Next time you're watching a college graduation, as you look out over the sea of caps and gowns, make sure you notice the ball and chain most graduates are wearing as they march onstage to receive their diplomas. That's student loan debt, which at over $1 trillion tops credit card debt in the U.S. today. The average burden is $28,000, but add in their credit cards and they're graduating with an average of $35,000 in debt. It's no wonder that people who've paid off their student loan debt are 36 percent more likely to own homes than those who haven't, according to new research by the One Wisconsin Now Institute and Progress Now.

What kind of society sends its young people from higher education into adulthood this way? I'm aware I'm only talking about those lucky enough to go to college, when roughly one-third of high school graduates don't - but if this is the way we treat our relatively lucky kids, the rest of them don't have a prayer. For many, the school to prison pipeline functions much more efficiently than the school to college one; California is one of at least 10 states that now spends more on prison than higher education. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, two-thirds of college graduates leave with some debt, and 37 million Americans are repaying a student loan right now.

Unbelievably, interest rates on federally subsidized loans are doubling today, from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. As Congress bickers over alternatives, even Democrats are backing "market-based" plans that aren't as bad as GOP ideas, but aren't good either. I hope they can find a way to lower interest rates, but the real scandal isn't the rate hike. The real scandal is that we take for granted that young people must go into debt - at whatever interest rate - to pay for college.

Of course, the truly lucky kids - those blessed wealthy members of the Lucky Sperm Club - sail through higher education without debt. But today, even upper-middle-class kids are having to take out loans, as the average annual cost of a four-year public university soars above $22,000, while private schools are over $50,000. Who the hell thinks this is a good idea?

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Also to blame were abortion, a same-sex kiss, and exposed breasts.

Last week on Generations Radio, Colorado pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner addressed the forest fires hitting their state. They wondered why God was punishing Colorado with the fires, and specifically targeting the heavily conservative city of Colorado Springs.

The two ultimately determined that the forest fires were linked to the state's liberal abortion laws and the recent success of civil union legislation. Swanson added that a Denver Post photograph of State House Majority Leader Mark Ferrandino kissing his partner also played a role in inviting God's wrath.

A video of police arresting a man in Hawthorne, Calif., appears to show them shooting his dog, Max, dead at the scene.

Police arrested Leon Rosby, 52, after he tried to film a police raid with his cell phone, according to CBS. Police said his loud music and his behaviour was obstructing the officers' response to an armed robbery call. But Rosby wasn't the only person filming nearby, because a video of his arrest posted online on June 30 shows the entire scene unfolding.

Footage shows Rosby standing on the street with his dog, a Rottweiler, near several police cruisers. Two officers approach him as he puts his dog into a car. They handcuff him, the dog jumps out and runs toward them and the officer shoots the animal several times as bystanders scream.

The video received many responses on Reddit before the website disabled comments because users were "witch-hunting" and posting personal information.

The police issued a statement confirming the officer had killed the dog after it ran toward him aggressively, according to CBS.

The video has more than 746,000 views on YouTube. Please be warned: the content is graphic.

New York - Around the world, people's understanding of why rape happens usually takes one of two forms. Either it is like lightning, striking some unlucky woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time (an isolated, mysterious event, caused by some individual man's sudden psychopathology), or it is "explained" by some seductive transgression by the victim (the wrong dress, a misplaced smile).

But the idea of a "rape culture" - a concept formulated by feminists in the 1970's as they developed the study of sexual violence - has hardly made a dent in mainstream consciousness. The notion that there are systems, institutions, and attitudes that are more likely to encourage rape and protect rapists is still marginal to most people, if they have encountered it at all.

That is a shame, because there have been numerous recent illustrations of the tragic implications of rape culture. Reports of widespread sexual violence in India, South Africa, and recently Brazil have finally triggered a long-overdue, more systemic examination of how those societies may be fostering rape, not as a distant possibility in women's lives, but as an ever-present, life-altering, daily source of terror.

The latest "rape culture" to be exposed - in recent documentaries, lawsuits, and legislative hearings - is embedded within the United States military. As The Guardian reported in 2011, women soldiers in Iraq faced a higher likelihood of being sexually assaulted by a colleague than they did of dying by enemy fire.

