Darrin Manning's unprovoked "stop and frisk" encounter with the Philadelphia police left him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested in front of her young child for "trespassing" at her own apartment complex in Houston.

A Georgia toddler was burned when police threw a flash grenade into his playpen during a raid, and the manager of a Chicago tanning salon was confronted by a raiding police officer bellowing that he would kill her and her family, captured on the salon's surveillance. An elderly man in Ohio was left in need of facial reconstructive surgery after police entered his home without a warrant to sort out a dispute about a trailer.

These stories are a small selection of recent police brutality reports, as police misconduct has become a fixture of the news cycle.

But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the media is inevitably drawn toward tales of conflict. Despite the increasing frequency with which we hear of misbehaving cops, many Americans maintain a default respect for the man in uniform. As an NYPD assistant chief put it, "We don't want a few bad apples or a few rogue cops damaging" the police's good name.

This is an attractive proposal, certainly, but unfortunately it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a systemic problem, not "a few bad apples":

Military style boot-camps are flourishing in China in order to break teenagers of their internet addiction. Some 250 camps are now functioning in the country alone - and the idea may spread.

"My parents wanted me to study at home all day, and I was not allowed to play outside," one teenager, who gave only his surname, Wang, told Reuters. He said that resultantly he turned to the Internet to escape the competitive societal pressures.

"As I became addicted to the game, my school grades tumbled. But I gained another feeling of achievement by advancing to the next level in the game," Wang said.

He admitted to once playing for more than three days in a row during which he slept for only one hour.

Residents in Salt Lake City, Utah are up in arms after a local police officer shot and killed a man's beloved pet dog last month while responding to a missing child report.

Authorities found the displaced toddler unharmed and sleeping inside its home around 30 minutes after they entered the yard of Sean Kendall on June 18 and killed his 110-pound Weimaraner, "Geist."

The incident has since managed to garner the attention of animal lovers in and out of Salt Lake City after Kendall published on the web a cell phone video he recorded as he accosted the police outside his home moments after learning what had happened.

"About 15 minutes ago, I got a phone call from Utah Animal Control, calling to tell me that an officer had shot and killed my dog," Kendall says in the beginning of the clip. "He was inside my backyard in a fenced-off area. What was the cause for the officer to shoot and kill my dog?"

French police put a block of explosives at Marseille Airport during training exercises...and forgot where they hid it, says a leaked report. The authorities have been searching for the perilous package for a week to no avail.

The explosives were lost somewhere in the cargo area in Marseille Provence Airport in the second-largest French city, reported French media.

The deadly substance was hidden during exercises in which the local gendarmes were training police dogs to find explosives. However, the sniffer dogs didn't seem to be trained well enough to find the substances. Neither were the officers, who forgot where they put no less than 100 grams of C-4 military explosives.

"All searches to find the material have failed," the police source said. It is yet unclear whether fully-trained police dogs had been used to help find the substances.

A criminal investigation has been launched to find out who is responsible for the incident, said local police, adding that the culprit could be subject to "administrative penalties and lawsuits."

The preliminary inquiry said that "there was a negligent supervision" of the training exercise.

A former New York Police Department officer convicted of planning to kidnap and rape women before killing and eating them is set to go free after a federal judge overturned his conviction.

According to Reuters, the so-called "Cannibal Cop" Gilberto Valle was acquitted by US District Judge Paul Gardephe on Monday. Valle has been in prison since he was arrested in 2012, and potentially faced life behind bars on kidnapping conspiracy charges.

In his opinion, Judge Gardephe stated that the evidence used to originally convict Valle did not sufficiently prove that the former officer acted on what his attorneys said were sexual, cannibalistic fantasies involving women he never met, as well as his wife.

"The evidentiary record is such that it is more likely than not the case that all of Valle's Internet communications about kidnapping are fantasy role-play," the judge wrote.

Gardephe did uphold Valle's conviction on a less serious charge, which alleged that he used the NYPD's federal database to collect information on various women he intended to target. That conviction carried a sentence of up to one year in prison, but since Valle has been in jail since 2012, he can be set free as early as Tuesday.

Although prosecutors originally argued that Valle's access of the NYPD database signaled that the former officer was taking steps to carry out his lurid plan - they also claimed he had searched the internet in order to learn about using chloroform to knock someone unconscious - defense attorneys said his involvement with a dark fetish website was simply fantasy. When Valle appealed his conviction, his lawyers claimed the jury could not differentiate between the details of his fantasy and real steps toward making it a reality.

