FBI agents swarmed a Fitchburg, Massachusetts woman's apartment, chainsawed a hole in her door — apparently that's how cops bust their way into homes now? — and held her and her daughter on the ground at gunpoint for 35 minutes. While the federal agents were going apeshit on apartment 2R, the actual guy they were after was sauntering out of apartment 2F.

A Cincinnati landlord named Jamie Hein posted a sign on her apartment complex's swimming pool entrance which read, "PUBLIC SWIMMING POOL: WHITE ONLY." A few days later, discrimination charges were filed with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission by Michael Gunn, an outraged tenant.

Here we see two D.C. transit police officers apprehending a wheelchair-bound man named Dwight Harris by throwing him to the ground with such force that a pool of his blood forms on the sidewalk. Why do they do this? Oh, because Harris was allegedly drinking some alcoholic devil-drink in public.

On October 20 of last year, two armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents broke into the two-bedroom Nashville apartment of Angel Enrique and Jesus Antonio, shattering a window and shouting racial slurs. Did they even have a warrant, Enrique and Antonio asked? "The warrant," one agent told them, "is coming out of my balls." So... no.

If you're trying to avoid being disenfranchised by your state's voter ID law, it's usually a good idea to avoid being a minority, a college student or poor. As it turns out you also probably shouldn't be 91-years-old and have trouble standing for a long period of time.

Last week, we showed you this heartbreaking video from the WE DO Campaign, an effort to draw attention to the battle for marriage equality in North Carolina by having gay couples request—and get denied—marriage licenses from the state.

Braidwood, Illinois calls itself a red carpet community, which suggests that visitors to the tiny town should expect to be treated like celebrities. Does not apply to brown-skinned visitors, though! In that case you might expect to be treated like a criminal, at least by some of the local cops.

One reason why some people oppose same-sex marriage is that they've never met a happy, loving gay couple or family. That's what the Campaign for Southern Equality is trying to change with the WE DO Campaign.

Just when you think that Manhattan is totally safe for gays, you hear about an awful verbal attack that you just can't believe. And in super gay Hell's Kitchen for that matter. Did the two men who were called "fags" in a CVS this morning do the right thing?

To apply for a photo ID—now required of voters under a new Tennessee law—96-year-old Dorothy Cooper gathered up a bunch of documents and took them all to her local photo ID office in Chattanooga. But a clerk said her docs didn't prove that her last name was really Cooper, and denied her application. Score one for the purity of the ballot box!

The New York Times has belatedly picked up the flag of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, with columnist Jim Dwyer arguing that the wanton pepper-spraying of a group of female demonstrators by an NYPD inspector was "like a punch in the face." It was! The only difference between the two, when you think about it, is that with the pepper-spray incident, no one got punched in the face.

Half a century ago, heroes like Martin Luther X and Rose Park risked their lives by marching on top of lunch counters so that kids of all races would one day have the right to catch a few "Z's" in class while the teacher showed a filmstrip of the "I Have a Dream" speech. And how do kids these days repay those civil rights heroes? By not knowing a damn thing about them.

During a school picnic, an assistant principal who apparently had never been to a park before spotted an empty liquor bottle lying on the ground and immediately knew, just knew, that this one eighth grader with no history of drinking whatsoever had left it there. Nobody drinks in the woods.

Gender categories on Australian passports have now been expanded to include "indeterminate," to be marked as "X," so long as a doctor's statement is provided. Looks like at least one country paid attention in Gender and Human Sexuality sophomore year!

Civil rights crusader Stetson Kennedy died this weekend at his home in Florida at the age of 94. Kennedy, a lifelong Floridian, author, and investigative journalist, infiltrated and exposed the Ku Klux Klan back when that really meant something.

The AP's Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman broke an extraordinary story today about the NYPD's unfettered and probably illegal intelligence operation—which employs "rakers" and "mosque crawlers" to troll Arab neighborhoods for information even when no crime is suspected—and its tight integration with the CIA, which has covert operatives deployed within the department. Basically, if you're a Muslim in New York, you either work for the NYPD or are being watched by them.

There's an art to shit-talking your co-workers. If you are to indulge in it, there's a certain checklist of precautions you'll need to take:

Thanks to the New York State Legislature, gay marriages are all the rage right now, but someone might want to tell the owner of Here Comes the Bride, a bridal shop in Somers Point, on the Jersey Shore (the actual shore, not the show). She just refused to sell a lesbian a wedding dress.

A federal judge has tossed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's class-action lawsuit accusing Bloomberg LLP of systematically discriminating against female employees who became pregnant.

In New Hampshire—whose culture we're suddenly learning all about, in piecemeal fashion—the parking situation outside the state's new, $3.3 million liquor store is probably causing a lot of anxiety for residents who have ever voted for Ralph Nader at some point in their lives.