In my recent interview, "Serfdom is the New Normal -Talkin' Oligarch Blues with Perpetual Assets", I mentioned the dangers of talking to the police in light of the recent epidemic of shady civil asset forfeitures. What many people fail to realize, is that you aren't obligated to have casual conversations with police when you have been pulled over. In fact, such conversations are often used solely to manufacture an excuse for further action against you. For example, take this excerpt from the recent Washington Post article, "Highway Seizure in Iowa Fuels Debate about Asset-Forfeiture Laws":

"Simmons said he was issuing a warning for the failure to signal. After handing over the paperwork, he said the stop was over. Then he asked the driver, Newmerzhycky, if he had "time for just a couple quick questions."

Police who specialize in highway interdiction use casual conversations to avoid triggering legal questions about the length of stops. If the conversations are consensual, courts consider the added delay to be legal."

A 3-year-old Florida girl was reportedly raped and beaten by her new stepfather, who had married the child's mother just one week before she died.

Charlie Brame died Monday at an Orlando hospital and investigators say her body showed signs of recent severe sexual and physical abuse and "aggravated child abuse with severe brain trauma," reports the New York Daily News. Her stepfather, Pascal Kaufmann, 19, allegedly told police the girl stopped moving on Saturday when he was babysitting for her alone while her mother was at work.

Police say it "was unlikely that (Brame) could receive such severe head trauma from falling out of the bed" and that her injuries were "more consistent with blunt trauma to the back of the skull."

Kaufmann moved to the United States from Germany in August and married Charlie's mother Emma Paige Liggett last week, reports WFTV. He was charged with child neglect and rape and has been denied bail. Depending on the results of an autopsy report, he could face additional charges.

"In all likelihood, what we're going to see is a charge of first-degree murder for the death of this child," WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said.

Charlie's biological father had reportedly begged her mother not to leave Kaufmann alone with the little girl after he found out he had spanked her. He reportedly told her that "(Kaufmann) is to never touch his daughter again or he would kill him," according to a police report. The father reportedly had no comment after the horrific incident.

The term "psychopath" tends to conjure up a specific set of images -- pop-culture creations like Psycho's Norman Bates or Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter, or real-life serial killers such as Clifford Olsen, Paul Bernardo or Jeffrey Dahmer.

But the reality is that those monstrous characters represent only the extreme end of the personality disorder covered by that word, and that it's very likely that you know someone who could rightly be described as a psychopath.

Local filmmaker Jeremy Torrie examines the broader scope of psychopathy with a fascinating hour-long documentary called The Psychopath Next Door, which airs Nov. 27 on CBC's Doc Zone.

"You're going to run into one of these individuals sometime in your life, more than once," University of British Columbia forensic psychologist Dr. Robert Hare says in the film. "And the encounter could either be exhilirating, thrilling (and) exciting, or devastating. More likely the latter.

"Most of these psychopaths are living right next to us, living a reasonably normal life but creating some sort of distress -- psychological or environmental or financial -- for others around them."

Hare, who's apparently known in scientific circles as "the godfather of psychopathy" for, among other things, having developed a 20-point checklist for identifying psychopaths, notes that the main attribute that separates them from the rest of the population is a total disregard for the distinction between right and wrong.

The hard-pressed chief of bankrupt 2014 Winter Olympics builder Mostovik has now been charged with tax evasion and embezzlement in the Siberian region of Omsk, adding to earlier charges of withholding wages from employees.

Oleg Shishov, who is CEO of Mostovik and a member of the region's legislative assembly, was put under house arrest early last week for allegedly failing to pay Mostovik employees for six months straight.

Shishov was then slapped with two additional charges: evading more than 515 million rubles ($10.9) in taxes from 2009 to 2012 via falsified tax documents and embezzling 500 million rubles ($10.6 million) from the Omsk regional budget, according to a statement last week on the regional investigative department's website.

The Denver police department has been accused of using excessive force after a video, which they allegedly deleted, survived on the cloud and was turned into FOX 31.

The incident started as two officers approached David Nelson Flores, who was in his vehicle with his seven-and-a-half-months pregnant wife and their child, to shake him down after suspecting him of being in possession of a substance deemed illegal by the state.

Upon their approach, officers said they saw Flores put a white sweat sock in his mouth. Because the US is involved in an immoral war on drugs, this 'sock in mouth' move apparently gave the officers the right to yank Flores out of his car and proceed to pummel the man on the asphalt.

According to the police report however, a pair of plain clothes officers "assisted" suspect David Nelson Flores out of his car and they all "fell to the ground."

The pummeling was for Flores' own good, according to the police report. They bashed in his face and head so he wouldn't "choke."

The Ebola death toll is up to 5,689 out of nearly 16,000 cases reported in eight countries by November 23, the World Health Organization said in its latest update.

Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia were the hardest hit by the virus outbreak, with 600 new cases recorded just last week.

"The total number of cases reported in Sierra Leone since the outbreak began will soon eclipse the number reported from Liberia," the WHO said.

