WASHINGTON - August 3, 2011 - A federal judge has ruled that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld can be sued personally for damages by a former U.S. military contractor who says he was tortured during a nine-month imprisonment in Iraq.

The lawsuit lays out a dramatic tale of the disappearance of the then-civilian contractor, an Army veteran in his 50s, whose identity is being withheld from court filings for fear of retaliation.

WASHINGTON - August 2, 2011 - If you’re in a position to be tasered, you’ve typically got one not very impressive advantage: the police officer or rent-a-cop trying to send 20,000 volts through your body has to be pretty close to you. But your advantage is about to disappear in a hail of electric shock cartridges.

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania - August 1, 2011 - A picture of your face is all it takes for Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to access a wealth of personal information. He and colleagues used PittPatt facial recognition software, which was developed at CMU and recently bought by Google, to match people with their Facebook profiles and gather names, birth dates and other demographics for one in three test subjects.

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania - August 11, 2011 - Young people are putting Drano, pieces of aluminum foil and a little water in soda bottles and then capping the bottles. They leave the bottles on lawns or and in mailboxes. When you pick up the bottle, if its contents are shaken even just a little, then in about 30 seconds or less it explodes with enough force to remove some of your extremities. The liquid that comes out is boiling hot, too.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina - August 3, 2011 - Storms are brewing about 93 million miles away, and if one of them reaches Earth, it could knock out communications, scramble GPS, and leave thousands without power for weeks or even months.

The tempest is what's known as a solar storm, a flurry of charged particles that erupts from the sun. Under the right conditions, solar storms can create extra electrical currents in Earth's magnetosphere - the region around the planet controlled by our magnetic field.

WASHINGTON - July 31, 2011 - In order to shore up GOP support for a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Senate Democrats are exploring ways of giving the proposed "super Congress" even greater super powers, according to multiple news reports and congressional aides with knowledge of the plan.

Under the new proposal, if the new legislative body, made up of six Democrats and six Republicans from both chambers, doesn't come up with a bill that cuts at least $1.5 trillion by Thanksgiving, entitlement programs will automatically be slashed.

FULLERTON, Kalifornia (PNN) - July 29, 2011 - Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old homeless man with schizophrenia, kept calling for his father, as police beat and tasered him repeatedly.

But his father was not around at that moment.

It wasn't until after Thomas slipped into a coma and was hospitalized with multiple injuries that his father saw him; and by then it was too late. Thomas never recovered. The 135-pound man died five days after his run-in with Fullerton’s murderous  thug police.

July 27, 2011 - These stories circulating about culinary raves are becoming more prevalent. In fact, the New York Times did a good story back in April. Instead of the old dance-and-drug-type rave, these are raves where foodies gather to craft, sell, talk about, and share their food in underground farmer's markets, away from all of the bureaucracy and tyranny of the federal food fuzz.

Troops to deploy against teenage population.

LONDON, England - August 9, 2011 - Riots have intensified on the streets of London as police and bystanders fear for their lives as people protest in anger at their government.

Large swaths of the city have been overrun by violence as the government hides the true reasons behind the rioting.

LONDON, England - August 8, 2011 - Violence and looting raged across London and spread to three other major British cities on Tuesday, as authorities struggled to contain the country's most serious unrest since race riots set the capital ablaze in the 1980s.

In London, a third straight night of disorder saw buildings, vehicles and garbage dumps set alight, stores looted and police officers pelted with bottles and fireworks, as groups of young people rampaged through neighborhoods. It was an unwelcome reminder of London's volatility for leaders organizing the 2012 Summer Olympics in less than a year.