New military veterans are claiming disabilities at levels never before seen in the U.S., according to a three-month study by AP. Forty five percent of the 1.6 million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seek compensation for injuries they believe are service-related. Payments range from $127 a month for a 10 percent disability to $2,769 for a full one. "You just can't keep sending people into war five, six or seven times and expect that they're going to come home just fine," said Barry Jesinoski, executive director of Disabled American Veterans.
Rodney Berget is on death row in South Dakota, awaiting execution for killing a prison guard during an escape attempt. Twelve years ago his brother Roger was put to death for kidnapping and killing a man in 1987 to take his car. "To have it in different states in different crimes is some sort of commentary on the family there," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Eligible voters in Florida will be removed from the voting rolls as a result of the massive voter purge ordered by Gov. Rick Scott (R), according to the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. "It will happen," Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, said. Last year, Scott ordered Secretary of State Kurt Browning to "to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls." Browning could not get access to reliable citizenship data, so Scott urged election officials to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file.
Jensen Farms, the Colorado farm that grew cantaloupes linked to a listeria outbreak that killed more than 30 people last year, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The bacterial illness spread through 28 states last summer in the deadliest food-borne occurrence in 25 years. A Congressional committee reported that 146 people were sickened by the bacterial infection. Food and Drug Administration investigators said Jensen Farms failed to store cantaloupes properly after harvest and stopped chlorinating the water it used to wash the melons, allowing listeria bacteria to flourish.
Tropical Storm Beryl, approaching Florida's east coast Sunday evening with sustained winds of 65 miles per hour, is projected to come ashore north of St. Augustine around 15 miles north of the Drudge Retort. Heavy rain, flood and dangerous surf warnings stretch from northeast Florida to South Carolina.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed a law aimed at keeping the state's courts from basing decisions on Islamic or other foreign legal codes. There are no known cases in which a Kansas judge has based a ruling on Islamic law. Brownback's office notified the state Senate of his decision Friday, but he actually signed the measure Monday. The governor's spokeswoman, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, said the bill "makes it clear that Kansas courts will rely exclusively on the laws of our state and our nation when deciding cases and will not consider the laws of foreign jurisdictions."
In November, the FBI arrested six Estonian hackers in an online advertising scam that involved fake DNS servers. Hackers used malware to point the browser of an infected computer to their own servers instead of the desired destination. After the bust, the FBI opted to leave the servers running, ad-neutralized, to avoid disrupting Internet functionality. On July 9, the servers will be shut down. At that point, anyone still infected with the DNS malware will lose Internet access.
A Saudi woman who was being harassed by the country's religious police at a Riyadh mall for having manicured nails turned her camera on and chewed them out. "You have no right to harass anyone," the unidentified woman said in her video. "You are not the boss of me, and you can't tell me not to wear nail polish." The woman told the mutawwa that his job is to advise people, not threaten them, and that the government had promised "no more chasing." "For your information, this video is on its way to Facebook and Twitter as we speak," she said. read more
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A naked man was shot to death by a Miami police officer Saturday as he was attacking another man by eating his face. The incident, which occurred near the Miami Herald building and was captured partially by the paper's security cameras, took place near a busy road. The victim is hospitalized with critical injuries after his face was "allegedly half eaten," the Miami Herald reports. read more
Mitt Romney's campaign is going ahead with plans for a fundraiser with Donald Trump despite the real estate mogul's latest descent into birther conspiracies about President Obama. "I can't speak for Donald Trump, but I can tell you that Mitt Romney accepts that President Obama was born in the United States," said Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom. Romney's campaign is holding a "Dine with the Donald" raffle for donors.
At a Memorial Day weekend event organized by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, Vice President Biden talked about his own experiences after the death of his wife and young son in a 1972 car accident. "For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide," he said. "There will come a day, I promise you, and your parents, as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later." read more
Going against two years of Tea Party rhetoric, Mitt Romney told Time magazine in an interview that he wouldn't undertake massive spending cuts in his first year as president because that would hurt the economy. "If you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent," he said. "That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I'm not going to do that, of course." Romney said spending cuts should come after the economy has improved. "I don't want to have us go into a recession in order to balance the budget," he said.
Former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), 71, currently serving an eight-year sentence in one of the biggest bribery scandals in Congressional history, has asked a judge to restore his gun-ownership rights. Cunnigham wrote that he needs it to hunt, fish and protect himself from rabid cougars. Unfortunately for him, legislation passed during his time in Congress bans the ATF from using federal funds to investigate whether felons should get their gun rights restored. "I will live in a very remote part of Arkansas, and not much threat [sic] from people but they do have a lot of black bears, cougars, and history of rabies," he wrote.
Klaas Carel Faber, a Nazi war criminal wanted by the Netherlands after escaping from jail there in 1952, has died in Germany at age 90. Faber, a member of Hitler's SS, was sentenced to death in 1947 for the deaths of 22 Jews at the Westerbork transit camp. Germany had refused his extradition.
A Fresno, Calif., motorcycle cop lassoed a runaway bull Friday in a residential neighborhood in Fresno, Calif., The 1,500-pound bull was led into a yard by officer Tom Hardin Sr., driving his cycle and swinging a lasso. "He was in a cop uniform on a motorcycle, but he had a rope over his head like a cowboy," said resident Yesenia Ochoa. "This is not an ordinary occurrence by any stretch," Police Lt. Burke Farrah said. "We're a city of a half-million people, despite our reputation as a cow town." read more
