Free Talk Live

SANFORD, Fla.— A man who defied officials for more than 13 years by refusing to remove airplane parts and other junk from his yard was sentenced to three years in prison.

Alan Wayne Davis, 49, had been placed on house arrest in September after serving nearly a year in prison for illegal dumping and creating and maintaining a public nuisance.

On Monday, a judge sentenced Davis to three years in prison for violations of his house arrest, including failing to return home from work on time and keeping part of a World War II fighter plane in his yard.

A former narcotics detective admitted to routinely faking drug charges in order to help officers meet department quotas.

Stephen Anderson testified under a cooperation deal with prosecutors that it was common for officers to frame innocent people on drug busts, a practice known as "flaking." According to The Daily News, Anderson's testimony is the first public account highlighting the alleged illicit behavior among Brooklyn South and Queens narcotics teams.

Johnny Ramsey, the 79-year-old Korean War veteran who collected and sold junk to pay for medications for his ailing wife, said just minutes before court Thursday evening: “If I have to go to jail, I guess I am ready.” An hour later, Ramsey left a Clover courtroom in shackles – sentenced to 30 days in the York County jail for not cleaning up his yard eight months after a judge ordered him to get rid of the junk.

Insomniac Joseph Stoiber, 29, was walking in his neighborhood when he couldn't sleep at 2:30 a.m. May 30, talking to his friend on the phone about baseball. Lakeland police Officer Tyler Anderson saw him in the community near Florida Southern College and stopped him. After asking Stoiber what he was doing, Anderson asked to pat him down. Stoiber said no. Seeing a bulge in Stoiber's pocket, Anderson began patting him down anyway. During the search, Stoiber, who had been chewing tobacco, spit the accumulated saliva on the grass or sidewalk. That's been against the law in Lakeland since 1944.

"That's not what we want to see in a front yard," said Oak Park City Planner Kevin Rulkowski.

Why? The city is pointing to a code that says a front yard has to have suitable, live, plant material. The big question is what's "suitable?"

"If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers," the city bureaucrat said.

Anderson Cooper has, at long last, publicly said he is gay. Cooper made the announcement in an email to writer Andrew Sullivan. "The fact is, I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud," he wrote. Cooper's sexuality has long been the subject of ample media speculation, but he has never publicly confirmed it -- a fact which he also seemed to address in the email to Sullivan. Cooper also said that he ultimately decided that he was doing more harm than good by not speaking up.

As Obama and Romney faced off for the last time before the general election, we once again broke the sound barrier by inserting Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party into the discussion. Before a live audience in San Rafael, California, we aired the Obama-Romney debate and paused the tape to give Stein and Anderson a chance to respond in real time to the same questions put to the major-party candidates.

Your trash is another's treasure. Don't put your fellow man at risk by leaving old living room furniture on your yard.

Man jailed over messy yard. Fairly good reporting job from WMUR in NH.