Official figures have shown that an increased number of Italians left their recession-hit country in 2012 to seek employment in other European countries.

Figures by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) revealed that the number of the Italians who left the country in 2012 rose to 68,000 people in 2012 from 50,000 in 2011, registering a 36-percent rise.

According to ISTAT, a quarter of those ages above 24 emigrating from Italy had university degrees and mostly headed for Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and France.

A private high school in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, will close for good at the end of March because the nuclear disaster has decimated enrollment, school officials said.

Shoei High School, founded in 1957, will be the first in the prefecture to close its doors permanently since the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant began unfolding on March 11, 2011.

Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He was 94 and lived in Beacon, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his grandson, Kitama Cahill Jackson, who said he died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Mr. Seeger's career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10 to college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.

For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.

Dieudonné M'bala M'bala appears on stage to a feral roar from the audience, with his arms held aloft, more politician than comedian.

Which is he? No politician in France generates such raw excitement. No comedian produces such an intoxicating and disturbing cocktail of self-righteous laughter and joyous anger among his fans.

Howls of gleeful fury greet Dieudonné's every reference to a French politician, or to his alleged "persecution" by the French establishment. Louder howls and boos greet every reference to a Jew or to a Jewish organisation.

Dieudonné M'bala M'bala - the man who invented the controversial "quenelle" arm gesture performed by the Premiership footballer Nicolas Anelka - has belatedly started his 2014 stand-up Tour de France. The show replaces a performance banned by the French authorities earlier this month for inciting racial hatred against Jews.

A student has been injured after setting himself on fire in the cafeteria of a suburban Denver high school, authorities said.

Westminster police department spokeswoman Cheri Spottke said she did not know if the student made any threats or statements before starting the fire at Standley Lake high school in Westminster, north-west of Denver.

He was taken to a hospital with unknown injuries.

Spottke said the fire was contained in the cafeteria and was put out by an adult with a fire extinguisher. There also was extensive smoke in the building.

The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship's 30-man crew - there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel - is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which in a previous encounter maimed the ship's captain, Ahab, by dismembering one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod's destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed - just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

"If I had been downright honest with myself," Ishmael admits, "I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing."

Our financial system - like our participatory democracy - is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds - much of it worthless subprime mortgages - each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money - because wages are kept low - by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. ... Or our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. But none of us know. The figures are not public. And the reason this systematic looting will continue until collapse is that our economy [would] go into a tailspin without this giddy infusion of free cash.

A woman from Clark County, Indiana, was held in jail for five months after being ordered to spend only two days there.

Judge Jerry Jacobi sentenced Destiny Hoffman, 34, to 48 hours in jail for failing to pass a drug test - one of the conditions of her drug court programs, which are notorious for being terrible forms of rehabilitation.

He instructed the Sheriff's office to hold her with no bond, and not to release her until "further order of the court" (it is currently unclear why a non-violent drug offender needed to be held indefinitely, without bail).

Hoffman was subsequently (and illegally) denied a hearing and any form of legal counsel, and would probably still be in jail if it weren't for Deputy Prosector Michaelia Gilbert, who noticed something was amiss while she was looking over old case files.

Gilbert quickly attempted to set the record straight by entering a motion for a status hearing, and Hoffman was finally appointed a lawyer, who "expect[s] this will result in a lawsuit for the county."

Judge Jacobi did not appear in court, and has not been reached to comment on the case.

Keeping even one "farm animal" in residential neighborhoods could soon be illegal in Michigan. That's because a proposed change to state regulations could strip property owners of the right to keep and raise small numbers of poultry or livestock.

Michigan's Right to Farm Act currently extends to all property owners in the state, including those in areas zoned residential or commercial. The state Agricultural Commission is considering a change to the regulations - called Generally Acceptable Agricultural And Management Practices (GAAMPS) - that would strip property owners of that right.

"It would exclude a whole bunch of people who are seeking Right to Farm protection," Randy Buchler of the Michigan Small Farm Council said of the proposal, "and strip the small farmers of their right to be protected by a state law."

The change would allow local governments to bar people from keeping small numbers of animals such as one cow or pig or a flock of chickens on their property. The law does this by labeling certain kinds of property, such as lots in subdivisions or small homesteads, as unacceptable for livestock.

Two sisters returning to Kansas from a trip to Colorado were pulled over on Monday for speeding. After being stopped, the Kansas police officer found a small amount of marijuana in the car. As will surely happen to many people in the near future, the sisters purchased marijuana legally in Colorado but made the mistake of bringing it across state lines.

The officer arrested the sisters, named Brenda Sewell and Joy Biggs, and put them in jail. While in jail, Sewell was unable to take her medications. She had the pills in a daily pill container rather than in their original prescription bottles. County officials say they were unable to determine what each pill was, and, because of this, could not allow Sewell to take her medications. She'd been taking medicine for hepatitis C, fibromyalgia, and thyroid problems for over a decade.

On Wednesday, after being off her medications for two days, Sewell fell ill in her jail cell. She was reportedly foaming at the mouth before passing out. Biggs and another inmate alerted authorities of the emergency while trying to revive her.

Severe headaches, dizziness, rashes and loss of memory: all symptoms reported to a new hearing examining health effects of Alberta's rapidly expanding heavy oil industry

Northwest Alberta grain farmer Alain Labrecque recalls the first winter in 2011 when the fumes from oil tanks near his home in the Peace River area seemed to trigger terrible health effects for himself, his wife and two small children.

"I started getting massive headaches. My eyes twitched. I got dizzy spells. I often felt like I was going to pass out."

"Next thing I knew, my [3-year-old] girl had trouble walking. She had no balance. She would sit at the table, and she would just fall off her chair."

"My [4-year-old] son - he was really black under his eyes all the time, and had big time constipation."

"Then my wife fell down the stairs while carrying a laundry basket."

"We went through a weird winter like that," Labrecque told the Vancouver Observer by phone Sunday.

Labrecque, his family, and neighbours are part of a group of rural home owners now giving testimony to an unprecedented Alberta hearing, examining the health effects of the odour and emissions from bitumen extraction. About 75 people packed the conference centre, each day of the first week of proceedings.