After Katie Feifer was raped at knifepoint by a man who pushed his way into her Oak Park home, her assailant tied her up in the basement and left.

She freed herself and called police, who took her to the emergency room at West Suburban Hospital.

"It's funny how vivid the memories are, even after all these years," Feifer says of her treatment after the 1988 attack. "A resident came in, and had this rape kit, and started opening envelopes and vials. He was fumbling around and he was very, very nervous. He did a pelvic exam, and kept apologizing. 'I'm sorry I have to do this. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

"I remember feeling I had to comfort him and make him feel OK. This guy was supposed to be examining me and helping me, and he didn't know what he was doing."

There is no shortage of jarring rape statistics.

Illinois State Police data reported 5,300 rapes statewide last year - more than 14 a day - though experts believe the actual number is triple that. Most go unreported, in part because the majority of rape victims are children - 54 percent, according to the Illinois Attorney General's office.

The third mass protest in Moscow in two months against Russia leader Vladimir Putin and demanding fair elections appeared to have been the largest yet.


Undeterred by subzero temperatures that froze their breath and left icicles adorning many men's mustaches and beards, tens of thousands of Russians marched through the streets of Moscow on Saturday demanding fair elections just a month before they are to go to the polls to choose a new president.

Despite fear that the frigid weather and bickering among the opposition would curb the turnout, the third mass protest in two months against the rule of Russian leader Vladimir Putin appeared to have been the largest Moscow has seen in a generation.

Authorities clocked the turnout at 36,000, bigger than either of the December demonstrations. Opposition leaders estimated that 120,000 demonstrators swarmed Moscow's Bolotnaya Square, while demonstrators said they believed they numbered 50,000 to 100,000.

After passing through a row of metal detectors, a throng of protesters marched about a mile to reach Bolotnaya Square, on an island in the center of the Moscow River.

A veteran at the San Onofre nuclear plant fell into a reactor pool, but suffered no major radiation exposure.

A plant worker at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego fell inside a reactor pool last week, but he didn't suffer any major radiation exposure, the North County Times reported.

According to Southern California Edison spokesman Gil Alexander, the man was leaning over to pick up a flashlight he had dropped when he lost his balance and fell into the Unit 2 reactor pool, the Associated Press reported. The pool, 20 feet deep, was filled with water that circulates through the reactor core.

"He was wearing all of the appropriate safety equipment, including a life preserver vest. We immediately began a thorough medical screening to determine if there had been any injury," Alexander said, the North County Times reported.

An explosion hit a gas pipeline running from Egypt to Israel on Sunday, witnesses and state television reported.

The pipeline, which also supplies gas to Jordan, has come under attack at least 12 times since Egyptian resident Hosni Mubarak was toppled in 2011.

The latest blast took place in the Massaeed area west of the Mediterranean coastal town of al-Arish. Gas pumping was stopped after the explosion.

Residents in al-Arish told Reuters they could see flames from their town. Security forces and fire trucks raced to the scene, witnesses said.

Security in Sinai loosened after Mubarak's fall as the police presence thinned out across Egypt.

As the last American soldiers left Iraq in December, so, too, did many of the journalists who had covered the war, leaving little in the way of media coverage of post-war Iraq. While there were some notable exceptions -- including two fine articles by MIT's John Tirman that asked how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the US invasion -- overall the American press published few articles on the effects of the occupation, especially the consequences for Iraqis.

As a college professor, I have a special interest in what happened to Iraqi universities under US occupation. The story is not pretty.

Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students -- churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries -- the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.

Iraqi universities began their decline in the 12 years after the 1991 Gulf War. As the international sanctions regime cut off journal subscriptions and equipment purchases, academic salaries fell precipitously, and 10,000 Iraqi professors left the country. Those faculty who remained were increasingly closed off from new developments in their fields.

Occupy Austin protesters were evicted from the steps of Austin's City Hall last night on orders from the office of City Manager Mark Ott. Seven arrests were made and one 58-year-old protester was hospitalized, says a report posted this afternoon on the Austin Chronicle web site.

Rumors of an eviction have swirled for days, the article says, but protesters were finally ordered to leave at 9:30 Friday night. At 10:45 p.m. a group of 50 police arrived by bus and began to clear the area.

