The brain incubator at Harvard, the place which according to legend, and certainly the US News and World Report's annual paid college infomercial, is the repository for some of the smartest people in the world, is furious.

The reason - Harvard's illustrious faculty has learned that they too will be subject to their own policy recommendations as relates to Obamacare, which they themselves helped conceive. As the left-leaning NYT reported earlier today, "for years, Harvard's experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar."

Because Harvard's brilliant ivory tower economists and public policy wonks know precisely how to fix the world... as long as said fix never applies to them.

And sure enough, the faculty did everything in its power to make sure it never had to suffer the consequences of its own brilliance...

"Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed."

... But it was too late:

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?

A crash involving 100 vehicles this morning on I-94 between Battle Creek and Galesburg killed one person, injured 16 and closed the freeway, drawing an areawide response from police, fire, rescue and community resources.

Some vehicles were burning in the smashup west of Exit 92, including a truck that carried fireworks. Shortly before noon, those fireworks caught fire, causing an extended display of aerial explosions.

Michigan State Police confirmed one fatality in the crash. Area hospitals reported treating 16 patients; one remained in serious condition about 1 p.m.


I-94 is closed in both directions from Exit 88 east of Galesburg to Exit 92 west of Battle Creek, the Michigan Department of Transportation said.

Only a few vehicles were involved in what Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard C. Fuller said was the first crash at the scene about halfway between Battle Creek and Galesburg. That occurred in the eastbound lanes. Quickly, vehicles began to pile up in the westbound lanes of the freeway, slamming one after another into vehicles ahead and the median barrier. Crashed vehicles stretched for hundreds of yards in the westbound lanes.

Battle Creek police and fire crews joined the response to the crash, city officials said. And two Battle Creek Transit buses were dispatched to the scene to carry uninjured crash victims from the scene, where it was 12 degrees late this morning, to a Galesburg-Augusta school serving as a warming shelter.

Bill Cosby jokingly warned a woman in the audience during a show in Canada on Thursday night to be careful drinking around him.

Cosby made the remark at his second performance in a row after a string of cancellations that followed sexual assault allegations from more than 15 women.

Some of the women accused Cosby of drugging them by slipping something in their drinks before he assaulted them.

A woman who got up from one of the front rows and walked past the stage was asked by Cosby where she was going. When she answered that she was going to the lobby to grab a drink, Cosby responded: "You have to be careful about drinking around me." The remark was met with loud applause.

A few minutes later a heckler yelled at Cosby that he was a rapist.

Cosby stood up as the crowd started to boo the man and asked them not to respond. "No, no, stop," he said, waving his hands.

The man was removed from the theatre by a police officer while one member of the audience yelled "we love you" to Cosby.

Arrests and ticket violations in New York City are dropping over the New York Police Department's purported political protest against the mayor, but investigative journalist Matt Taibbi says the slowdown is exposing weaknesses in normal police policy.

The number of arrests across the city last week plunged to just over 2,000 - compared to over 5,000 during the same time one year ago - with parking- and driving-related tickets down more than 90 percent, according to NYPD data. There has also been a drop in new inmates, with only 618 entering the system compared to over 1,000 a year ago.

Sometimes the (nasty) truth surfaces, even on Fox News. They sometimes use code words to express their discriminatory views, but sometimes the truth just slips out. It looks like it did on Wednesday. Fox News host, Shannon Bream, wants to know how (on earth) are we suppose to spot the "bad guys" if we cannot see the "tone of their skin"?!

From the New Civil Rights Movement:

On Fox's "Outnumbered" Wednesday, the cast got into a discussion about how Paris police didn't have enough weapons, which enabled - they claimed - the Islamic extremist terrorists to massacre 12 people.

Enter Fox News anchor Shannon Bream, a former corporate attorney and graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

Bream, speaking unscripted, wondered how police would be able to identify "bad guys" if they had ski masks and couldn't "even know what color," what "the tone of their skin was?"

"That's my question about these guys because if we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had, you know, ski masks on, do we even know what color they were?," Bream asked. "What the tone of their skin was," she tried to clarify - as if that were less racist. "I mean what if they didn't look like typical bad guys?"

That is pretty overt and obvious, IMO.

• The accused thief was caught with three accomplices robbing a home in the town of Tehuacan, central Mexico
• Furious residents stripped them and beat the four with sticks and metal pipes before tying them to trees
• The four criminals included a teenager and a woman believed to be pregnant
• One of the adult male criminals died of his injuries

An accused thief was beaten to death by a mob in central Mexico after the furious crowd caught him and three accomplices, including a pregnant woman and a teenager, robbing a home.

A crowd of some 100 people discovered the four allegedly robbing electronics at a home in the town of Tehuacan, in the state of Puebla.

The residents seized the four - two men, a male teenager one woman said to be pregnant - and stripped them.

Then they beat them with sticks and metal pipes before tying them to trees.

The woman, who said she was pregnant, was 'struck in the face' while the teenager was tied by his hands and feet and beat up, local reports say.

He suffered wounds to his abdomen, legs, back and head.

