law

It's a curious business when Best Buy employees ask you for your receipt as you leave the store.

But never so curious that you want to physically assault them.

However, as CBS St. Louis reports, at the Fairview Heights Best Buy in St. Louis, an altercation allegedly occurred when a 61-year-old employee asked a couple if he could inspect their receipt.

Latoya Thompson, 38, allegedly found the request somewhat offensive. The result was that she has been charged with disorderly conduct and her 39-year-old husband Hickey with felony aggravated battery, after the employee was allegedly beaten to the ground.… Read more

This morning, I saw a uniformed cop jaywalking with two lady friends who seemed not to be his next of kin. Well, this is Miami.

He hesitated for a moment and then seemed to think: "Well, why not?"

I found it charming to see an officer of the law bend the rules in such a human way.

I wonder, though, whether the fellow officers of an NYPD Internal Affairs sergeant found it equally charming when he allegedly bought an iPhone from them. For $15.

As the New York Daily News reports it, Sgt. Victor Leandry allegedly paid the $… Read more

Being unable to resist buying a lot of iPhones is uncomfortable enough. It's worse coupled with being unable to avoid being handcuffed.

This can be the only conclusion after a full and thorough police investigation into the tasering of a woman outside the Apple store in the Pheasant Lane Mall of Nashua, N.H.

Should you not have had the opportunity of enjoying this footage, I have embedded it again. It appears to show a woman on the ground being subdued and tasered by more than two police officers. They are bigger than she is.

The Union Leader of New Hampshire now reports … Read more

Do you talk to your fellow passengers on public transport or perhaps on your cell phone to your beloved?

Do you enjoy listening in to passengers' conversations? It's so much more interesting than watching them clip their toenails.

Do you even, as I do, talk to yourself on occasion, when there's nothing better to do?

How would you feel if you local police force could listen in? I merely ask this, because of the mundane fact that they might be.

It seems that video surveillance just isn't enough these days. Your local everyday busybody authorities apparently are feeling the need to listen in on buses, just in case someone is discussing yesterday's bank robbery or tomorrow's drug deal.… Read more

Some thieves like to believe they have scruples. They even talk of honor among themselves.

Some, though, see an iPhone and just can't help themselves. Earlier this year, footage emerged of a man stealing an iPhone from a baby in a store. Yet even that pales with a theft that occurred in a Staten Island apartment building lobby.

William Washington, 38, is a quadriplegic. He has cerebral palsy. The only way he communicates is through an iPhone that he keeps on the tray of his wheelchair. He uses a special pointer attached to a headband in order to tap … Read more

California's attorney general filed a lawsuit today against Delta Air Lines for failing to prominently display a privacy policy in its mobile app.

The lawsuit is the first brought under the state's 2004 Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires Web sites and apps that collect personal information from California residents to prominently post a privacy policy, as well as give users the opportunity to read the privacy policy before downloading the app.

The Atlanta-based airline was among 100 app developers and companies warned recently by Kamala Harris' office that they were in violation of California's privacy laws … Read more

European data stored in the "cloud" could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe's strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.

A research paper written by legal experts at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law and titled "Cloud Computing in Higher Education and Research Institutions and the USA Patriot Act" supports previous reports that the antiterror Patriot Act could theoretically be used by U.S. law enforcement to bypass strict European privacy laws to acquire citizen data within the European Union.

The Patriot Act, … Read more

The U.S. has teamed up with nearly 50 countries around the world in an effort to curb child sexual abuse on the Internet.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and European Union Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstrom today announced a new initiative called the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online. A host of European Union countries have joined the effort. South Korea, Vietnam, Turkey, and Nigeria are among the many non-EU countries that will participate in the alliance.

The alliance will make it easier for the participating countries to work together to identify instances of child sexual … Read more

I have never robbed a bank, but some people find it invigorating.

Different people find different ways of expressing invigoration. So it may well be that one of them -- at least in the case of 19-year-old Hannah Sabata -- involves making a YouTube video boasting about how you've just robbed a bank.

Here, you see, is just such a video. Its contents allegedly fit comfortably with the facts of a robbery at the Cornerstone Bank in Waco, Neb.

Indeed, the Associated Press reports that it was posted the very same day that Sabata was arrested on charges of … Read more