A second grade student apparently brought a gun to an elementary school in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York City.

Via:

Police are investigating after a loaded handgun was found in a 7-year-old boy's book bag at a school in Far Rockaway, a law enforcement official tells NBC 4 New York.

The boy's mom brought him to P.S. 215 Thursday morning, and came back to the school a short time later, claiming she needed to take him to a doctor appointment.

When she got back to the school, the loaded .22-caliber handgun was found and police were called. The school was then locked down for about 45 minutes.

It's not clear exactly how the gun was discovered.

Police are now questioning the mother and the brother of the boy, the law enforcement official said.

Thank goodness that the gun didn't discharge and hit someone. This time.

August 1, 2012, Seattle: A short video covering the latest student debt protest organized weekly by #MicCheckWallStreet.

Via: We Are The 99 Percent:

I’m on an internship for school. I’m not getting paid for it. I’m in a strange city. I don’t know anyone here. I have applied at almost every fast-food restaurant, retail store, gas station, and whatever else I can think of, but have heard nothing back. My bank account is almost completely empty. I’m writing this on the laptop I can’t sell because I need it for school, and while I write, I eat the last of my groceries. My car is almost out of gas. I don’t even have enough money to pay rent on the first of the month. I don’t have a lot of personal possessions that I can sell, and the ones that I can, I probably won’t get much for. I don’t have health insurance, and I dread getting sick or having an accident that leaves me in the hospital. If I give up now and go home, I won’t graduate. I’m already several thousand dollars in student loan debt, I hope to at least have something to show for it. But how long can I last at my internship when I have to choose between putting gas in my car and doing laundry? My life is a ticking time-bomb, and the last few seconds are counting down before my eyes.

I am the 99 percent. And I am out of ideas.

Brought to you by hip-hop superproducer Pharrell Williams, i am OTHER is a new channel and cultural movement dedicated to Thinkers, Innovators and Outcasts. Programs explore the pursuit of individuality, the defiance of expectations and the arrival of a new class of visionaries.

In this short film, "Voice of Art - The Tax Dodgers Part I," Gan Golan, street theater artist and co-author of best-sellers "Goodnight Bush" and "The Adventures of Unemployed Man," leads a mock baseball team called "The Tax Dodgers." Golan's guerrilla art tactics developed through his student-activist years at MIT, battling the World Trade Organization in Cancun, Mexico, and eventually taking on powerful corporations alongside Occupy Wall Street.

A UC Davis football player who was shot in the eye by a projectile fired by campus police trying to break up a party on a city street can sue the university, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in a decision critical of the use of force against "non-threatening individuals." The ruling may be a setback for other police fighting lawsuits by Occupy protesters.

Via:

Wednesday's ruling stemmed from an April 2004 incident in which UC Davis and city police tried to disperse a crowd at a party by shooting pepper balls, which break on impact and spray a powder akin to mace or pepper spray.

About 1,000 people were at a Davis apartment complex to celebrate UC Davis' annual Picnic Day. The police wanted to break up the party because the street was congested, partygoers had parked illegally and some minors were drinking alcohol, the court said. Police in riot gear entered the complex, and an officer fired a pepper ball into an area where UC Davis student Timothy Nelson was standing with friends.

The pepper ball hit the sophomore in the eye and caused permanent damage, eventually leading Nelson to lose a football scholarship and drop out of the university, the court said.

Writing for the court, Judge Stephen Reinhardt said police used excessive force. "A reasonable officer would have known that firing projectiles, including pepper balls, in the direction of individuals suspected of, at most, minor crimes, who posed no threat to the officers or others, and who engaged in only passive resistance, was unreasonable," he wrote.

John Whitesides, a lawyer for the city of Davis, whose police were also sued in the case, defended the officers' actions and said that they might seek a larger panel of the 9th Circuit court to reconsider the case.

"I know I’m just a kid, but I have no future, and it freaks me out. I’m sorry if it looks like I’m just spoiled and petulant."

[Via WeAreThe99Percent]

Marina Keegan, an Occupy activist and recent Yale graduate, died in a car accident on May 26. Around campus and in the pages of the New York Times she took on Wall Street campus recruiting practices as part of an action known as Occupy Morgan Stanley. “I’m just not convinced that the most productive use of 25 percent of my graduating class’s time is to spend two or three years pushing figures around spreadsheets to make more money for those with the most money,” she wrote in November.

Condolences to all her family, friends, and fellow Occupiers.

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Hundreds have been arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests, but photographer Alexander Arbuckle's case was the first to go to trial, and was acquitted after video footage of the incident showed that he didn't break any law. The best part? Arbuckle was there to document the NYPD's side of the story, hoping to defend police working at Occupy protests with his NYU photojournalism project when he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for allegedly blocking the street. "I felt the police had been treated unfairly on the media," he told the Village Voice. "All the focus was on the conflict and the worst instances of brutality and aggression, where most of the police I met down there were really professional and restrained."

During the January 1st Occupy Wall Street march, journalist Tim Pool was there livestreaming the event, and in his video footage, later used as evidence along with the NYPD's own video footage, protesters are clearly seen using the sidewalk like they were asked to, with only the swarm of officers blocking traffic. In Pool's video, above, the relevant portion begins at the 31:50 mark, with the arrest action taking place around minute 35.

"What's happening is very similar to what happened in 2004 with the Republican National Convention," Arbuckle's lawyer told the Voice. "It's just a symptom of how the NYPD treats dissent. But what has changed is that there is more prevalence of video. It really makes our job a lot easier to have that video."