A new report reveals rampant abuse by US Customs and Border Patrol agents towards migrants being deported to Mexico. One in three men and women said they were subjected to some type of abuse, whether verbal or physical, and often robbed.

The report, which was based on first-hand accounts, found that 38.4 percent of Mexican migrants reported abuse, most often verbal, and that two-thirds of migrants had been separated from their immediate family on being deported.

The report argues that the percentage could be even higher, because abuse "can deter [people] from making complaints."

A police dispatcher who sent cops to a playground where a 12-year-old boy was later fatally shot by police has resigned. The dispatcher failed to tell the officers that the 911 caller who reported the boy thought, correctly, that he was holding a toy gun.

On November 22, 2014, police responded to a 911 call concerning Tamir Rice, who was sitting on a swing at the Cudell Recreation Center while holding a BB gun that officers said appeared to look like a real handgun. Two police officers, 26-year-old Timothy Loehmann and 46-year-old Frank Garmback, had responded to a distress call about a "male sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people" in a city park.

The 911 caller had told dispatcher Beth Mandl that the gun was "probably fake, but you know what, it's scaring" me. Yet that message was not relayed to the responding officers.

Upon arrival at the scene, Officer Loehmann almost immediately fired two shots, one fatally wounding the 12-year-old boy, who was black. The child died in a hospital a day later. Police allege that Loehmann shot the kid after his orders were ignored and as Rice reached for his weapon - a BB gun.

Mandl offered a letter of resignation in July after being off the job without official leave since early April, according to police records reported by WKYC.

"I have enjoyed working here and I will miss you all," the letter said, according to Cleveland.com.

A TSA screener has been fired after security camera footage showed him stealing $61 in cash from a traveler's wallet at New York's JFK International Airport. Recent complaints against the agency have included theft, sexual assault and fraudulent fondling.

Passing through the airport on Saturday evening, a 26-year-old Bronx man went through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint at JFK, and placed his wallet in a plastic bin along with his other possessions. After passing through security, he noticed some of his cash was missing and complained to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the regional agency administering the airport.

Security footage showed a Transportation Security Administration screener opening the wallet and pocketing the cash, Port Authority spokesman Joe Pentangelo told reporters. The sticky-fingered agent was arrested Saturday night and charged with petit larceny and criminal possession of stolen property. Local media have identified the suspect as a 37-year-old Queens resident named Joe Bangay (also spelled Bengay).

TSA spokesman Mike England told reporters over the weekend that the agent would be fired on Monday.

This is the second TSA screener at JFK to be caught on camera absconding with passenger property. On August 26, security footage captured a female agent taking a $7,000 diamond watch from one of the screening bins and walking away. Margo Grant-Louree of Brooklyn was fired from the agency and charged with grand larceny and official misconduct.

Nearly one in four female undergraduates has experienced some type of sexual assault - meaning they were penetrated or touched in a sexual way without their consent - according to a new study. Freshman women are most likely to be victims.

Just over 23 percent of female undergraduate students reported that they had been sexually assaulted since enrolling in college, of which 10.8 percent said they have been raped, meaning they experienced penetration. The poll, which surveyed students at 27 nationally known universities, was conducted for the Association of American Universities (AAU) by Westat, a statistical research corporation.

Overall, 11.7 percent of students surveyed reported having experienced nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching by force or incapacitation since beginning college. Rates of sexual assault and misconduct were highest among undergraduate females and those identifying as TGQN (Transgender, Genderqueer or non-conforming, Questioning, Not Listed), AAU found. The risk of the most serious types of sexual assault declined during the college years, with 16.9 percent of female freshmen reporting being assaulted, as opposed to 11.1 percent of seniors.
"Students who are relatively new to school may experience higher risk because they are not as familiar with situations that may lead to an incident of sexual assault or misconduct," AAU noted in its findings.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Washington Post last week that the number of students who experience sexual assault on campus has been "unacceptably high" for decades.

A smoky cabin forced an American Airlines jet to make an emergency landing on approach to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport Sunday afternoon, according to an airline spokeswoman.

American Airlines Flight 5775, operated by MESA Airlines, was scheduled to arrive at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport from Des Moines International Airport, according to Victoria Lupica, American Airlines spokeswoman.

The crew of the CRJ-900 reported an issue with a smoky cabin upon their approach into D/FW Airport, Lupica said. The aircraft landed and deplaned safely on a taxiway.

All 76 passengers and four crew were bused to the terminal building. No injuries were reported.

The aircraft was taken out of service and was being attended to by maintenance, Lupica said.

A powerful explosion ripped through a residential building in Chengdu, south-western China, before setting the homes inside ablaze.

Police are currently still investigating the explosion on September 20, but gas leak is the suspected cause, reported People's Daily Online.

Six people, including pedestrians, were injured during the explosion but no deaths have been reported.

Around 1.40pm, a loud explosion rippled through the city centre residential area.

