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"Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said he was 'thunderstruck' by images he saw of police forces responding to protests in Ferguson after the shooting of teenager Michael Brown as the midnight to 5am curfew enters its second night. Nixon, speaking to ABC News' Martha Raddatz on This Week on Sunday, said the sight of police in riot gear with armored tanks led to his decision to replace the local police force with highway patrol. The measure had a calming effect at first, but last night saw one man shot and seven arrested after resisting the curfew order. A picture has emerged...

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A news crew, clearly no threat or impediment to the cops, films from a verge in Ferguson, Missouri. A pop and a cloud of white smoke marks the arrival of a tear gas canister at their feet, and the newscrew is forced to flee.

SANTOS, Brazil, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Brazilian presidential candidate Eduardo Campos was killed in a plane crash on Wednesday, throwing the October election into disarray and causing big swings in local financial markets. Campos' private jet crashed in bad weather as it prepared to land in the coastal city of Santos, just south of Sao Paulo, killing all seven people on board, the Sao Paulo state fire department said. Television images showed smoke billowing from the crash site in a residential area. Campos, 49, was in third place in recent polls with the support of about 10 percent of voters....

Reuters) - Spanish emergency services picked up 755 immigrants traveling in dozens of small boats and makeshift rafts across the Strait of Gibraltar on Tuesday and 227 from the same stretch of water the day before, the Maritime Safety Agency said. The Mediterranean shipping lane is almost 15 km (9 miles) wide at its narrowest and is often used by migrants trying to get to Europe. More than 75,000 have tried to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa in the first half of 2014, landing in Italy, Greece, Spain and Malta, the UNHCR agency says, with about 800 people dying...

If you gon @ least loot, go to the white people neighborhood— #Struggle (@illmatic_kid) August 11, 2014 Words from mentor. If you're going to riot and loot, at least take it to the rich white folk neighborhood. 😂— Kesus ⚡ (@KesusWalks) August 11, 2014

A VIOLENT riot and looting has erupted in Missouri, after a protest over the killing of an unarmed black teenager descended into chaos. Crowds of protesters broke windows of cars and stores after a day of demonstrations over the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black teenager who was shot dead on Saturday by a police officer in the predominately black neighbourhood of Ferguson, located a few miles north of downtown St Louis, the Chicago Tribune reports. At the time he was shot and killed by police, Brown was unarmed and allegedly surrendering with his hands in the air on...

Just four months ago, a conference here on electric cars drew four times as many people as expected. District fire marshals ordered some of the crowd to leave, and the atmosphere was more like that of a rock concert than an energy conference. A brief film depicted an electric car owner driving off with a beautiful woman to the strains of "The Power of Love" while her original companion struggles to pay for gasoline. The audience cheered. One discordant note in the series of enthusiastic speeches came from Bill Reinert, one of the Toyota Prius designers. He cautioned that designing...

One of the most universal lessons of sports prediction is that margins matter. An NFL team that wins a number of games by less than a touchdown might get banner headlines for its clutch performance. But a team’s record in close games is mostly just luck. A football team that thrives on winning close games is likely to see its luck revert to the mean and start losing its fair share of them. The same is true in baseball, basketball and most other sports. (SNIP) In fact, the average share of the primary vote received by Republican incumbent senators so...

Hurricane Iselle has been downgraded to a tropical storm but still battered Hawaii with driving winds and rising surf on Friday, knocking down trees and causing power outages. It was the first of two major storms expected to hit the islands, as the more powerful Hurricane Julio gathered steam behind it. Iselle passed overnight across the Big Island, which is one of the state’s least-populated islands and is known for coffee fields, volcanoes and black sand beaches. The storm was expected to send rain and high winds to the rest of Hawaii on Friday. The storm's predicted track had it...

