Ted Cruz is back in the horse race, and this time it’s even more torturous than the last.

Here are two stories from today's New York Times about law-enforcement priorities and matters of public outrage in New York City. The first is a front-page news story, describing the prosecution of a 22-year-man in Brooklyn who violently kicked a cat and posted a video of the kicking to Facebook:

Japan executes its death row inmates only hours after the prisoner has been informed that they are about to be hanged, Danielle Wiener-Bronner over at The Atlantic writes.

A Vermont man has been charged with child cruelty after he made his injured four-year-old and nine-year-old sons walk more than a mile down a snow-covered road instead of getting help after his SUV crashed into a utility pole.

Children love to tear bugs limb from limb. Eventually, however, the rush of sadism gives way to the pity one has for the lifeless form crumbled beneath their hands. The fragility of life, the small plane between being and nothingness has been revealed to the young individual and they turn to the heavens and reflect on the next few decades of struggling to accept their demise... Or they forget all that and strap on an electrode and control the insect's body through a cell phone App.

As baseball's regular season nears its end, here is a highlight reel celebrating the hideous souvenir-crazed monsters who grab balls away from young children in the stands.

Two people have been arrested for the hit-and-run death of Wang Yue, the Chinese two-year-old left to die in the street. No word on what the formal charges are; police used the now-infamous surveillance footage to identify the suspects. As much as we dislike how camera'ed up and Big Brothery our public spaces have become, we're glad this particular incident was captured on video. [Washington Post]

Her name was Wang Yueyue. She was run over—twice—in a crowded market in Fushan, China, last week as at least 17 passersby drove, walked, and bicycled by without lifting a finger to help her for almost ten minutes. Chinese officials announced today that she has died of her injuries, just as those 17 people intended.

Last week, a two-year-old girl wandering in the street in a market in Foshan, China, was hit by a van. The driver stopped for a moment and continued on, rolling over the girl again with the van's rear wheels. Over the course of the next seven minutes, as she lay in the street bleeding, 17 passersby walked over and around her—one truck ran over her again—without helping.

Sarah — a 54-year-old Asian elephant performer in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus with a known history of poor health — was filmed by animal rights activists collapsing onto her side as she boarded her boxcar after a performance in Anaheim, Ca.

A veterinarian in Grand Rapids is offering a $500 reward for anyone who knows who shot his new friend, Bow the Cat, with a bow and arrow. A what? Yep—as it turns out, this sort of awful thing happens fairly often.

Remember when you were a teenager and your annoying little brother did something annoying, so in revenge you grabbed his hamster, and killed it? We've all done it. Well now they arrest you for that, apparently. What a world.

What's an extra cruel way to tease the American Idol finalists with wealth and fame only to tear the dream out of their hands one by one until no one is left? Put them in a seriously huge, $100,000/week rental mansion, so they can feel like kings and queens (mostly queens) for a day or two before they are sent tumbling, so so far, back down to miserable wannabe obscurity.

This is truly sick: here's surveillance footage from outside of a school in Coventry, England that shows a woman walk up to a cat, pet it for a few seconds, and then pick it up/throw it into a garbage bin.

Meet Stan Still, Justin Case, Barb Dwyer and Bill Board. They're among the names a survey revealed actual parents gave to their actual children — human beings, remember — because they thought they were funny.

Do you hate dogs? Great. Awesome idea for you: adopt a dog, then decide that the dog's barking annoys you, then have the dog's vocal cords severed so it can't bark ever again. Stupid dogs, always behaving naturally. [NYT]

Recently, scientists repeated the Milgram test, reports the BBC, which demonstrated normal people's willingness to inflict pain on others, and guess what? There's no difference today.

Have you signed the petition against Guillermo "Habacuc" Vargas yet? He's the Costa Rican artist whose latest big exhibition featured him tying up a starving dog "without food and water under the words 'Eres Lo Que Lees' - 'You Are What You Read' - made out of dog biscuits while he played the Sandinista anthem backwards and set 175 pieces of crack cocaine alight in a massive incense burner." Some reports say the dog starved to death during the display; the gallery director says that's not true. Either way, Vargas is not a popular man with animal lovers. By now, more than a million people have signed a petition (you can sign here, if you're so inclined) urging that he not be allowed to recreate the work, and the cause continues to draw media coverage and generate new outrage. But the artist calls his opponents hypocrites. His defense, and a video of the exhibit in question (which is pretty heartbreaking), after the jump.

Private security firm and deadly, answerable-to-no-one mercenary army Blackwater was involved in yet another shocking display of deadly gunplay in Iraq. Just months after Blackwater guards shot 17 civilians in cold blood on the streets of Baghdad, they SHOT THE NEW YORK TIMES'S DOG. Which, wow. The New York Times had a dog? And Blackwater just... shot it? "State Department investigators have made two follow-up visits to the Times compound to investigate the shooting of Hentish [the lovable, and no doubt absolutely adorable dog belonging to the Times]," according to Reuters.

New York Times in Iraq: "Blackwater shot our dog" [Reuters]