Federal authorities in the United States being asked to investigate an incident in Rhode Island over the weekend in which a Muslim school was vandalized with anti-Islamic graffiti.

"Now this is a hate crime" was among the slogans that were spray-painted on the back and front entrances of the nonprofit Islamic School of Rhode Island in the town of West Warwick late Saturday.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, is now calling on authorities to investigate the incident after what the group calls a "recent spike in anti-Muslim hate rhetoric and bias-motivated attacks on American Muslims and their institutions."

"This apparently bias-motivated incident should be investigated as a hate crime, with the strongest possible charges brought against the perpetrators once they are apprehended," CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said in a statement on Sunday.

In spite of the prevailing stereotypes and assumptions about who uses SNAP Food Stamp benefits the most in the United States, the highest usage is not in Compton, Queens, nor the South Side of Chicago. Instead, a city that is 99.22% white and 95% Republican comes in the lead. Owsley County, Kentucky is a community of about 5,000, residents earning the lowest median household income in the country outside of Puerto Rico, according to the U.S. Census.

The decline in the profits from coal, tobacco and lumber industries led to a harsh toll being taken on the community.

Cale Turner, county executive of Owsley County told ABC back in 2010 that economic hardships have led to a high incidence of drug addiction.

"Those with drug addictions end up in prison without effective treatment. And it happens over and over in this community. The drug problem continues to get worse every year."

Over a period of two decades, 2.5 million single parent families experienced a 35 percent decline in federal assistance while those earning slightly more saw aid rise 74 percent, the New York Times reported.

The findings come from research that covers the 15 largest social safety net programs of the period between 1983 and 2004. They demonstrated that aid spending had dramatically increased. Despite this news, those earning as little as 50 percent below the federal poverty level, or $11,925 a year, were getting less support even though those earning 200 percent above the poverty level, or $47,700 were experiencing an increase in support.

Additionally, the review found that the elderly and disabled were benefiting more than younger individuals and the non-disabled, though families with married parents saw more support than single-parent families. In 2004, single-parent families received 20 percent less support than they did in 1983.

The period of study hints at the possible consequences of welfare reform legislation enacted during the presidency of Bill Clinton with the help of a Republican Congress, after which the amount of aid delivered to single-parent families decreased.

"You would think the government would offer the most support to those who have the lowest incomes and provide less help to those with higher incomes," Johns Hopkins University Economics Professor Robert A. Moffitt said in a statement. "But this is not the case."

The findings come from a new study, called "The Deserving Poor, the Family, and the US Welfare System by Moffitt," which is set to be published in the journal Demography.

The New York Times reported "that working families across the US account for nearly three quarters of the people enrolled in major public benefits program and 63 percent of the costs."

Four juveniles who allegedly rampaged through a Marysville supermarket face up to life in prison after they were charged as adults in Yuba County Superior Court.

Yuba County prosecutors charged the teens on Friday with seven felonies and one misdemeanor.

Superior Court Judge Julia Scrogin set bail at $1 million each for Shateemah Harrison, Alexandria Petrondla Evans and Elias Esquivel, all 15, and Sarah Murphy, 14.

The teens, who pleaded not guilty, wore Juvenile Hall jumpsuits and were chained at the waist as they appeared in Scrogin's courtroom.

They were charged with felony counts of second-degree robbery, dissuading a witness, criminal threats, assault with a deadly weapon, second-degree burglary and vandalism. Esquivel also faces a felony charge of resisting an executive officer.

They also face a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest.

A Minnesota man who was arrested in November on drug charges has been released after the "most expensive and most accurate test" available found that the drugs in his possession were over the counter vitamins, the Mankato Free Press's Dan Nienaber reports.

Joseph Burrell was arrested on two felony counts of drug possession on November 14, 2014. According to police, Burrell was initially stopped for driving out of a grocery store parking lot without his lights on. When police searched his vehicle, they found a bag containing powder that a field test determined could be an amphetamine.

Burrell — who acknowledged that he had used drugs in the past, but that he had also just finished in-patient treatment at the New Beginnings drug treatment center in nearby Waverly — insisted that the substance was not illegal, and that he had purchased it to deal with a chronically sore shoulder.

Prosecutors pressured him to plead guilty, but Burrell told the Free Press that he "couldn't plead guilty [to possessing] something I knew wasn't a drug. They set my bail at $250,000 for vitamins."

The charges were dropped after prosecutors used a more sophisticated means of analyzing the powder and discovered that it did, in fact, consist of legally available vitamins.

"I had been sitting in the jail since November with my bail set at $250,000," Burrell told the Free Press. "Then, two days before trial, they dropped the charges and let me go."

Two nights after briefly portraying President Obama as a sex-assault suspect on its 10 o'clock news, Fox 5 San Diego apologized to viewers.

