In a horrific new video (embedded at the end of this post), Sandra Amezquita, a 5-foot-4, five months pregnant Sunset Park resident, is thrown to the ground belly-first by a police officer.

The cops had been arresting her 17-year-old son, Jhohan Lemos, for possession of a knife he had clipped on his belt. Amezquita and her husband responded to Lemos’ cries as he was being beaten. Photographs obtained by New York Daily News show Lemos with a swollen shut eye and a number of serious scrapes and bruises.

According to police watchdog group El Grito de Sunset Park, police officers had actually been harassing Lemos for a prior robbery arrest and planted the knife. “According to this young man,” said Dennis Flores of police watchdog group El Grito de Sunset Park, “when they put the razor blade in his pocket, they told him, ‘We’re going to make sure this time, it sticks. So the mom saw this, started yelling out, and the cops grabbed her and slammed her against the floor like we see in the video. And they put a Taser to her stomach.”

“The first thing I thought was they killed my baby and they’re going to kill my wife,” said Amezquita’s husband Ronel Lemos.

The deadly police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, in Ferguson prompted nationwide outrage and weeks of protests. But police in the area apparently still have a lot to learn.

The St. Louis County And Municipal Police Academy, which encompasses Ferguson, is offering a “Continuing Education” course in October entitled “OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTING — YOU CAN WIN WITH THE MEDIA.” The class is billed as “fast-paced class is jam-packed with the essential strategies and tactics, skills and techniques” and includes a “detailed case study of Ferguson.”

Learning about how to manipulate the media after a police officer shoots someone can be a blast, according to a flier produced by the academy promoting the course.”The training is also highly entertaining,” the flier says, “You will learn a lot, and you’ll have fun doing it!”

Yet another NFL player is dealing with repercussions from a domestic abuse incident, the fourth such case to come to light this week. Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer was reportedly arrested for domestic violence on Wednesday, according to a report from 3TV anchor Tyler Baldwin.

According to CBS News, Dwyer was charged with aggravated assault and preventing someone from calling 911.

This comes after Baltimore's Ray Rice was terminated for punching his wife in a February incident, Adrian Peterson was indicted on child abuse charges, and Greg Hardy was deactivated due to a domestic violence conviction from this summer.

A legislative committee in Wyoming endorsed a bill that will permit the state to execute inmates by firing squad in the event that it is unable to obtain lethal injection drugs. The bill is a response to a nationwide shortage of the drugs, at least in the nation’s death chambers, as drug companies have grown unwilling to allow their drugs to be used in executions and foreign governments have prevented the drugs from being exported for that purpose.

Currently, Wyoming law provides for execution by “the administration of lethal gas” if the state’s lethal injection process is declared unconstitutional, although the state does not actually own a gas chamber. The firing squad bill, which earned the support of Wyoming’s Joint Judiciary Legislative Committee on Friday, makes two changes to the state’s law — it changes Wyoming’s fallback execution method from the gas chamber to the firing squad, and it permits firing squads to be used “if the sentencing court finds execution by lethal injection cannot be performed within the time prescribed by law,” even if no court has found lethal injections to be unconstitutional.

As lethal injection drugs have grown increasingly scarce on death row, many states have turned to less dramatic alternatives to ensure that they can still move forward with executions. Yet, while these less dramatic options may not back the emotional oomph of learning that your home state just re-legalized firing squads, they could be far more painful for inmates. A number of states, for example, have turned to “compounding pharmacies” which produce drugs of uncertain quality in order to execute inmates. As a result, poor quality drugs may be responsible for several incidents where inmates died after long periods of apparent pain. Additionally, in part because several professional organizations representing doctors and nurses outright forbid their members from assisting executions, executioners can lack the training necessary to prevent inmates from suffering as they die.

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Most of the details of the drunken rumpus are known at this point, and take but a few minutes of googling and following links, but I did talk to my own source who had a couple things to add to the growing body of first person accounts. Sarah and Todd Palin were invited to a birthday party for Mark and Matt McKenna, twin brothers who own McKenna’s Paving, a successful business in Anchorage. The party was held at an address in the South Anchorage community of Oceanview. I lived in Oceanview once upon a time. It’s nice. There are tree-lined streets, and lilac bushes, and lots of little cul-de-sacs where kids ride bikes in circles and play hopscotch. Nothing much happens there, and that’s why people like it. When people throw parties, they are usually subdued back yard affairs. I never saw the police once in the five years I lived there. And if I lived there still, I might be sitting on some sweet cell phone video right now which I could share with you. Wouldn’t that have been something… But, alas.

The Palins arrived at the party, but not just Sarah and Todd who were the only actual invitees from the clan – the whole fan-damnily and some other tagalong friends from Wasilla turned up in a stretch Hummer limo. Because, of course they did. The party was an adult and relaxed event, with most guests at least in their 30s. Reports have come in that Track got into a fight with an ex-boyfriend of Willow’s. But according to my source, the initial fight started when Track and his buddy were aggressively pursuing… how shall I put this… “romantic relations” with some female guests. They were allegedly explicit and crude in their depictions of what they’d like to do with and to the ladies, expressing a desire to “bend them over on the lawn,” according to my source. Apparently the lawn was large enough to include places one could be “bent over.”

Hey. You guys wanted this… don’t look at me.

As Track and his companion were wooing the ladies with honeyed words, certain individuals took exception to it – namely the husbands of the women in question, whose presence right there with their wives the whole time was no deterrant to our confident and ambitious Casanovas from the Mat-Su.

Track did not fare well in the ensuing confrontation with the spouse. The irate husband punched Track with the full force of his annoyance, and the young Palin ended up “spread eagle lying on the grass.” You could say someone did end up bent over on the lawn, but not in the way he first envisioned.