So pervasive is the sexual violence aimed at American women soldiers that a group of veterans sued the Pentagon, hoping to spur change. Twenty-five women and three men claimed that they had endured sexual assaults while serving, and lay the blame at the feet of former US Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. The reason, the lawsuit claims, is that these men oversaw an institutional culture that punished those who reported the assaults, while refusing to punish the attackers.

An FBI investigation has uncovered a plot by a New York state engineer with ties to the Ku Klux Klan to construct a radiation particle weapon, with the intention to sell the device to either a southern branch of the KKK or Jewish groups.

Federal investigators first began to investigate Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, when he allegedly approached an Albany-area synagogue and "asked to speak with a person who might be willing to help him with a type of technology that could be used by Israel to defeat its enemies, specifically, by killing Israel's enemies while they slept."

Crawford, an industrial mechanic with General Electric Co., evidently sought to assemble a radiation-emitting device "that could be placed in the back of a van to covertly emit ionizing radiation strong enough to bring about radiation sickness or death against Crawford's enemies," according to a complaint put together by an FBI agent on the case.

The agent's affidavit indicates that Crawford then telephoned another Jewish organization in Albany and made a similar offer. Luckily, Crawford's visit to the synagogue raised eyebrows, and an unidentified individual later contacted police.

If headphones are too bulky and ear buds make your ear canals hurt, why not surgically transform your ear itself into a speaker?

That's what body hacker Rich Lee has done, by implanting rare-earth magnets in his ears, so he can listen to music or amplified sounds even when he's not wearing headphones.

"The fidelity is comparable to a cheap set of earbuds at the moment," Lee told me in an email. So these aren't the high-fidelity bone induction implants you might have read about in science fiction novels (I think Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash references them). They're not connected directly to bone anyway, so he's actually using his ear's cartilage as the speaker diaphragm.

"However, in experimenting I have discovered ways to improve fidelity and possibly introduce stereo (currently it is just mono)," Lee said.

In addition to music, he looks forward to connecting these embedded bio-speakers to a directional microphone or a voice analysis app, so he can do surreptitious spy-like activities, like listening to conversations across the room and detecting whether you're telling lies or not.

He'd also like to connect his setup to a Geiger counter, so he can get ambient readings on radioactivity, or perhaps use it as part of a digital echolocation system of some kind.

It's not the kind of project you'd undertake lightly.

How can it be any other way? The Palestinians have been tortured, brutalized and systematically murdered by the Israelis for decades. That they still exist is a testimony to the fact that they, more than any other people, know what it is to teach life to their children.

On Canada's 100th birthday, Chief Dan George silenced a crowd of 32,000 with his "Lament for Confederation" at Empire Stadium. George's mournful speech began with, "Today, when you celebrate your hundred years, oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land."

George - chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, a Coast Salish band in North Vancouver - was also an author, poet and an Academy Award nominated actor. But above all, he was an activist and an influential speaker on the rights of native peoples of North America. Some of this activism may have stemmed from the fact that, at the age of five, George was placed in a residential school where his First Nations language and culture were prohibited. His "Lament for Confederation" - a scathing indictment of the appropriation of native territory by white colonists - was his most famous speech.

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A teen with Tourette syndrome and a developmental disorder killed himself days ago after suffering from years of bullying. But death wasn't enough to escape the taunting, as just after his suicide, a mean-spirited bully took over his condolence page to leave one last haunting comment.

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA HE DIED!!!!!! I HOPE HE IS IN HELLLLLLLL," the student wrote.

Gregory Spring was 17 years old when he took his life. His mother Keri said he suffered six years of relentless bullying.

Seven million college students will see their student loan costs double on Monday, after a group of bipartisan lawmakers failed to agree on a plan to keep interest rates down.

The Senate adjourned for the July 4 recess on Thursday, but failed to keep interest rates on Stafford loans at the current 3.4 percent rate. The federally subsidized loans are set to expire on July 1, after which the interest rate cap will rise to 6.8 percent.

Congress' Joint Economic Committee estimates that the average student will be paying $2,600 more starting July 1. On a $23,000 student loan repaid over 10 years, a student would be paying about $3,000 total interest.