An entire family from Edgewater, Fla., is missing in a case that has local law enforcement puzzled.

Karen Burger, 57, along with her daughter, son-in-law and grandson, have not been seen since July of this year, according to police.

Burger's elderly father, Maxwell Lee, initially reported his daughter as missing in August although she had not been seen for nearly a month prior.

The case is complicated by Burger's alleged drug-abuse problem, according to a police bulletin.

A chain of three stores that sells survival food and gear reports a jump in sales to people who are getting prepared for the "possible collapse" of society.

"We had to order fifty cases of the meals ready to eat to keep up with the demand in the past three months," said manager Steve Dorsey at Uncle Sam's Safari Outfitters Inc. in Webster Groves. "That's not normal. Usually we sell 20 to 30 cases in a whole year."

Dorsey says business has been brisk since the spring uprisings in the middle east, as customers share concerns about political uprisings, the world economy and the future of the United States.

"I've had people in here that are very wealthy and they've spent thousands of dollars just on backpacks that they fill with survival gear, one for each person of their family," Dorsey said, "And something where they can just grab a bag and get out of Dodge."

Dorsey says some customers talk of stocking up on freeze-dried meals for the home, while others confide they are stashing supplies at a remote location away from the city where they would go in an emergency.

The leader of a breakaway Amish group allowed the beatings of those who disobeyed him, made some members sleep in a chicken coop and had sexual relations with married women to "cleanse them," federal authorities said Wednesday as they charged him and six others with hate crimes in hair-cutting attacks against other Amish.

Authorities raided the group's compound in eastern Ohio earlier in the day and arrested seven men, including group leader Sam Mullet and three of his sons.

Several members of the group carried out the attacks in September, October and November by forcibly cutting the beards and hair of Amish men and women and then taking photos of them, authorities said.

Cutting the hair is a highly offensive act to the Amish, who believe the Bible instructs women to let their hair grow long and men to grow beards and stop shaving once they marry. One victim told the FBI he would rather have been "beaten black and blue than to suffer the disfigurement and humiliation of having his hair removed," according to court papers.

The attacks struck at the core of the Amish identity and tested their principles. They are pacifists and strongly believe that they must be forgiving in order for God to forgive them, which often means handing out their own punishment and not reporting crimes to law enforcement.

A grocery store security guard was fired after he told the father of a 4-year-old girl that she would face criminal charges for eating from a dried fruit package, a TV station reported.

The child's mother, Alissa Jones, said the father wasn't looking when the girl grabbed the package, ate a few pieces of fruit then returned it to a shelf at a Safeway store in Everett, Wash., KOMO reported Wednesday.

Safeway previously faced widespread criticism when a Honolulu couple were arrested over stolen sandwiches and had their 2-year-old daughter taken from them briefly by state officials.

In Washington, the guard took the 4-year-old and her dad to a room and said the girl would face charges and be banned from the chain, Jones said, adding the guard had the girl sign a paper acknowledging she wasn't allowed to enter any Safeway stores.

A local man says the latest movie in the popular Twilight franchise triggered a seizure, and similar incidents have been reported in theaters around the country.

Brandon Gephart and Kelly Bauman said they were watching Breaking Dawn: Part One at a theater Friday night when Brandon sudden began convulsing during a graphic birthing scene.

Brandon said he doesn't remember anything until he woke up on the theater floor, but Kelly said he was, "convulsing, snorting, trying to breathe."

"He scared me big time," she added. Paramedics transported the man to the emergency room and the theater had to cancel the rest of the movie for that showing.

Signs warning against staying overnight at Los Angeles City Hall drew mixed reactions from Occupy L.A. protesters and others camped outside the downtown landmark, with some saying they feared eviction and others insisting they were determined to stay unless forced out.

"It's created fear and panic through the entire community," said Melissa Balin, who said she has been living at the 1.7-acre park since the start of the protest nearly two months ago.

Another woman, however, said she was unconcerned, noting that protesters had never sought permission when they erected tents on the site.

"This is an occupation," said the woman, who gave her name as Zeeva International, as she photographed police officers putting up signs on the north side of City Hall.

