law

It's a natural instinct to resist if someone tries to steal something out of your hand.

In Las Vegas on Thursday afternoon, that instinct might have cost a 15-year-old boy his life.

As the Las Vegas Sun reports, Marcos Vincente Arenas was walking down the street, holding an iPad. … Read more

Thin is the line between the brave and the foolhardy.

Thinner is the brain that thinks it's brave to taunt the police on Facebook.

Perhaps it comes from watching too many movies or too few, but those who are wanted by the police sometimes turn to Facebook to offer a "na, na, na-na, na."

A couple of years ago, a man in Utica, N.Y., allegedly tried to dare the police to catch him, with troubling results (for him).

The world learns as slowly as it turns. For today I have news that an English teen, wanted … Read more

I think of it less as a cell phone than as a self-phone.

So in a land so fond of the individual's primacy over the group, it's inevitable that having a gadget that contains the whole of your life is more mesmerizing than, well, anyone else or anything else.

The proof of this in public places is constant. And yet some choose to fight back.

In the very latest incident of someone using a cell phone when they should have been watching a cultural performance, Kevin Williamson decided he'd do something about it.… Read more

It's more enjoyable when sense doesn't prevail.

It allows for so much more humor and head-shaking.

However, Kiera Wilmot has probably shaken her head enough lately and will now be grateful for a little stillness.

Should you have been unaccountably arrested for expectorating in your high school cafeteria recently, you might not have heard about Wilmot.

One morning at Bartow High School in Florida, she put toilet cleaner and aluminum foil in a water bottle to see what might happen. It was just, she said, an experiment.

Even her school principal admitted that it merely sounded like a … Read more

Cell phones seem to be causing the police increasing unease.

It's quite easy for ordinary people to film officers in the line of duty, and sometimes that duty can seem to be excessively dutiful.

This seems to be the view of Maria Melendez, who says she used her phone to film a case of what appeared to be fatal police brutality, only to have it confiscated without a warrant. Worse, reports are now emerging that some of the footage may have been deleted by the police.

As The New York Times reports, Melendez was leaving the Kern Medical Center … Read more

Our lives tend to be defined by the decisions we make. And the ones we don't.

Please place yourself, therefore, into the hands and mind of someone whose 14-year-old son has just been shot. He has been shot by a friend playing with a gun.

What might be your first decision?

I fancy that, for many, the choice might be to take the boy to the nearest hospital. However, this was not the decision allegedly taken by Deborah Tagle of Santa Fe, Texas.

As KHOU-TV reports, she allegedly felt the most appropriate course of action was to go to … Read more

Those who steal your identity digitally are not nice people.

On the other hand, they are still people. Which often means that -- somewhere -- they have online enthusiasms which still take them over and reveal their own identities to the outside world.

IRS investigators say that a predilection for food porn created a digital footprint for a suspect whom they were trying to trace.

As Florida's Sun-Sentinel reports, the investigators were in pursuit of a man who was said to have 700,000 stolen IDs available for sale.

It seems that he was quite good at keeping his … Read more

I am not sure how much intelligence it takes to pin a "Kick Me" sign on someone's back, but one imagines it doesn't befit Intel.

Perhaps that's why an employee of the company's New Mexico plant is suing in federal court, after someone allegedly pinned such a sign to his back and then more than one person actually kicked him.

The Associated Press reports that Harvey Palacio went to a senior member of staff named Randy Lehman to ask whether there was a sign on his back.

He claims in a lawsuit that Lehman … Read more

We believe in love around here. Equally, we believe that sometimes it goes wrong, through no fault of at least one of the parties concerned.

There is a certain downcast tinge, therefore, on hearing the story of Lee David Clayworth and the woman he left behind -- who didn't want to be left behind.

Clayworth is a Vancouver teacher. Or at least he'd like to be. But, he says, a relationship he had while in Malaysia in 2010 prevents him from even getting a job. His online footprint, you see, reveals all sorts of potentially off-putting (and untrue) … Read more