The Pentagon is looking at conducting emergency air drops to the estimated 15,000 stranded ethnic minority Yazidis in northern Iraq, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin, A decision is expected today. Martin says if the U.S. military makes drops, the transport planes would almost certainly be escorted by fighters. Reuters, citing Turkish officials, reported Thursday that thousands of Yazidis had fled to the Turkish border to escape the the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has advanced to northern Iraq. ISIS, which has rebranded itself as the Islamic State, issued an ultimatum to tens of thousands...

CHICAGO (CBS) — Looking over the description of Kelvyn Park, it seems to have the typical amenities that you would find from a Chicago Park District facility. It has a field house, with a fitness center, auditorium, meeting rooms … and even a small kitchen. Set out on its 8.5 acres in the 4400 block of Wrightwood in the Hermosa neighborhood, the park also has a couple of tennis courts, walking paths … baseball and soccer fields. What the park doesn’t have, at least according to the view of the person who scrawled on this park sign at the tennis...

Title: Geraldo Rivera: Scare Tactics, Public Hysteria Only Deepen Immigration Crisis President Obama is right to call the surge a humanitarian crisis, one he must bear part of the blame in creating by not understanding how his message of compassion toward earlier waves of immigrant children was being misconstrued in the civil anarchy of Central America. He should have spotted this trend a year ago and moved to counter the misinformation being spread by immigrant smugglers and local media that undocumented, unaccompanied minors would be welcome, if only they could make it across. Still, these children cannot now be deported...

photo: On The Step  Best of week's news/opinion from the new media's right wingtip at Reaganite Republican...

Britain's Sky News channel, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox company, has used the self confessed 'prejudiced' Mira Bar-Hillel as a talking head and authority on the subject of anti-Semitism. Bar-Hillel, who is known for her irrational loathing of the State of Israel, was featured on Sky News as a panellist discussing the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK. The author and commentator has form on the subject, and once wrote (emphasis added): "The Jews of today scare me and I find it almost impossible to talk to most of them, including relatives. Any criticism of the...

Best of new-media reporting/opinion from the right side of the spectrum this week,  links at Reaganite Republican...

The world is transfixed by the conflict in Gaza, as the death tolls of both Palestinians and Israelis killed in the fighting continue to rise. It has animated global public opinion and sparked protests in myriad far-flung cities. But ...a deadlier war next door rolls on. The Syrian civil war has claimed 170,000 lives in three years; this past weekend's death toll in Syria was greater than what took place in Gaza. By some accounts, the past week may have been the deadliest in the conflict's grim history. Meanwhile, insurgents known as ISIS, have continued their ravages over a swath...

In scandal after scandal in the Obama administration, President Obama has said he didn’t know about the problems until he heard it on the news. But the president changed his tune about his supposed ignorance at a Democratic fundraiser near Seattle on Tuesday night. Mr. Obama told supporters that he doesn’t watch the news because, “Whatever they’re reporting about, usually I know.” That contrasts with the explanations that the president and his aides have given from scandals in the past few years ranging from long wait times and deaths at the VA, to the IRS targeting tea party groups, to...

In scandal after scandal in the Obama administration, President Obama has said he didn’t know about the problems until he heard it on the news. But the president changed his tune about his supposed ignorance at a Democratic fundraiser near Seattle on Tuesday night. Mr. Obama told supporters that he doesn’t watch the news because, “Whatever they’re reporting about, usually I know.” That contrasts with the explanations that the president and his aides have given from scandals in the past few years ranging from long wait times and deaths at the VA, to the IRS targeting tea party groups, to...

The issue of illegal immigration continues to cover national headlines. After reading articles and talking with friends and coworkers, it’s easy to hear a lot of terms trying to personify an international issue. You have probably heard the words “immigrant,” “migrant,” “alien” or maybe even “refugee” to describe people who come into the U.S. illegally. We wanted to look at what these terms specifically mean. Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word ‘immigrant‘ as “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.” The word ‘migrant‘ means “a person who goes from one place to another especially to find...