A tour bus carrying gamblers to an Indian casino overturned along a Southern California freeway after sideswiping a car, injuring more than 50 people on board Thursday, authorities said.

The driver made an "unsafe lane change" to the left, struck the car "and then overcorrected to the right," California Highway Patrol Officer Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh said. The skidding bus careened through a chain-link fence and down a dirt embankment, where it came to rest on its right side between the freeway and railroad tracks.

Ambulances and helicopters converged on Interstate 210 in Irwindale, about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, where firefighters laid out red, yellow and green tarps to evaluate the injured.

Fifty-two people, mostly elderly, suffered minor injuries, according to doctors and fire officials. At least one passenger reported wearing a seatbelt, Van Valkenburgh said.

Some of the passengers were able to get out on their own, while others needed to be rescued by firefighters or drivers who stopped to help, said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Brian Jordan.

If you go shopping in Huntsville, Texas, you're likely to run into a local preacher with an assault rifle slung across his back. Beginning last week, Pastor Terry Holcomb started posting videos of himself wandering into local businesses with an AR-15 Bushmaster rifle - the same weapon used to kill 20 children and six adults in the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting.

In one video, Holcomb wanders about a Walmart for several minutes before he is approached by two store employees and asked to leave. He argues briefly with those two employees until a manager approaches and threatens to call the police if he does not exit the store. Although Holcomb then agrees to leave the store, he refuses a request to stop videoing the engagement - at one point, his camera man claims the recording is for Holcomb's "safety."

A Canadian dentist is hoping to clone John Lennon using DNA from one of the singer's rotten teeth. Michael Zuk, who bought Lennon's molar at a 2011 auction, has begun sequencing the former Beatle's DNA - the first step in a process set out by scientists who propose to clone a woolly mammoth.

"Many Beatles fans remember where they were when they heard John Lennon was shot. I hope they also live to hear the day he was given another chance," Zuk said. The tooth has already been couriered to an unnamed US lab where scientists are "considering ways to extract [its] genetic code". "I am nervous and excited at the possibility that we will be able to fully sequence John Lennon's DNA," Zuk said. "With researchers working on ways to clone mammoths, the same technology certainly could make human cloning a reality."

Moscow - A Russian Zubr ("Bison") hovercraft, the largest type of military hovercraft in the world, on Sunday ploughed into a Kaliningrad Region beach filled with dozens of sunbathers, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported.

The daily quoted the Russian Defense Ministry's press service as saying the landing was part of a routine exercise on ministry property and "what people were doing at the beach on the territory of a military base is unclear."

Zubr-class hovercraft can simultaneously carry several tanks and up to 500 troops. The landing, during which marines reportedly ran out and cordoned off the vehicle, occurred in the town of Mechnikovo, in Russia's western-most region.

An explosion in Cedar Falls was reported Monday morning around 10 a.m. at a Cedar Falls Utilities electric generating station, destroying half of the building and sending shock waves throughout Cedar Falls.

The explosion happened at the generating station at 2602 West 27th Street in Cedar Falls at around 10 a.m.

Two CFU employees -- Steve Balthazor and Kevin DeSerano -- were inside at the time, according to Betty Zeman, CFU Marketing Manager. They were treated at the scene and declined further medical attention.

The workers were doing a routine test of the combustion turbine at the time, according to CFU officials.

"What was happening today is a routine test of one of the gas turbines that we do annually. So the employees who were working this morning were doing a routine start up of the turbine for testing," said Zeman.

CFU officials are still investigating the cause of the explosion.

Schilling said he was inside City Hall at the time and felt that building shake. Emergency crews got calls from all over Cedar Falls about buildings shaking, they said.

Officials say the explosion, which damaged about half of the station, will not affect CFU's ability to generate power to the city.

• Footage captured witnesses to the incident near Fresno, California

An amateur cameraman captured the moment that police tasered an apparently suicidal man as he hung from the edge of a freeway overpass, sending him plummeting towards the ground.