'We warned them of what would happen if they returned to rob from us,' local neighbors, who said they were tired of thieves after a recent string of robberies, told local newspaper Excelsior.

The four alleged thieves included a woman (red pants) who was 'beaten in the face because she said she was pregnant' and teenage boy

Local cops tried to stop the brutal beatings but were pushed back by the crowd. State police had to intervene to bring the situation under control.

One of the four suspects died of his injuries.

A guru who ordered 400 of his followers to undergo castrations he said would bring them closer to God is under investigation by police in India.

The country's top crime fighting agency registered a case against Gurmeet Ram Rahim - known as the 'guru in bling' for his penchant for garish clothes and jewellery - over the operations at his ashram.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said Rahim is being investigated for criminal intimidation and causing grievous bodily hurt after an alleged 400 castrations were carried out.

The guru, who heads the Dera Sacha Sauda organisation based in Haryana state, is already facing trial for conspiracy over the murder of a journalist in 2002, as well as with claims of sexually exploiting female followers.

A police officer was recently found to have acted "inappropriately" after he pulled over an intoxicated Native American woman, and then drove her to his house to have a "personal relationship" with her.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer was disciplined, and given seven days off off work without pay. The Canadian CBC News reported that adjudication documents said that "RCMP Const. Kevin Theriault took an intoxicated woman he had arrested out of a cell and drove her to his northern Manitoba home to pursue a personal relationship."

Theriault and another officer had arrested the woman at a party back in 2011 according to the report. They placed her in a cell "to sober up" but six hours later Theriault came back, out of uniform, and requested that the woman be released into his custody.

The RCMP report says that he drove the woman to his house in his personal car, while officers taunted him via text message to find out "how far he would go" with his prisoner.

One of these officers even "jokingly made a comment about having a threesome," according to the report.

One officer said that all of this "wasn't right."

But he eventually even conceded: "You arrested her, you can do whatever the f*ck you want to do."

It's not clear what shocked people most about the report in Fortune that Whole Foods Market sells goat cheese and tilapia prepared with prison labor - the horrendous exploitation of prisoners for a base rate less than one-tenth of Whole Foods' starting wage, or the fact that even after paying prisoner-workers sixty cents an hour, that tiny wheel of goat cheese still costs upward of seven dollars. Whichever reason it was, for many the story disturbed the experience that Whole Foods carefully cultivates for its customers.

Walk into any Whole Foods Market and the messaging is clear. Colorful panels above neatly displayed quarts of organic chicken broth boast that Whole Foods pays the highest minimum wage in the grocery business ($10 an hour, which is still a poverty wage for most workers). Pamphlets outside the meat cases detail the company's animal welfare rating system and explain why it doesn't sell shark meat and other seafood that can't be fished sustainably. Workers in a seemingly casual but carefully tailored uniform set out "Whole Trade" bananas while smiling and making small talk with customers. Along the walls, posters introduce you to different vendors whose products the store stocks. When you check out, a cashier may ask you to donate to the Whole Planet Foundation - a program to give microloans to women entrepreneurs in developing countries. The stores are designed, from the crates used to display produce to the boat-deck-style overalls worn in the seafood department, to give you the impression of a highly compressed supply chain, carefully monitored for quality and decentralized to produce "win-win" relationships with vendors.

Whole Foods portrays this experience as the natural state of affairs in a bastion of so-called conscious capitalism - a strategy that has contributed in no small part to the company's incredible success. It pioneered a new model for grocery stores that based its marketing not only on the products it sold but on its image as an "activist" company that "revolutionized" the way the grocery business was run. The real secret of Whole Foods' success, however, is far less novel or glamorous: it has essentially profited from scamming its customer base.

Police tackled and restrained the teenage sister of 12-year-old Tamir Rice when she rushed to her dying brother after a Cleveland, Ohio cop fatally shot the boy in November, according to newly released video footage of the now notorious incident.

The Cleveland Police Department shared the 30-minute recording on Wednesday night, lending credence to claims made by the Rice family about how law enforcement acted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. This comes in the midst of a wave of similar tragic officer-involved incidents that have unfolded across the United States in recent months.

"This has to be the cruelest thing I've ever seen," Akron-based attorney Walter Madison, a representative of the Rice family, told the Northeast Ohio Media Group when he viewed the video footage.

On November 22, 2014, the Cleveland Police Department received reports concerning a male with a gun at an area playground, and a cruiser, with Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, arrived on the scene shortly after.

Police said Loehmann engaged when Rice reached into his waistband, and that officers didn't learn until after the fact that the boy only had a non-lethal airsoft pistol. An abbreviated, 2.5-minute video clip, taken from a nearby surveillance camera and released by the police days after the incident, showed previously that Loehmann, 26, fired two shots at Rice in just as many seconds. This happened as soon as the officer got out of his vehicle, fatally wounding the boy.

According to the new footage made available this week, roughly one minute after Rice was shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann, the victim's 14-year-old sister sped to his aid but was intercepted by another cop, forced to the ground and eventually detained in a nearby patrol car only a few feet from her dying brother.