Sorry in advance for ruining a lovely Friday morning. There's pretty disturbing news coming out of Thailand where authorities have arrested a man for smuggling six roasted human fetuses in his luggage. (We said sorry!)

According to The Independent's Rob Williams and other news reports, the fetuses had been roasted and covered in gold leaf as part of a ritual. Chow Hok Kuen, a British citizen, was planning to sell them to people looking to get rich.

Xiamen - Lai Changxing, the kingpin of a notorious smuggling ring, was sentenced to life imprisonment Friday for smuggling and bribery, the Intermediate People's Court of Xiamen said.

The sentence was handed down given the graveness of Lai's offences and "an extremely large amount of money" involved, and Lai as the mastermind should be held responsible for all the crimes his syndicate committed, the court said.

The court deprived his political rights for life and confiscated all his personal assets, according to the verdict.

His illegal income would also be confiscated, the court said.

The court found that Lai, 53, had formed a smuggling ring by establishing firms and bases in Hong Kong and Xiamen since 1991.

Princeton, New Jersey - The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn't matter how often he'd been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, who turns 80 next week, lay awake at 4 o'clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.

He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson's disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.

The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations - pathetic - is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies.

Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to "cure" homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.

Syriza leader's claims countered by Antonis Samaras, who says Greek government must not abandon reforms or quit euro

The two main figures in what promises to be Greece's most electric election in living memory were on a collision course on Thursday, with one predicting "hell" if Athens adheres to EU-mandated austerity and the other forecasting a "nightmare" if the nation abandons reforms and gives up the euro.

Emboldened by yet another poll showing his party's wide appeal, the leftwing Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, said the international accord that Greece had signed up to in return for rescue loans was catastrophic for the country. Instead of a rescue, the debt-stricken nation has been thrown into its worst recession since the second world war.

"With this policy [bailout agreement] we are going directly to hell," he told CNN. "To save Europe we need to change direction," insisted the politician who has pledged to "tear up" the €130bn (£104bn) "memorandum of understanding" that Athens reached with the EU and IMF earlier this year.

Spain moved back into the eye of the eurozone storm on Thursday, as the country's borrowing costs rocketed to unsustainable levels and the country's banking sector was hit by mass downgrades.

Moody's slashed the ratings of 16 Spanish banks on Thursday evening, citing the reduced ability of the Spanish government to provide support to the sector, as well as the "adverse operating conditions" characterised by a renewed recession.

The rating agency also downgraded Santander UK, although, at "A2," it is still rated one notch above its parent bank Banco Santander. Moody's highlighted that Santander UK has "no direct exposure to the Spanish government (or regional governments)".

Earlier in the day, shares in Bankia, the country's fourth biggest bank, plunged by as much as 29pc amid reports that depositors had pulled out €1bn in the past week.

A new documentary about director and child rapist Roman Polanski is coming out, which can only mean we'll see a slew of child rapist apologists in its wake. True to form, here's The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney:

In more skilful hands, this might have been an eloquent testament to an artist widely considered to have paid his debt during 35 years of physical exile and personal vilification.

Just for starters, when you drug, rape, and sodomize a 13 year-old girl, you're supposed to live a life of physical exile and personal vilification. But that should only be the side order of your life AFTER you have paid whatever price the justice system has delivered.

Polanski fled justice and his life of "personal exile" has been a luxurious European one and the "personal vilification" has included a 35 year career of making films, winning Oscars, and being celebrated by every child-raping apologist known to mankind.

An Indiana pastor could be facing felony voyeurism charges after a congregation member found cameras installed in the women's bathroom at his Lafayette church.

Robert Lyzenga, 55, was arrested late last week on suspicion of voyeurism after a church member reported finding two cameras hidden in fake air fresheners in the bathroom stalls, CBS Chicago reports. Police found footage of two adult women and a juvenile girl using the restroom on the cameras' memory cards.

"I'm devastated, distraught, amazed, confused and disappointed in the deepest sense of the word," Mark DeYoung, a member of the church council that voted to suspend Lyzenga Friday, told the Lafayette Journal and Courier. "Pastor Bob was a longtime, trusted, highly regarded man within the congregation. At this point, that is not the case."

RAF veteran Mike Sutherland was once a "party animal".

But at 49, he has been forced to quit his £55,000 a year job, has arthritis and his life is plagued by depression and chronic fatigue.

Mr Sutherland says he is just one of thousands of military veterans whose lives have been stolen by Gulf War Syndrome, and today he spoke out to raise awareness of the condition.

He is part of a group of veterans attempting to force the Ministry of Defence to release documents that could explain what caused the condition and give the support he says the Government has a moral responsibility to provide.

Iceland's peaceful revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. Read details about Iceland's wonderful social evolution at DailyKos, here. Another great article is on Bloomberg.com. The following summation has been posted by countless people on Facebook; I've reposted it in its entirety: ICELAND (GP) - No news from Iceland? Why? Last we heard, people were rising up and overthrowing the bankers. Then, no news on the television or newspapers for two years. What happened? Why won't the papers and TV tell us how the bankers successfully crushed or minimized another rebellion? Because... THEY DIDN'T! This time, the people won.

The people of Iceland have overwhelmingly risen up and forced their government puppets of the banks to resign. Primary banks have been nationalized. The debt scam imposed by Great Britain and Holland money printers was declared null and void. A public assembly has been created to rewrite Iceland's constitution.

The bank runs that we are watching right now in Greece are shocking, but they are only just the beginning. Since May 6th, nearly one billion dollars has been withdrawn from Greek banks. For a small nation like Greece, that is an absolutely catastrophic number. At this point, the entire Greek banking system is in danger of collapsing. If you had money in a Greek bank, why wouldn't you pull it out?

If Greece leaves the euro, all euros in Greek banks will likely be converted to drachmas, and the value of those drachmas will almost certainly decline dramatically. In fact, it has been estimated that Greek citizens could see the value of their bank accounts decline by up to 50 percent if Greece leaves the euro. So if you had money in a Greek bank, it would only make sense to withdraw it and move it to another country as quickly as possible.

And as the eurozone begins to unravel, this is a scenario that we are going to see play out in country after country. As member nations leave the eurozone, you would be a fool to have your euros in Italian banks or Spanish banks when you could have them in German banks instead. So the bank runs that are happening in Greece right now are only a preview of things to come. Before this crisis is over we are going to see bank runs happening all over Europe.

If Greece leaves the euro, the consequences are likely to be quite messy. Those that are promoting the idea that a "Grexit" can be done in an orderly fashion are not being particularly honest. The following is from a recent article in the Independent....