Footage of the incident shows the man falling about 15ft from the overpass near Fresno, California, into an air cushion set up to break his fall.

But even though the officers seem to have saved the man from killing himself, observers who are out of shot are heard saying: 'There is no denying it. This is becoming a police state.'

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans - even more so than older Americans - appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans "Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?" Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don't believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

Rossford, Ohio Police staged a realistic hijacking of a school bus - with children on board - in order to allow a SWAT team to perform an explosion-packed rescue drill. The occupants of the bus were unaware of the details of the drill, for added terror and realism.




"I didn't know what was going on, because at the start he was just a normal person and then he pulled out a gun and a mask, and put it all on," said teen Justin Klocko to ABC 13 News. "Then he started tying everybody down and it just got really scary."

While the bus was in transit under the control of an armed, mask-wearing hijacker, a large crowd of school teachers and administrators sat in an audience observing the terror through a video feed. The bus ultimately pulled into the parking lot of Owens Center for Emergency Preparedness, where the crowd resided and the SWAT team was prepared to burst in with guns drawn to subdue the hijacker.

Report says First Nations women from Thunder Bay, Ont., trafficked in sex trade in Minnesota

An American researcher says First Nations women from Thunder Bay, Ont., have been sold on ships in the harbour at Duluth, Minn.

Christine Stark said the port at Duluth is notorious among First Nations people as a site for trafficking women.

The masters student at the University of Minnesota Duluth said she has anecdotal reports of women, teenage girls and boys, as well as babies being sold on ships for sex.

"The women and children - and I've even had women talk about a couple of babies brought onto the ships and sold to the men on ships - are being sold or are exchanging sex for alcohol, a place to stay, drugs, money and so forth.," Stark said. "It's quite shocking."

Stark said the sex trade on ships has been going on for generations, and includes Indigenous women from Canada.
Strong link between Thunder Bay, Duluth

"I have spoken with a woman who was brought down from Thunder Bay on the ships and talks about an excessive amount of trafficking between Canada and the Duluth-Superior harbor," Stark said. "There is a very strong link between Thunder Bay and Duluth."

Her current research is an offshoot of a 2007 report on prostitution in Minnesota, in conjunction with the Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition. That report included interviews with 105 indigenous women in Minnesota who have been trafficked in the sex trade.

Stark said the stories that "women get brought out onto the boats and never come back" that she heard as part of that study begged further exploration. She's currently conducting interviews with 15 people to learn more about what happens on the ships.

The Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) said it also has anecdotal reports of women being trafficked across borders,or provincial boundaries, into the sex trade.

"We know that it's happening between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay, and there have been reports of it happening in southern Ontario across the U.S. border," said Kezia Picard, the director of policy and research with ONWA.
Poverty, lack of housing make women vulnerable

But Picard said more funding is needed for more formal research into how women are being spirited away.

The United States has withdrawn all assistance to St. Lucia's police force over concerns about allegations of unlawful killings, the leader of the small Caribbean country announced.

St. Lucia Prime Minister Kenny Anthony said the matter focuses on 12 people fatally shot by police in 2010 and 2011 while another administration was in power. Relatives of the victims and other critics insist the men were murdered and police had a "hit list" of people deemed to be criminals.

The killings occurred during a security initiative called "Operation Restore Confidence" as the tourism-dependent island grappled with a worrying rise in violent crime. Five of the men were killed in a single police operation in the southern town of Vieux Fort.

Washington already had blocked St. Lucia officers from participating in U.S.-financed training programs and recently prevented the top commissioner from attending a law enforcement conference, Anthony said.

On Wednesday, a State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said St. Lucia was informed about the decision Aug. 16.

In an address to the country of some 162,000 people late Tuesday, Anthony said the action was based on a U.S. law that requires the State Department to stop assistance to a foreign security force if there is credible information that a gross violation of human rights has occurred.

In its recent annual report on the island, the State Department complained of the slow pace of investigations into the deadly police shootings.