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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - The mother of a man gunned down Friday night during a botched robbery in a Birmingham park said she's thankful to have had her only child for as long as she did, and knows he is now in a better place. "He made me happy,'' 88-year-old Cellie Watson told Al.com today. "I was hurt when I found out, but the Lord knows best." McDaniel "Mac" Watson Jr., 50, was walking with his wife of 13 years in George Ward Park off Green Springs Highway about 10 p.m. Friday when a man approached the couple and demanded Watson's...

PRINCE GEORGE COUNTY, Va. — A 51-year-old bicyclist remains in intensive care at VCU Medical Center after he was targeted in what a witness called a “knockout game-style” attack. The man was riding his bicycle on River Road near the Prince George County-Hopewell line at about 7:30 Sunday morning when a car came up from behind and slowed down, the bicyclist’s friend said. The friend, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said someone in the car reached out and hit the bicyclist in the back with either his hand or an object. The bicyclist had time to...

FERGUSON, Mo. — Dorian Johnson had just moved from his mother’s house in St. Louis to a two-bedroom spot in the Canfield Green Apartments that he was sharing with his then-pregnant girlfriend and another roommate. Sometime in March, a buddy stopped by with a stranger. “Wow,” Johnson said, “that’s a big dude.” The dude, Michael Brown, was 6-foot-4, and he had brushed past Johnson with barely a hello as he headed to the video-game console and began to play. “I asked, ‘Why he don’t speak?’ ” Johnson recalled in a 90-minute interview with The Washington Post last week — his first...

Rapper Nipsey Hussle has been arrested for interfering in the arrest of a man authorities were after for violating his probation. The incident occurred on the night of Friday, August 29th. Police responded to a report that a man had violated his probation and was currently located in a clothing store in downtown Los Angeles. Upon searching the store for the alleged parole violator, they came across Hussle, who committed an undisclosed action that authorities viewed as obstructing an officer which subsequently resulted in his arrest. He was released shortly after his arrest after posting bail in the amount...

On June 24, 2012, the body of Shane Todd, a young US electrical engineer, was found hanging in his Singapore apartment. The Singapore Police say it was suicide, but the Todd family believes he was murdered. -excerpt- ... Shane told his family that he was being asked to compromise US security and he feared for his life. Shane refused to do what he was being asked to do and turned in his sixty day notice at IME. Shane found a good job with a company in Virginia, and bought a ticket to fly back to the US on July 1,...

MANY white Americans say they are fed up with the coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. A plurality of whites in a recent Pew survey said that the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News reflected that weariness, saying: “All you hear is grievance, grievance, grievance, money, money, money.” Indeed, a 2011 study by scholars at Harvard and Tufts found that whites, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black racism. Yes, you read that right! So let me push back at what I...

I have sometimes imagined that because of my time in prison I can understand what it is like to be black in the United States. I lived for nearly 25 years under conditions of control, viewed with suspicion and presumed dangerous. The law enforcement that ran the prisons were taught to view prisoners as an enemy, and that things could go wrong at any moment and they often responded with preemptive or excessive force. It was also a world full of black prisoners, who far outnumbered the other races, so I lived as a minority and sometimes suffered because...

A conservative blogger who claims he was told by law enforcement that Michael Brown had a juvenile arrest history has filed a lawsuit seeking to obtain the alleged records. Brown was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9 in an incident that sparked weeks of civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Though it’s been confirmed that the black 18-year-old was unarmed, many questions surrounding the shooting remain unanswered. Charles C. Johnson, a blogger and journalist who recently launched a website called GotNews.com, filed a lawsuit last week seeking Brown’s records from the office of Paul Fox, director of...

BREAKING: Mike Brown Allegedly Involved in Second Degree Murder Case as Minor By Reagan Wilson on August 29, 2014 Charles C Johnson, a freelance journalist who has been covering the Mississippi Senator race better than anyone in the mainstream media, Daily Caller contributor, TheBlaze contributor, National Review contributor, author of “Why Coolidge Matters”, and the guy who did the research to debunk Everytown for Gun Safety’s school shooting map, seems to have information that Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri earlier this month, may have been involved in a murder case as a...