At 10:04 p.m. Friday the 13th, viewers heard anchor Kathleen Bade say: "The only suspect in a sex assault at SDSU will not be charged." At the same time, a picture of Obama appeared with the legend "NO CHARGES."

The Obama shot lasted about 5 seconds, but it was noticed immediately in the newsroom, said Mike Wille, an assignment editor.

"Yeah, there was an accident when they had an over-the-shoulder" display, Wille told Times of San Diego. "It wasn't on purpose."

Asked why there was no immediate on-air acknowledgment or apology for the error, Wille said: "They really don't do that when it's a small thing like that."

But at 10:31 p.m. Sunday, Fox 5 anchor Misha DiBono read this statement:

"And we have an apology now. Friday night at 10 o'clock, we inadvertently used a photo of President Obama while reporting on a story about charges being dropped in a local case. We regret the error."

Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old Mexican national, was shot to death by police in Pasco, Washington last Tuesday as he was backing away from officers with his hands up. A video of the shooting clearly corroborates claims by Zambrano-Montes's family that he was killed "execution style."

Police claimed that Zambrano-Montes, who had lived in the city for ten years and worked as an orchard picker, may have been "armed with a rock" before he was shot multiple times. Protests erupted over the weekend, with more than a thousand demonstrating in Washington state on Saturday against the killing.

The United States has invaded, bombed and destabilized dozens of countries on the grounds that their regimes perpetrated human rights abuses. In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama declared that America leads the world "with the example of our values." He added, "That's what makes us exceptional."

Not only is this sanctimonious drivel completely at odds with the reality of American imperialist foreign policy, which employs mass murder, support for extreme right forces, subversion and provocation as its stock-in-trade, it is belied by the reality of life within the United States itself.

The wave of police violence in the US is one aspect of an escalating assault on the democratic rights of the working class that makes a mockery of the official human rights rhetoric. Were these events occurring in a country targeted for conquest or regime change by the CIA and the Pentagon, that country would be declared a human rights disaster area.

According to a web site that keeps track of police shootings, Zambrano-Montes was the 122nd person to be killed by police in the United States since the start of the year. In the five days since the shooting, another ten people have been killed by police: two black, two white, one Latino. The names and identities of five others have not been released.

In virtually all of these fatal police shootings, the victims have been blasted by a fusillade of bullets, their bodies riddled by ten, fifteen, twenty or more rounds fired off by the killer cops.

The recent incidents of wanton police violence include:

The beating of an elderly Indian man in Alabama as he walked in the street, leaving him partially paralyzed.

The veteran Elyria Schools educator said Monday she plans to resign at the end of the school year.

Gasps of disbelief followed the announcement made during an education forum aimed at unraveling for parents the intricacies of the standardized testing system. Starr was at the podium, delivering a talk on how special education students are suffering under the new system based on Common Core standards and more rigorous assessments. She said as a veteran intervention specialist at Elyria High School, she could no longer watch silently from within the confines of a structured school day.

Instead, she is leaving education in the traditional sense.

"I am going to teach in a different way," she proclaimed.

Starr wants to start an after-school mentoring program for at-risk students in hopes of saving them from the school-to-prison pipeline.

Starr garnered a reputation of being a rock star teacher long before "Live with Kelly and Michael" picked her as the winner of the 2014 Top Teacher Search. She has mentored middle school boys, putting books in the hands of at-risk youth and ties on their necks to foster a sense of pride. Handing out high school diplomas to those same students was a highlight of her career, a testament that getting a child to graduation sometimes requires more than just lesson plans and homework.

She has coached football, taken students on field trips to meet authors and adopted a "failure is not an option" approach to some of the hardest-to-reach students. Yet with a stellar 16-year career under her belt, Starr said the new testing culture is killing education.

"I can't do it anymore, not in this 'drill 'em and kill 'em' atmosphere," she said. "I don't think anyone understands that in this environment if your child cannot quickly grasp material, study like a robot and pass all of these tests, they will not survive."

A Chinese mining tycoon linked to former security tsar Zhou Yongkang has been executed, according to state media.

Sichuan native Liu Han, 48, was found guilty of 13 charges - including murder, organising casinos, running a mafia-style gang and illegally selling firearms - and sentenced to death in late May.

He was executed on Monday morning together with his younger brother Liu Wei and three associates, Tang Xianbing, Zhang Donghua and Tian Xianwei, Xianning city intermediate court in Hubei province said.

The court organised meetings between the criminals and their families prior to the executions, Xinhua reported.

For Russian farmer Alexander Bakshaev, the crushingly high interest rates the banks were charging him on his loan inspired a smelly protest... As Pro-Sibir reports, the fuming farmer repaid his loan with the equivalent value in manure.

As NBC News reports, the manure was worth 40,000 rubles ($610) - the exact amount he owed the bank, Bakshayev told Sibkray.ru.