I am an Officer, be prepared to get killed

1) North Charleston 

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A white South Carolina police officer has been charged with murder after a black man who appeared to be fleeing from him was shot dead. State investigators arrested North Charleston police officer Michael Slager on Tuesday after viewing a video of the shooting. Authorities say the victim, Walter Lamer Scott, was shot after the officer already targeted him with a stun gun.

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A video of the incident published by the New York Times shows a brief scuffle before Scott begins running away. The video then shows the officer firing several shots at Scott, who falls to the ground.

The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston reported that Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearing. Scott's brother, Anthony, told the Post and Courier that he believed his brother fled from Mr Slager because he owed child support. Victim's brother Anthony Scott: "If there wasn't a video would we know the truth? We do know the truth now." 

Free speech

1) University of Michigan screening American Sniper 

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The University of Michigan’s Center for Campus Involvement canceled a planned showing of the movie American Sniper after student complaints about how the film depicts Middle Eastern people, The Michigan Daily, reports. A petition started by a student, Lamees Mekkaoui, garnered the signatures of roughly 200 other students and resulted in this Friday’s cancellation. 

“Although we respect the right to freedom of speech, we believe that with this right comes responsibility: responsibility of action, intention, and outcome,” the letter reads, in part. “The movie American Sniper not only tolerates but promotes anti-Muslim … rhetoric and sympathizes with a mass killer.”

Affirmative action

1) Admitted while black

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Kaling's brother, Vijay Chokal-Ingam, who is an American-Indian man, pretended to be a black man to facilitate getting accepted into med school 15 years ago. ... On his blog, Chokal-Ingam, 38, says that his modest 3.1 GPA didn't seem like it would cut it to get him accepted into a top tier medical school, so he adopted his middle name — Jojo — and gave himself a mini-makeover. "So, I shaved my head, trimmed my long Indian eyelashes, and applied to medical school as a black man," he writes. "My change in appearance was so startling that my own fraternity brothers didn't recognize me at first." 

Chokal-Ingam was accepted into some top medical schools, and he even enrolled in St. Louis University, before ultimately dropping out after two years. "Lucky for you, I never became a doctor," he wrote on his website. He did, however, earn his MBA at UCLA. Perhaps his conscience caught up to him, as he was accepted as an Indian man there. 

On his Facebook page, Vijay has been posting about how his scam awoke him to the realities of affirmative action and racism, calling it a "stomach churning eye opener." But he seems set on letting people know that he did not do anything bad. "For the record, I never lied about anything in my application to medical school except my race," he writes. 

My own rules

1) Cricket association 

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South East defeated USA Development XI in the final of the 2014 USACA T20 Championship by four runs in controversial circumstances after being awarded five penalty runs. According to the live update feed on USACA's official Facebook page, USA Development XI won the game taking the winning single off the final delivery of the match, but about 40 minutes later it replaced that announcement with: "UPDATE: The USA Development team was penalized 5 runs for a batsman obstructing the fielder. The 2015 USACA National T20 Champion is the South East Region!"   

At around 6 am on Monday, about 11 hours after the final ended, USACA's Facebook page was edited to delete the reference to "obstructing the fielder", and was replaced with an explanation that the penalty runs were awarded for "a running-on-the-pitch infraction". 

... This is not the first instance in which South East has won a USACA tournament match in strange circumstances due to being awarded penalty runs. At the 2009 USACA Eastern Conference tournament in Washington, DC, South East needed 200 to beat a USACA Directors XI team, and lost their last recognised batsman for 50, at the team score of 198 for 8. A few moments later, all players began walking off the field, and it was later announced that South East had been awarded five penalty runs by the umpires after one of them claimed that the USACA Directors XI wicketkeeper Carl Monroe "used obscene language". Monroe's coach claimed Monroe was cursing himself for a missed stumping earlier against the same batsman.

2) In my flight, my rules even if you have the ticket

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All Elizabeth Sedway wanted was to leave paradise and head home. But she couldn't. Why? Because, according to her, she has cancer. 

That's what she said in a video posted to Facebook that shows her group packing up from their Alaska Airlines plane as it sat at the gate in Hawaii. 

"Your taking me off the airplane because I don't have a doctor's note saying I can fly," a woman is heard saying. "All these people are waiting, and I'm being removed as if I'm a criminal or contagious, because I have cancer and no note to fly." 