Gangster, arson-murderer hanged Crime Aug. 29, 2014 - 03:00PM JST ( 16 ) AFP TOKYO — Japan executed a mobster and a killer arsonist on Friday, bringing to 11 the total number of death sentences carried out since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took power in 2012. The executions came days before Abe is expected to reshuffle his cabinet amid speculation that he will appoint a new justice minister, whose approval is needed for any sentence to be carried out. “I ordered the executions after careful consideration,” Justice Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki told reporters

Amidst all the hell breaking loose in Ferguson, here is one more old scab to pick at – immigrant-black tensions in small towns and inner cities. It is a troubling image. The hazy security camera screen captures from the convenience store reinforced those fears. The store clerk was slightly built. Michael Brown, the customer holding him by the collar was a much larger man. Though the storeowner, Andy Patel, later told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch no shoplifting or robbery had occurred in his store, the screen-grab encapsulated a story of suspicion, tension, and conflict. Soon thereafter Michael Brown was gunned...

Three of the 40 members of the California State Senate have been arrested this year, more than double the statewide arrest rate and higher than the rate in any of California's 25 largest cities. State Senator Ron Calderon was arrested in February for allegedly taking bribes. State Senator Leland Yee was arrested in March for allegedly trafficking in firearms and taking bribes. State Senator Ben Hueso was arrested Friday on suspicion of drunk driving charges. A fourth senator, Roderick Wright, was convicted of perjury and voter fraud charges in January but was arrested prior to this year. [SNIP]

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's sister has been arrested for allegedly threatening to bomb a New York City woman. Police say Ailina Tsarnaeva, 24, made the threat via telephone Monday and turned herself in earlier today. She is charged with aggravated harassment targeting a woman from Harlem. Police say the North Bergen, New Jersey, resident is due in court September 30.

Lois Lerner’s Blackberry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration. Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the Blackberry was "removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012." That date - June 2012 - is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about...

<p>These truths will reshape how you think about the Michael Brown shooting.</p> <p>I admit that in a cropped photo it’s hard to distinguish the Gaza Strip from Ferguson, Mo. But the violence that occurred in the St. Louis suburb this month following the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer isn’t the authoritarian injustice that it has been portrayed to be. It may be hard to hear, but we live quite safely in the United States thanks in large part to our law enforcement system. We experience civil unrest and cruel conflict vicariously, not personally. And our exposure to deadly violence largely comes from the news and entertainment world.</p>

MATT FLEGENHEIMER and J. DAVID GOODMANAUGAugust 26, 2014 A union of New York City police sergeants warned the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday against holding its 2016 convention in Brooklyn, issuing an open letter that doubled as a broadside against a mayoral administration with which some officers have grown increasingly frustrated. In the letter, addressed to the group Mayor Bill de Blasio wooed during its visit to New York two weeks ago, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Edward D. Mullins, said the city was going “backward to the bad old days of high crime, danger-infested public spaces and...

On Monday, Aug. 11, a 20-year-old unarmed white man named Dillon Taylor was shot and killed in Salt Lake City, Utah, by a black police officer in questionable circumstances. Taylor, a first-time father with a criminal record, had at the time of the shooting an outstanding arrest warrant for probation violations on robbery and obstruction of justice charges. Police had been called to a convenience store after someone reported seeing a gun. Taylor’s friends said he was turning his life around, that he had never carried a gun, that he was listening to music on headphones and was shot outside...

After Monday’s bombshell about the federal government’s system-wide email back-up system broke, there was yet another bombshell. The IRS “recycled” — destroyed — Lois Lerner’s hard drive in June 2011, just 10 days after Rep. Dave Camp had sent a letter to the IRS inquiring about the targeting of conservative groups that Lerner knew about and may have orchestrated. The IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry device, too. Even though there is no suggestion that it ever “crashed,” as the agency claims about her hard drive. Even worse, the IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry after it knew of the crash, and while the...

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. - Police filled a downtown Grand Junction neighborhood Monday afternoon after an officer-involved shooting occurred. "A ton of sirens came flying down our streets, about multiple police were down each street," eyewitness Ben Arellano said. Arellano witnessed the whole incident from his house saying he heard allegedly 12 gunshots near 17th and Grand Avenue. "Almost all of Grand Junction police, I felt like, was here at this house, guns drawn. Sadly, someone was on the ground," Arellano said. According to the Grand Junction Police Department, authorities were called to remove a person outside a home. They contacted...

Sheriff Joe Arpaio sent out this bitter attack on Barack Obama this morning. Arpaio accuses Barack Obama of leading an attack on the United States. The popular sheriff says President Obama is “rewarding criminals.” Our country is under attack. And Barack Obama is the aggressor. That’s right. Our own President has overseen the release of thousands of illegal immigrants…hundreds of whom are convicted criminals – even felons, which are flooding into America. Every day you read the newspaper or turn on the news, there is something tragic happening, something Obama says is beyond our control. But I must tell you:...