Gardephe also pointed to the fact that no one was ever harmed to justify the idea that evidence in the case was lacking.
"No one was ever kidnapped, no attempted kidnapping ever took place, and no real-world, non-Internet -based steps were ever taken to kidnap anyone," he wrote, according to the New York Post.

"Dates for 'planned' kidnappings pass without comment, without discussion, without explanation, and with no follow-up. The only plausible explanation for the lack of comment on inquiry about allegedly agreed-upon and scheduled kidnappings is that Valle and the others engaged in these chats understood that no kidnapping would actually take place."

Municipalities within New York can pass local laws to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the state's top appeals court affirmed Monday.

The 5-2 decision this week out of the New York Court of Appeals now means that cities and towns across the Empire State can pass local zoning rules prohibiting the controversial natural gas-extraction process, much to the chagrin of energy companies that accused those restrictions of being illegal.

Dryden and Middlefield - two upstate New York towns - became the target of litigation after fracking operations planned within their borders were preemptively aborted as a result of recently-enacted drilling bans.

The plaintiffs - Norse Energy Corp. and a rural dairy farmer - responded to the bans in Dryden and Middlefield by asking the courts to acknowledge that towns can't enact local laws imposing restrictions on the oil and gas industry.

Agreeing with three lower courts, the majority of the state's appellate panel said local officials legally passed the anti-fracking bills.

A Mexican woman is currently on trial for killing her rapist in self-defense.

The woman, 21-year-old Yakiri Rubí Rubio, was abducted at knifepoint by two men on December 9, 2013 in her hometown of Mexico City, Mexico. According to Upside Down World, 37-year-old attacker Miguel Angel Anaya began raping her at a nearby hotel. Rubio fought back against Anaya, ultimately stabbing him in the abdomen and neck with the knife he had been carrying. Anaya and his accomplice, brother Luis Omar Anaya, both fled on their motorcycles. Rubio was able to make her way to the nearby Public Prosecutor's Office to report the crime.

While Rubio was in the office, Luis Anaya arrived and accused Rubio of murdering her brother. The man claimed that Rubio had known and been lovers with his brother, a claim which Rubio denies because she is homosexual.

Still, the woman was charged with homicide. Although her charges were reduced to "legitimate self-defense with excessive violence" and she was released on $10,000 bail, she still faces fines to be paid to Anaya's family and ten years of possible jail time.

A Minnesota man used his bare hands to pry open a passenger-side door of a burning sport utility vehicle and save a trapped motorist from near-certain death, police said Tuesday.

The incident has left police marveling at the actions of Bob Renning, 52, who - apparently fueled by a burst of adrenaline - pried open the door of Minneapolis resident Michael Johannes's 2006 Chevrolet TrailBlazer on Sunday evening.

"To say his actions were heroic would be putting it lightly," said Lieutenant Eric Roeske, spokesman for the Minnesota State Patrol. "He almost certainly saved Mr. Johannes from a horrible death."

Kentucky could become the first southern state to allow same-sex marriage after a federal judge determined arguments supporting a ban on such relationships were bewildering and irrational.

U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II ruled in favor of two gay Louisville couples who challenged the state's 2004 constitutional amendment and a similar 1998 law violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

"In America, even sincere and long-hold religious beliefs do not trump the constitutional rights of those who happen to have been out-voted," Heyburn wrote in his ruling.

The judge sharply rejected the only justification for the ban offered by Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear's lawyers - who argued that traditional marriage contributed to a stable birth rate and the state's long-term economic stability.

"These arguments are not those of serious people," Heyburn said.

"Though it seems almost unnecessary to explain, here are the reasons why," Heyburn continued. "Even assuming the state has a legitimate interest in promoting procreation, the Court fails to see, and Defendant never explains, how the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage has any effect whatsoever on procreation among heterosexual spouses. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage does not change the number of heterosexual couples who choose to get married, the number who choose to have children, or the number of children they have."

EFF, Greenpeace, and the Tenth Amendment Center flew an airship over the NSA's Utah data center on Friday. Heralded as "the first-ever anti-surveillance air force," the 135-foot-long thermal airship carried activists from EFF and Greenpeace with the message: "NSA Illegal Spying Below."