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Body cam images appear to show police planting weed on a black teenager. What do you see?

In 2013, Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize marijuana for recreational use. While some predicted legal reefer would be the downfall of society, studies show that crime rates in weed-legal states have either remained the same or dropped post-legalization.

However, recreational marijuana is only currently legal in 10 states.

So throughout most of the country, state governments are still arresting, fining, and jailing their citizens while wasting countless millions on courts, prisons, and law enforcement in the process.


According to Newsweek, nearly 600,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2016, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Black people are arrested nearly four times more often than white people for possession although they use the drug at similar rates.

A marijuana case was recently dropped by prosecutors in New York after it appears as though police officers planted weed in a car driven by a black teenager.

On February 28, two officers from Staten Island’s 120th Precinct, Kyle Erickson and Elmer Pastran, stopped a BMW sedan for failing to signal before a turn and having excessively tinted windows.

The car was driven by 19-year-old Lasou Kuyateh who was accompanied by three friends.

Kuyateh plead guilty to an assault charge in 2015.

The four young black men admitted to smoking marijuana beforehand but said there wasn’t any in the car. “I don’t appreciate being lied to,” Officer Pastran responded. “I know there is weed in the car. I smell it.”

Body camera footage shows that during the arrest, Erickson searched the rear of the car, including the back seat, without finding any contraband. Then, while searching the driver’s seat, he says, “We’ve got to find it. We have to find something.”

Then, miraculously, Erickson’s body camera goes off. He’d later claim it had a technical issue.

But Pastran’s body cam remained on during the same time. His device captured him searching the floor area of the back seat without finding anything.

A minute later, Erickson, still with his body camera turned off, is filmed returning to the back seat and fiddling with something.

Kuyateh, the driver of the car, films Erickson handling two small bags in the back seat and accuses him of “putting something in my car.”

Erickson tells him to “step back.”

Kuyateh is then handcuffed and his phone is confiscated.

After Kuyateh was arrested, Erickson’s body camera magically turned back on and, low and behold, he found a lit joint resting in a place that was had been repeatedly searched.

After the incident, Kuyateh spent two weeks in jail before getting out on bail. He would have to appear in court ten times.

The charges were eventually dropped against Kuyateh, citing the gap in Officer Erickson’s body-worn camera as the reason. An internal police investigation later found no evidence of misconduct by the officers.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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A woman looking at her phone while sitting on the toilet.


One of the most popular health trends over the last few years has been staying as hydrated as possible, evidenced by the massive popularity of 40-oz Stanely Quencher cups. The theory among those who obsess over hydration is that, when you pee clear, you’ve removed all the waste in your body and are enjoying the incredible benefits of being 100% hydrated. Congratulations.

However, according to Dr. Sermed Mezher, an NHS doctor in the UK, peeing clear isn’t always a sign of being healthy.

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A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Joy

Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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