Sierra Leone had 6,599 cases in comparison to 7,168 in Liberia.

A month ago, those figures stood at 5,235 for Sierra Leone and 6,535 for Liberia, with the number of deaths, respectively, 1,500 and 2,413, according to the WHO.

The situation is said to be more or less stabilizing in Guinea and Liberia, but just the opposite is happening in Sierra Leone, according to the update. However, officials in Sierra Leona insist that the outbreak is losing momentum.

"We believe that now that those treatment centers are ready, the transmission of new cases will start reducing," Sierra Leone's minister of information, Alpha Kanu, told journalists. "I don't think we can get any higher than we are now - we are at the plateau of the curve and very soon we will have a downward trend, once we have somewhere to take people."

The World Health Organization said it was able to isolate more than 70 percent of those infected with Ebola in Guinea, referring to the international target set for December 1, but had failed to do so in the other two countries.

"Liberia and Sierra Leone report that fewer than 70 percent of patients are isolated, though there is wide variation among districts," the WHO said, adding that the final goal is to isolate 100 percent of those infected by January 1.

Meanwhile, eight more cases have been reported in Mali, with six dying.

The police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy carrying a pellet gun fired within 1½ to two seconds of pulling up in his cruiser, police said Wednesday. During those few moments, he ordered the youngster three times to put up his hands, they said.

The city released a surveillance video that shows the shooting of Tamir Rice, who was carrying an airsoft gun that shoots non-lethal plastic pellets.

Much of the footage shows what appears to be a bored kid alone in a park on an unseasonably warm November afternoon. Tamir is seen pacing, occasionally extending his right arm with what appears to be a gun in his hand, talking on a cellphone and sitting a picnic table with his head resting on his arms.

The gun wasn't real. It can be bought at sporting goods stores for less than $20. Tamir's was lacking the bright orange tip that is usually put on such weapons to indicate they're not real guns.

The patrol officer who shot Tamir was identified Wednesday as Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old rookie who began his career in Cleveland on March 3. He previously spent five months in 2012 with a department in the Cleveland suburb of Independence, but four of those months were in that city's police academy.

Loehmann's partner that day was identified as Frank Garmback, 46. He has been with the department since 2008. Both are on paid administrative leave pending a decision by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office whether to pursue any criminal charges.

A Houston pastor has come under fire for refusing to bury a 93-year-old woman who had been a member of his church for 50 years but had not tithed enough as her death neared.

Barbara Day told KRIV that she was devastated by the way pastor Walter F. Houston treated her when she contacted him about a funeral at Fourth Missionary Baptist Church for her mother, Olivia Blair.

"It was like the last insult in the world, there was nothing else that I could do for my mommy but funeralize her in the church that she loved and worshiped all of her life, even as a little girl," Day said, explaining that Houston told her that Blair "had not paid her dues, and she had not attended the church in recent years."

"For the last two years, my mother has been in either a nursing home or she's been in a hospital," she pointed out. "And the last few months, she was in a coma!"

Day said that she could not understand why Houston would force her to find another place for the burial after her mother had supported him for so many years, and her stepfather had also been buried at the church.

Nearly one in five U.S. households will celebrate Thanksgiving on food stamps this year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on participation in the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program.

Back in fiscal 2000, there were 106,061,000 households in the United States and, according to a USDA report published in November 2012, there was a monthly average of 7,335,000 households - or 6.9 percent - getting food stamps that year.

As of this August, according to the most recent data released by USDA, there were 22,729,389 households on food stamps. That equaled 19.75 percent of 115,048,000 households in the country at that time.

In each of the two previous fiscal years, the percentage of American households on food stamps in the average was near 20 percent, hitting 19.4 percent in 2012, 20.4 percent in 2013.

Greek leaders at San Diego State University have announced that they were suspending all fraternity parties and social functions indefinitely after a weekend that not only involved taunting people protesting sexual assault, but also the seventh sexual assault at a fraternity house since the semester began in September, U-T San Diego reports.

The InterFraternity Council admitted that the fraternity members who pelted participants in Friday's Take Back the Night protest against sexual assault with eggs and waved dildos at them behaved in a manner that did "not reflect the values of the Greek community at SDSU."

"I've been to about three demonstrations before," Jordan Busse, who helped organize the Take Back the Night protest, told KPBS. "This is the first time where I've actually felt scared."

She said that men at both the Sigma Phi Epsilon and Delta Sigma Phi fraternities shouted obscenities and waved dildos at the protesters, and that drivers along fraternity row threw eggs at them.

On Saturday, police responded to a sexual assault on the very same street on which the protesters had been taunted.

This confluence of events prompted Greek leaders to suspend all fraternity "social activities in order to focus on educating its members about sexual assault prevention."

Although the suspension is indefinite, critics noted that it began the week of Thanksgiving, when no fraternity events are planned because most students return home for the holiday.

However, SDSU student president and Sigma Phi Epsilon member Jonathan Cole told KPBS that "[w]hen we get back, [the length of the suspension] is one of the discussions we'll have."