months that followed, America, anaesthetized by eight years under Eisenhower, awakened to discover that she had a President with both a brain and a heart.
Comment: This whole privacy issue seems to be a bit of a red herring. The psychopathic insurance companies would be the most damaged by allowing cameras in nursing homes. Their tort liability would increase exponentially. Funny how that is NOT mentioned. Cui bono.