Man to be paralysed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago unless his family pays one million Saudi riyals

Amnesty International has condemned a reported Saudi Arabian court ruling that a young man should be paralysed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago which resulted in the victim having to use a wheelchair.

Amnesty said Ali al-Khawaher, 24, was reported to have spent 10 years in jail waiting to be surgically paralysed unless his family pays 1m Saudi riyals (£176,000) to the victim.

Khawaher stabbed a friend in the spine during a dispute, paralysing him from the waist down. Saudi Arabia applies Islamic sharia law, which allows eye-for-an-eye punishment for crimes but allows victims to pardon convicts in exchange for so-called blood money.

Growing wealth inequality means that the wealthy have nowhere to hide and that events like those in Cyprus will happen in more countries around the world, including developed nations, said Marc Faber, the contrarian investor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.

"It will happen everywhere in the world, in Western democracies," Faber said "Squawk on the Street" on Tuesday. "You have more people that vote for a living than work for a living. I think you have to be prepared to lose 20 to 30 percent. I think you're lucky if you don't lose your life."

"If you look at what happened in Cyprus, basically people with money will lose part of their wealth, either through expropriation or higher taxation," he added.

"The problem is that 92 percent of financial wealth is owned by 5 percent of the population. The majority of people don't own meaningful stock positions and they don't benefit from a rise in the stock market. They are being hurt by a rising cost of living and we all know that the real incomes of median households has been going down for the last few years," he said.

Italian police have seized a record (EURO)1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) in cash and property from a single person, a Sicilian alternative energy entrepreneur alleged to have close ties to the Mafia.

Italy's anti-Mafia investigators said in a statement Wednesday that Vito Nicastri, a 57-year-old native of Alcamo, near Trapani, was placed under surveillance and must remain in Alcamo for three years. He is accused of declaring for tax purposes a fraction of the value of his businesses.

The NRA wants to make every student and school employee a suspect, and arm security officers with legal authority to shoot back.

The NRA doesn't just want to put armed teachers, armed guards and volunteer vigilantes in schools to prevent more school shootings. It wants to turn schools into veritable prisons, where security staff patrol and lockdown schools, and indentify and spy on problem students and employees, according to an NRA-sponsored report that included model legislation to allow such measures.

The National Federation of Teachers and well-known civil rights advocates slammed the report, issued by former GOP congressman and Department of Homeland Security official Asa Hutchinson. They said militarizing schools with more guns was not the answer to gun violence. Nor was putting more police into schools, particularly in communities of color. That only increases hostilities for students, not safe learning environments.

What follows below are 16 excerpts from the 225-page report showing how the NRA would choose to deal with the potential for gun violence - primarily by locking down schools, making every student and school employee a suspect, and arming a cadre of security officers with legal authority to shoot back.

Barack Obama's signing of 'The Monsanto Protection Act', or H.R. 933 is really only small part of a much bigger pattern and corruption and collusion between Monsanto and the U.S. government.

Today in Colorado Obama mocked legitimate 2nd amendment concerns by gun owners:

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.

Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.

"If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we'd be out of business in six months to a year," said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. "The drugs we're going to lose money on we're not going to administer right now."

After an emergency meeting Tuesday, Vacirca's clinics decided that they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients.

"A lot of us are in disbelief that this is happening," he said. "It's a choice between seeing these patients and staying in business."

Let me try to understand this: the key incentive for small businesses to support Obamacare was that they would be able to shop for the best deals in health care superstores - called exchanges. The Administration has had three years to set up these exchanges. It has failed to do so.

This is a really bad sign. There will be those who argue that it's not the Administration's fault. It's the fault of the 33 states that have refused to set up their own exchanges. Nonsense. Where was the contingency planning? There certainly are models, after all - the federal government's own health-benefits plan (FEHBP) operates markets that exist in all 50 states. So does Medicare Advantage. But now, the Obama Administration has announced that it won't have the exchanges ready in time, that small businesses will be offered one choice for the time being - for a year, at least. No doubt, small-business owners will be skeptical of the Obama Administration's belief in the efficacy of the market system to produce lower prices through competition. That was supposed to be the point of this plan.

North Korea dramatically escalated its warlike rhetoric on Thursday, warning that it had authorised plans for nuclear strikes on targets in the United States.

"The moment of explosion is approaching fast," the North Korean military said, warning that war could break out "today or tomorrow".

Pyongyang's latest pronouncement came as Washington scrambled to reinforce its Pacific missile defences, preparing to send ground-based interceptors to Guam and dispatching two Aegis class destroyers to the region.

Tension was also high on the North's heavily fortified border with South Korea, after Kim Jong-Un's isolated regime barred South Koreans from entering a Seoul-funded joint industrial park on its side of the frontier.

In a statement published by the state KCNA news agency, the Korean People's Army general staff warned Washington that US threats would be "smashed by... cutting-edge smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike means".

"The merciless operation of our revolutionary armed forces in this regard has been finally examined and ratified," the statement said.

Kim Jong-un isn't the first North Korean leader to use threats for political gain. But the West doesn't really know what of make of him because of his youth and the uncertainty that shrouds the country.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un's saber-rattling rhetoric and threats to restart his nuclear program could be a rational move to garner more in the way of concessions in the world community and much-needed political street-credentials among the populace and troops he commands.

But just how confident can Pentagon officials be about whether Mr. Kim is a rational actor?

Could he, in fact, be young, reckless, without great political savvy and in grave danger of making a move that could set off a chain of events - including an inadvertent war - with dire consequences?

"We've seen some historical trajectory here on where North Korea occasionally will go to try to get the attention of the United States, to try to maneuver us into some position favorably to them, whether it's more assistance or bilateral engagement," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said during a press conference last week.