City officials have offered Occupy L.A. protesters 10,000 square feet of indoor space and other incentives to vacate the City Hall lawn they have camped on for over seven weeks, a lawyer for the group said on Tuesday.

The proposal emerged from two days of talks between city officials and 12 Occupy L.A. representatives, including Jim Lafferty, an advocate for the protesters who is executive director of the National Lawyers Guild's Los Angeles chapter, he said.

A 50-member "city liaison group" began debating the plan on Tuesday evening, and many expressed deep suspicions about the city's proposal.

"It's called co-option -- you become part of the system when you make a deal with them," said Mike Saulenas, 60, a member of the group.

The Los Angeles encampment is among the oldest and largest established on the West Coast by anti-Wall Street activists aligned with a two-month old nationwide movement protesting economic inequality in the country and corruption in the U.S. financial system.

A radio reporter was shot and wounded in the southern Philippines after using a broadcast program to accuse police of being in cahoots with drug dealers.

Cagayan de Oro city police chief Gerardo Rosales said James Licuanan of DXIF radio was shot in the chest as he was heading home on a motorcycle after his radio program late Thursday.

He fell off the bike and was shot again before taking shelter in a nearby fire station. The gunmen then fled the scene on motorcycle.

A Philippine media watchdog says that 123 journalists have been killed in the country since 1986.

A prominent Egyptian-born U.S. columnist said local police sexually assaulted, beat and blindfolded her after she was detained Thursday near Tahrir Square during clashes, leaving her left arm and right hand broken and in casts.

Mona Eltahawy, 44, lives in New York and is a prominent women's rights defender, a lecturer on the role of social media in the Arab world and a former Reuters journalist. Eltahawy describes herself as a liberal Muslim who has spoken publicly in the U.S and other countries against violent Islamic groups, particularly in the wake of 9-11. She is known as a scathing critic of the former Egyptian regime.

Eltahawy arrived in Egypt Wednesday evening and went straight to Tahrir Square, getting close to the front lines of clashes between protesters and the police at the nearby Interior Ministry. She was detained outside the ministry in the early morning hours of Thursday and released about 12 hours later.

"They hit me with their sticks on the arms and head. They sexually assaulted me, groping my breasts and putting their hands between my legs," she told The Associated Press. "For a moment I said 'this is it. No one is around. I am finished.'" As she struggled, shouting: "No! No," her attackers dragged her by her hair from the street to the Interior Ministry, cursing her.

"What I experienced is just the tip of the iceberg of the brutality Egyptians experience everyday," she said, considering herself lucky because her dual nationality might have played a role in sparing her further abuse. "This is just the type of brutality that our revolution came about to fight."

Eltahawy is a vocal supporter of the Egyptian revolution and has visited the country at least twice since the January uprising. Known for her harsh criticism of the regime of the ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Eltahawy continued to denounce the new military rulers in post-Mubarak Egypt. She warned in public speeches that one Mubarak has been replaced with "1,800" others, in reference to the military council.

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

When it set up its campsite at Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street was facing in only one direction: toward the financial heart of the planet two blocks away. The police, who promptly surrounded the encampment and organized their own occupation of the neighborhood, were in a sense facing in the other direction: toward Ground Zero, where new glass-sheathed towers were rising to replace those destroyed on September 11, 2001. The police, up-armored in full riot gear, with the sort of surveillance paraphernalia, helicopters, and high-tech cameras that were a far more minimal aspect of domestic policing before 9/11, were clearly thinking counter-terrorism.

They were the representatives not just of New York's billionaire mayor and the bankers and brokers who had previously made the area their own, but of the ever more militarized national security state that had blossomed like some errant set of weeds in the ruins of the World Trade Center towers. They were domestic grunts for a new order in Washington as well as New York that has, by now, lost the ability to imagine solving problems in a civil and civilian fashion.

They represent those who have ruled this country since 9/11 in the name of our safety and security, while they made themselves, and no one else, safe and secure. It is an order that has based itself on kidnapping, torture, secret prisons, illegal surveillance, assassination, permanent war, militarized solutions to every problem under the sun, its own set of failed occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the closest of relations with a series of crony capitalist corporations intent on making money off anyone's suffering as long as the going is good.