Following revelations of child sex abuse in Rotherham, actor and director Samantha Morton felt the need to go public about her own shocking experience growing up in care homes in Nottingham. Here she talks for the first time about being sexually abused by residential care workers, and what happened when she went to the police about it.

Jury selection began Monday in the retrial for a Michigan police officer accused of killing a 7-year-old girl during a 2010 raid on her house while being followed by a reality-TV camera crew. The cop is charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Joseph Weekley was charged with involuntary manslaughter for shooting Aiyana Stanley-Jones as she slept on a couch the night of May 16, 2010. Weekley was among a group of Detroit officers executing a search warrant on a home where they hoped to find a 17-year-old murder suspect. They threw a flash grenade inside the home hoping the bright light, smoke and vibrations would confuse the occupants before the officers entered.

Stanley-Jones was shot seconds later, with Weekley later testifying that he heard a noise from the couch "like somebody's out of breath" before Aiyana's grandmother, Mertilla Jones, attempted to push the gun away. Jones denied she made a move for the gun and claimed police intentionally murdered Stanley-Jones.

A member of the Detroit Police Special Response Team at the time, Weekley was trailed by a crew filming for the television show, The First 48. The A&E reality show, in the vein of Cops, follows simultaneous murder investigations and depicts real-life scenarios from an investigator's perspective.

"I replay this every day in my head," Weekley testified in his first trial. "There's nothing else I could have done differently."

On Monday, the FBI announced that it is investigating the Independence Police Department after an encounter with an officer left a 17-year-old in a coma.

According to his friends, Bryce Masters is in a medically induced coma because of injuries he sustained during the traffic stop.

At around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, Curtis Martes, a friend of Masters', stepped outside to welcome Masters to his home on Southside Boulevard.

Martes then saw that a police officer had pulled Masters over; he recalls the cop standing by the passenger window and telling Masters to roll down the window.

According to Martes, Masters couldn't roll the window down because, "He doesn't have the cable that allows the electric window to work."

Independence Police said that Masters had an outstanding traffic violation and refused to cooperate with the officer.

As Sgt. Darren Schmidli said, "I believe he did crack the window but did not roll it down any further. He was just being completely uncooperative with the officer."

According to Schmidli, "The driver refused to exit the vehicle." A struggle ensued, during which, "a Taser was deployed by the officer. The driver was finally removed out of the car. A struggle ensued once he was moved out of the car."

Schmidli noted that even after Masters was warned the officers were going to use a stun gun, he refused to cooperate.

Witnesses, however, recount a different series of events.

Witness Michelle Baker, who lives next door and captured cell phone footage of the encounter, describes that, "The cop was like, 'you want to mess with me,' and pulled out his Taser and tased him."

"I thought he shot him," Baker said. "Then he pulled him out of the car, handcuffed him and drug him around the car."

"It looked like he hit his head on the concrete. You could see blood coming out of his mouth," Baker added, noting that the cop "put his foot on his back and moved it back and forth like he was putting a cigarette out."

When her mother and father came outside after hearing her cries for help she was desperately holding a tree with one arm while plainclothes officers were beating her in the head, neck and throat.

Dymond Milburn, now 20-years-old, was an honor student attending advanced classes at Austin Middle School, when her life would be forever scarred by Galveston police.

On the night of August 22, 2006 at 7:45 PM, Emily Milburn was preparing her children for school the next day, when a breaker broke, cutting off electricity to the family's home. Emily asked her daughter, Dymond, to go outside and hit the switch, located downstairs and outside the house.

A deputy Los Angeles city attorney has been arrested and charged with possession of child pornography, authorities said Friday.

Christopher Richard Garcia, 57, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home in San Pedro and booked on suspicion of possessing and distributing child pornography, said Officer Liliana Preciado, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Garcia had been under investigation since at least November, when authorities served a search warrant at his home and seized computers and other "electronic evidence," Preciado said.

"At the time, they found some questionable images," she said.

A forensic search of the computer revealed evidence of child exploitation, she said.

Prosecutors said Garcia has been charged with sending or bringing obscene material into the state for sale and possession of material depicting minors engaged in sexual conduct.

The board of trustees of the University of Illinois voted Thursday to reject the appointment of Steven Salaita as dozens of student and faculty supporters of the professor packed the meeting room at the Urbana-Champaign campus.

Before and immediately after the vote, The Electronic Intifada questioned top university officials on video, including the president, chancellor, board chair and several trustees, about the apparent influence of pro-Israel donors on the decision to fire Salaita.

Salaita has expressed "disappointment" in the decision, stating, "I am speaking with my attorneys about my options."

Lone dissenter

A lone trustee, James D. Montgomery, voted in favor of Salaita's appointment.

Regarding Salaita's tweets, Montgomery, the only university official who did not evade questions, told The Electronic Intifada that it was "pretty clear that some of those opinions were justified and probably most of the people in this room would agree with the opinions in terms of the tragedy that is going on between Israel and Gaza."

Newly sanctioned Gazprom Neft plans to continue offshore oil extraction in its Prirazlomnoye Arctic field as planned, and will reach peak oil production by 2021, First Deputy CEO Vadim Yakovlev said.

Prirazlomnoye is Russia's first offshore Arctic field, and with 72 million tons of recoverable oil, will be a key source for future hydrocarbon production and development in Russia. Already 100 million barrels of the new ARCO Arctic blend have been extracted from the site, which began production in April 2014.

The fresh round of sanctions by the US and EU intend to freeze Russia's big Arctic and Siberia shale oil ambitions by barring foreign oil companies from supplying any technology or equipment for joint ventures in deep water, offshore, or shale projects.

The production platform located in the Pechora Sea in Arctic waters will produce 110,000 barrels per day by 2021, despite Western sanctions.

"At the moment, we don't think that this will affect our long-term plans," Vadim Yakovlev, told reporters Friday, just before the sanctions were published.

The Police Chief in Washington, DC, is speaking out against one of her officers and in support of a man who stopped to record police arresting a man on a sidewalk only to be harassed by police and suspected of involvement in a crime for doing so.

Metropolitan Police Department Police Chief Cathy Lanier said she was surprised by the officer's actions in the incident that happened this week, and that he is now under investigation because for clearly violating the department's own regulations.

In the cell-phone video recording posted on YouTube, several police officers could be seen arresting a man lying on the ground, with his belongings scattered on the sidewalk outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.

Just over 50 seconds into the video, an officer approaches the witness, Andrew Heining, to ask if he knows the person being restrained.

"Are you a part of this, sir?" the officer, identified as C.C. Reynolds, asked Heining. "You're videotaping an investigation. This can be evidence in the case you understand that?"

Local and regional election took place across Russia on Sunday as millions went to the polling stations to elect 30 governors, 14 regional parliaments, three mayors and thousands of municipal assemblies, including Moscow's City Duma.

A record number of 75 million eligible voters were registered this year for the single election day on Sunday, according to the election commission chairman Leonid Ivlev.

The elections at all levels were held in all Russian regions except in the republic of Ingushetia. Thirty Russian regions elected their heads and governors, 14 regions elected legislative assemblies, while three administrative centers of Russian regions elected their mayors.

"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life." - Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we've walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance. The bogeyman's names and faces change over time - Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and now ISIS - but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security.

Ironically, just a short week after the 13^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we find ourselves commemorating the 227^th anniversary of the ratification of our Constitution. Yet while there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years since 9/11, there has been little to celebrate.

The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights - the first ten amendments to the Constitution - which historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like - all sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts - a recitation of the Bill of Rights would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.