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BERKELEY, CA (KGO) -- The final showdown is unfolding at UC Berkeley. As campus police move in on the tree sitters occupying the last of the remaining trees. There have been many violent confrontations between police and protestors. Objects thrown, weapons drawn, people arrested - it's all going down right now at UC Berkeley. Campus police in a cherry-picker are actively trying to get the tree sitters down from their perch in a redwood tree. A dramatic ending to the nearly two-year protest over the removal of trees to build a new university sports complex.

ST PETERSBURG, Florida (AP) -- A woman and her roommate were charged with starving the woman's 9-year-old daughter, who weighed just 42 pounds when she was found, authorities said. The child also was locked up all day and was forced to wear a filthy diaper, police said. Melissa Samoraj, 27, and Raymond LaFountain, 31, were arrested Wednesday and charged with aggravated child abuse.

Racism: The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society. Individual Racism: The beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that support or perpetuate racism. Individual racism can occur at both an unconscious and conscious level, and can be both active and passive. Examples include telling a racist joke,...

Lorain school officials this week executed an ''emergency removal'' of an 8-year-old boy who they say sexually harassed a girl in gym class. The boy's mother, Tammy Barth, said yesterday her son was playing in gym on Tuesday when a girl student said he and two other boys may have grabbed her buttocks. He was then questioned in an informal hearing by school officials and he admitted he had been passing love notes to the same girl. The second-grader then asked to sign a notice of emergency removal form for sexual harassment without a parent present, Barth said. The boy...

Buffalo emergency crews have become very familiar with one particular home on the West Side. So far this year, they have received almost 1,000 emergency calls from the same home on 15th Street, seeking help for everything from shootings to fires to severely injured children. The calls have one thing in common. They're fake. Sometimes a dozen or more police officers, firefighters and emergency medical technicians have rushed to the location. The situation has upset Buffalo Police and Fire Department officials, who hope the courts will take a hard line with two adults arrested in the incidents. Juan Merced and...

A TEENAGER kidnapped by a gang of six was told she was going to die as they raped and tortured her before stabbing her death, a court heard yesterday. Terrified Mary-Ann Leneghan, 16, and a friend were also allegedly forced to smoke heroin and crack cocaine by the mob hell-bent on revenge over an earlier robbery. The pair were then driven to a park where a pillowcase was stuffed over Mary-Ann's face and she was knifed repeatedly, jurors were told. Her friend was shot in the head but miraculously survived. Opening the case against the six men accused of murder,...

A legless teen in Ohio who was told he cannot play during a game in Cincinnati because of a rule requiring players to wear shoes and knee pads will be allowed to play in future games, according to a Local 6 News report.Bobby Martin was told at halftime of a recent game at Mount Healthy High School in Cincinnati that he could not finish the game because of the shoes and knee pads rule. Martin said the decision made him feel disabled for the first time."That's the first time in 17 years," Martin said. "That's a landmark.""Bobby was in tears...

SEATTLE - One man's unconventional way of curbing car theft in his Queen Anne neighborhood is winning him a lot of applause. Ken Cavallon literally caught one of the suspected prowlers in the act, and has the photo to prove it. It all started early Tuesday morning when Ken's wife noticed three people outside their home trying to break into her husband's truck. She went back inside to tell him about what she saw and Ken said he didn't hesitate. "I realized, enough is enough, so I came flying up the hill." The youth football coach immediately ran toward the...

ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"    As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.     Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers. Instead, they...

In the state of Washington, you can eat as much roasted duck as you please.You can shoot the occasional duck, provided you follow certain rules.But you can't possess a wild duck; a fact that Diane Erdmann didn't fully grasp until two state Fish and Wildlife officers showed up at her Auburn workplace Friday demanding her pet duck Gooey.What ensued that afternoon was a bizarre altercation, the seizure of Gooey the duck and two separate criminal investigations. Fish and Wildlife is looking into Erdmann for unlawful possession of wildlife, and the Auburn Police Department is investigating the officers, one of whom...

Scroll down to the picture of the girl with "W" hair. Right click on her picture. Look at the file name.

LAS VEGAS -- Roy Horn has never spoken publicly about being mauled nearly fatally by a 380-pound white tiger named Montecore. So when NBC airs the special "Siegfried & Roy: The Miracle" at 8 p.m. Wednesday (WTHR, ), viewers will hear Horn for the first time and see his battle to regain his motor skills after the attack and subsequent stroke left him in a wheelchair.

A Southwest Airlines flight bound for Tulsa was detoured to Dallas Sunday night to deal with an out of control passenger. One of the passengers who stepped in to get the out of control flyer under control again is 18-year-old Bryan Golemon of Cushing. Bryan is a high school wrestler and used his wrestling skills to help the flight crew and other passengers. "The stewardess, she was standing right next to me and I said I'm a wrestler and if you want I can have him down in about ten seconds, she said OK." They got the restraints on...

Some Perry Hall High School seniors may still be grappling with the decision of whether to return their yearbook at Friday's graduation. If they don't turn in their yearbooks by then, they might not be allowed to participate in the ceremony. A racial slur was found next to a student's name in the book earlier this week. School officials say a boy apparently typed the slur next to his bi-racial friend's name as a prank. Both boys were present when it happened. They told school officials they use the slur commonly between themselves and with another friend who is black....

GRANDVIEW, Mo. -- Imagine cops throwing you out of your own child's graduation just for expressing your joy.It happened Monday night to several families at a local ceremony, and it was all caught on tape.KCTV5's Liana Joyce reported live on "KCTV5 News at 6 p.m." that there was a dress code and a behavior code that was strictly followed at the Grandview High School graduation. One family who got kicked out for cheering their son's accomplishments said it was being taken too far.It all began when 18-year-old Brandon Sample's family clapped and whistled as the Grandview grad walked across the...

The school-sponsored event asked students to pay 50-cents to pie their favorite or least favorite teacher or principal in the face! A student's parents are outraged now that administrators have suspended him from Ottawa County's Danbury high school. It's all over a fundraiser held during school hours. What's puzzling is school administrators encouraged the students to participate in the pie-in-the-face contest. The targets were the teachers and the principal. Now one student's education is on the line. Tina and Don Molnar say a pie-in-the-face contest held by Danbury high school got their son expelled for 80 days. The school posted...

Theunissen - Cut off from the rest of the world, with only veld and animals for company, a husband and wife and their four children have spent the past 20 years all alone on a remote Free State farm. The four children - aged 26, 22, 18 and 14 - have never had contact with the outside world and their behaviour is so animalistic they can't even communicate in an understandable language. One of them walks on all fours, almost like a monkey. An assortment of healthcare experts have been ordered by the Free State department of health to assess...

As director of such dark films as "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive" and the television series "Twin Peaks," David Lynch seems an unlikely leader for a world peace campaign based on mass meditation.But for Lynch, life is bliss, and he says he wants to spread it around.So he has joined a Washington real estate developer and a former magazine executive to try to raise $1 billion to bankroll a foundation meant to supply instructors in Transcendental Meditation to ease the planet's stress."There's a ton of skeptics out there," Lynch said in a Reuters interview on Tuesday, acknowledging a certain giggle...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A 16-year-old boy is recovering after being impaled with a tire iron. Columbus police said a threatening dog's owner on Midland Avenue refused to take the animal inside when asked by a mailman. Police said that was when the homeowner's son attacked the mail carrier. The mailman sprayed the teen with Mace. Police said the boy's uncle, George Crankshaw (pictured, left), then took a tire iron out of a car and threw it at the postal employee. Crankshaw hit his own nephew instead, puncturing the teen's lung. "What I think is they should have let that mailman...