Protesters reconvened at Republic Square Park and began to march up Sixth Street, webcasting the event until it became clear that police were using the webcast to track and surround the group.

Seven arrests were made in total, including videographer Corey Williams, 'Occupy Austin' organizers, and 58-year-old Claire Hirschkind who fell to the ground and was taken to Brackenridge Hospital. City officials say that Hirschkind has a history of seizures but witnesses say she was pushed down by police.

New regulations put in place by the City Manager prohibit any non-city usage of the area between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. and bar the use of "sleeping, camping and the use or storage of sleeping equipment." A reservation is now required by any group wishing to use the area's mezzanine and amphitheater.

Protesters who were arrested face charges of criminal trespass.

February 1st 2012 the entire parliamentary group of The Movement of the Icelandic Parliament nominated Private Bradley Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Following is the reasoning we sent to the committee explaining why we felt compelled to nominate Private Bradley Manning for this important recognition of an individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world.

Our letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

We have the great honor of nominating Private First Class Bradley Manning for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings. These revelations have fueled democratic uprising around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia. According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on our foreign policies, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will not be held responsible for providing toxic, formaldehyde-laden trailers to thousands of displaced individuals following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Courthouse News Service (CNS) reports that Judge Carl Stewart from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has struck down an appeal from 10,000 residents who were harmed by the trailers, claiming that these individuals have no jurisdiction to sue the government.

Even though taxpayers like those injured by the toxic trailers are responsible for funding FEMA, which means they technically helped fund the trailers as well, Judge Stewart does not believe the plaintiffs in the case have subject-matter jurisdiction to go after the agency. In his view, the trailers were provided at "no cost," and "under no obligation."

But the whole premise of the case alleges that FEMA knew about the trailers' formaldehyde problems early on and continued to distribute them to displaced hurricane victims. By failing to admit the problem and take action to remedy it, FEMA inflicted undue injury and even death on victims just to avoid having to deal with future lawsuits, they say.

This past week, I had the distinction of becoming one of a select list of authors banned by the Tucson United School District. Now this is no small feat. It turns out that the Tucson United School District (a city adjoining both the U.S./Mexico border and that of the Tohono O'odham, Yaqui and several other tribal nations) does not want to discuss Native American or Mexican American history - at least, as told by Native American and Chicano or Mexican American authors.

Hence, the decision to ban books in a 4 to 1 vote on Tuesday, January 10 by the school-district board. This is part of a larger state mandate banning Mexican American Studies. An estimated 50 books are being banned.

This morning, I am looking at one of the banned books, Rethinking Columbus: the Next 500 Years. The book, originally published in 1991 by Milwaukee-based Rethinking Schools, is intended to provide educators with tools to re-evaluate "the social and ecological consequences of the Europeans' arrival in 1492" and was written in time for the quincentenary. That was the event the Chicago Tribune had promised would be the "most stupendous international celebration in the history of notable celebrations."

Perhaps a bit optimistic in retrospect. In the book, the question was asked, What were the consequences- both positive and negative of this "discovery," or, in actuality, the blind luck of some poor navigation skills. Apparently this book is the pinnacle of what should not be read.

Why do we stick up for a system or institution we live in -- a government, company, or marriage -- even when anyone else can see it is failing miserably? Why do we resist change even when the system is corrupt or unjust? A new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, illuminates the conditions under which we're motivated to defend the status quo -- a process called "system justification."

System justification isn't the same as acquiescence, explains Aaron C. Kay, a psychologist at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, who co-authored the paper with University of Waterloo graduate student Justin Friesen. "It's pro-active. When someone comes to justify the status quo, they also come to see it as what should be."

Reviewing laboratory and cross-national studies, the paper illuminates four situations that foster system justification: system threat, system dependence, system inescapability, and low personal control.

When we're threatened we defend ourselves -- and our systems. Before 9/11, for instance, President George W. Bush was sinking in the polls. But as soon as the planes hit the World Trade Center, the president's approval ratings soared. So did support for Congress and the police. During Hurricane Katrina, America witnessed FEMA's spectacular failure to rescue the hurricane's victims. Yet many people blamed those victims for their fate rather than admitting the agency flunked and supporting ideas for fixing it. In times of crisis, say the authors, we want to believe the system works.