Ft. Penitentiary

1) Girls in prison 

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The photos show girls wasting the day in their bunks, staring at the wall. Some struggle with mental illness. The girls obscure their faces or are turned away from the camera. That works to protect their identities, but it also evokes shame. Ross seems to be saying the shame isn't the girls' -- it's ours as a society for jailing children.  

Ross recalled one particularly agonizing interview with a girl who kept telling him, "I can't wait to get out of here so I can kill myself." "She was just a kid, but she was at that place where you have no hope," he said. "I feel all these stories, but that one just hit me hard. I was sobbing. You want to say, 'It will get better,' but you also know the system and you know that you can't say that." 

But times were different then, he said, and there's been a cultural turn in America toward criminalizing a child's bad behavior. He recalls a detention-center director in Reno, Nevada, who asked him to visit and take photos. At intake, he photographed a fifth-grader who had been taken to jail because he had acted up in class.

The American war on wars

1) Fallujah, Iraq

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Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study. Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents. 

In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties. "During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over 40 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city," recalled Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British commander serving with the American forces in Baghdad. He added that the US commander who ordered this devastating use of firepower did not consider it significant enough to mention it in his daily report to the US general in command. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside." 

The study, entitled "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009", is by Dr Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, and concludes that anecdotal evidence of a sharp rise in cancer and congenital birth defects is correct. Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait. The report says that the types of cancer are "similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout". 

Of particular significance was the finding that the sex ratio between newborn boys and girls had changed. In a normal population this is 1,050 boys born to 1,000 girls, but for those born from 2005 there was an 18 per cent drop in male births, so the ratio was 850 males to 1,000 females. The sex-ratio is an indicator of genetic damage that affects boys more than girls. A similar change in the sex-ratio was discovered after Hiroshima. 

John Racist

1) Hidden racism

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America may be growing less hateful. That's according to an annual Southern Poverty Law Center report that says the number of hate groups in the United States remains on the decline for the second year in a row. In the "Intelligence Report" released Tuesday, the SPLC says the number of hate groups operating in the U.S. declined 17% between 2013 and 2014. They are now at their lowest levels since 2005, the watchdog organization said.

One of the oldest and most infamous hate groups in the United States, the KKK took its foothold after the Civil War, terrorizing the African-American population with intimidation and violent actions, including lynching. The Klan's growth slowed after the establishment of Jim Crow laws in the American South, according to the SPLC. The KKK's last resurgence came during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The group was again responsible for large-scale terror against the South's African-American population. In 1990, the SPLC started to keep track of the number of KKK chapters, which reached a high of 221 in 2010, in response to President Barack Obama's election, according to the report. Since then, the numbers have been on the decline. The SPLC now reports 72 chapters, down from 163 a year ago.

The reason for the decline of the Ku Klux Klan is not totally clear, though the report even suggests the groups may be going deeper underground. "It appears that most of the groups simply faded as their leaders and members got older, but it is also very possible that many simply stopped announcing where their chapters were," the report said. The center estimates that between 5,000 and 8,000 people are Klan members in the United States. The SPLC report also notes that more people may be operating as so-called lone wolves. Lone wolves are a concern, the report said, because 90% of all domestic terror attacks since 2009 were carried out by individuals or pairs.

The overall number of hate groups peaked in 2011 and has been on the decline since. However, the number of registered users to Stormfront -- a website claiming to be "the voice of the new, embattled White minority!" -- has doubled since 2008. It now has nearly 300,000 users. 

The SPLC refers to this and other indicators to say that many individuals may be moving from organized groups to the Internet, to become more anonymous. Looking towards next year, SPLC is "expecting a real wave of Islamophobia" because of the proliferation of ISIS and the heavy media coverage of the extremist group, Potok told reporters. 

2)  Burn the Quran pastor 

Linky 

With pressure building on potential nominees for the 2016 U.S. presidential election to declare their candidacy, a surprise entrant who added colour to the race this week was controversial Florida pastor Terry Jones.

Jones who is avowedly “anti-Obama,” and described as a “fringe front-runner” in the race, made headlines in 2010 when he declared his intention to burn the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, causing deep consternation in the U.S. administration, which feared a violent backlash.

When Jones announced his plans to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day,” he faced major pressure from world leaders and U.S. President Barack Obama to call off the event.