Large areas of Jiefang Road First Section, where the building was located, was covered in shattered glass.

Shortly after, the building became engulfed in flames.

Hu Jianhua, a resident who lives in the apartments around 100 feet across the road, reported that she initially thought the explosion was an earthquake.

She said: 'I was taking a siesta when a loud bang made me jump out of the bed.'

Video footage, captured by a passing pedestrian after the explosion, showed heavy smoke bellowing from the windows of the fourth and fifth floor.

Enormous flames licked the floors above where there were still people trapped.

A seed storage vault built into the side of an Arctic mountain to protect global food supplies in case of global cataclysm is being tapped by researchers in the Middle East who say the Syrian war has devastated their crops.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built in 2008 by the Norwegian government as the world's largest secure seed storage, is intended to protect thousands of varieties of essential food crops against things like nuclear disaster, disease and climate change.

Now, the devastation brought on by the war in Syria, which has raged on for four years and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, has prompted researchers to request some of the samples they gave to the vault, as their collection of crops in Aleppo was destroyed in the fighting.

Among the samples requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) crops resistant to drought that could help scientists develop and secure food supplies in the face of climate change in dry areas worldwide.

Protecting the world's biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault," said Brian Lainoff, spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground store, located on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

The Empire holds by far the most prisoners than any other country on earth, in both absolute numbers and per capita. Abby Martin explores the dark reality of conditions in America's prisons, who is warehoused in them, and how things got this way. Featuring interviews with Eddie Conway, former political prisoner unjustly incarcerated for 44 years, and Eugene Puryear, author of "Shackled and Chained, Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America."

The Government battled against releasing the figures

Thousands of people have died within six weeks of being found 'fit to work' by the Government's disability benefits test, departmental figures show.

The Department for Work and Pensions battled for months not to release the numbers, with its chief minister Iain Duncan Smith at one point telling Parliament they did not exist.

But the statistics, released on the order of the Government's transparency watchdog, show that between December 2011 and February 2014, 2,380 people died after their Work Capability Assessment told them they should start looking for work.

The figures related to claims for the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) benefit as well as IB/SDA.

The DWP's mortality report says that a causal effect cannot be assumed from the new numbers.

"These isolated figures provide limited scope for analysis and nothing can be gained from this publication that would allow the reader to form any judgement as to the effects or impacts of the Work Capability Assessment," it says.

Iain Duncan Smith previously said such figures did not exist The DWP, which is responsible for the benefits system, initially rejected a freedom of information request by campaigning journalist Mike Sivier on the grounds that it would publish them in future.

But Mr Sivier won an appeal to the Information Commissioner (ICO), an official body which judges whether government departments are acting in a fully transparent way. The ICO said the Government had no good reason to withhold the figures.

Mr Duncan Smith later caused confusion when he told Labour MP Debbie Abraham in Parliament: "She knows very well that the department does not collate numbers on people in that circumstance."

The figures were released this morning.

Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS union, which represents civil servants, said the work capability assessment should be scrapped.

"What lies behind these figures is a cruel climate generated by some politicians and sections of the media that seeks to demonise those in need and undermine public confidence in our welfare state," he said.

The 60-year-old father from north London was found 'fit to work'

A coroner has concluded for the first time that a man with severe mental illness killed himself as a direct result of being found "fit to work" by the Government's outsourced disability assessors.

Michael O'Sullivan, a 60-year-old father from north London, hanged himself after his disability benefits were removed despite the opinion of three doctors that he was suffering from recurrent depression and certified as unable to work by his GP.

Figures released last month by the Department for Work and Pensions showed that nearly 90 people died every month between 2011 and 2014 after they had been declared fit for employment after undergoing a work capability assessment (WCA).

Ministers insisted that the statistics provided no basis for a link to the Government's welfare reforms. But it has now emerged that a coroner ruled in the case of Mr O'Sullivan that the WCA and anxiety caused to him by its findings were the direct cause of his death.

Mary Hassell, the senior coroner for inner north London, wrote to the DWP warning that she believed there was a risk of similar deaths in future and demanding preventative action.

It is believed to be the first time a coroner has explicitly blamed a suicide on the welfare reforms. Mr O'Sullivan, who had a long history of debilitating mental illness, including fear of being outdoors, died in 2013 but the case has only now come to light after it was revealed by the Disability News Service.

In a formal finding following Mr O'Sullivan's inquest in January last year, Ms Hassell said: "[His] anxiety and depression were long-term problems but the intense anxiety that triggered his suicide was caused by his recent assessment by the [DWP] as being fit for work, and his view of the likely consequences of that."

The coroner further outlined her concerns in a separate document, known as a Prevention of Future Deaths report.

She wrote: "I found that the trigger for Mr O'Sullivan's suicide was his recent assessment by a DWP doctor as being fit for work... In my opinion, there is a risk that future deaths will occur unless action is taken."