Vernon, Connecticut - Police in Vernon are investigating reports that a man held a knife to a child's face and threatened to cut out his tongue.

On Friday, a woman named Heather Bonneville called police to inform them that a family acquaintance, who has been identified as Roman Fein, held the knife within inches of her 3-year-old son's face before making the threat to cut his tongue out of his mouth.

Bonneville said that the incident occurred while she was working, and her son was under the care of a babysitter.

Police said several witnesses provided the same information about what occurred.

Fein admitted to police that he had been flipping a knife open in the area of a child, but he said he denies purposely holding the knife towards the child, police said.

Fein was arrested and charged with breach of peace, reckless endangerment and risk of injury to a child.

A naked man who may have been on drugs was arrested Saturday for killing a Tracy motel employee.

Andrew Carreiro, 25, is behind bars accused of killing the 62-year-old woman who cleans rooms at the Hacienda Inn on the 600 block of West 11th Street.

Witnesses say they found Cerreiro covered in blood and standing near the partially naked body of the woman, say witnesses.

"[It's] most definitely the craziest thing I've seen in my life; most definitely," said Jermaine Haynes, a motel resident who made the gruesome discovery.

The scene is something Haynes says he wishes he'd never witnessed, and says he knew the victim.

The first total shutdown of Norway's oil industry in more than 25 years may be hours away if the government does not intervene in a tussle between striking offshore workers and employers and allows a steep cut in European oil supplies.

The strike over pensions has kept oil prices on the boil as the market is surprised by a lack of government action to avert a plan by the oil industry to lock out all offshore staff from their workplaces from midnight (2200 GMT).

Under Norwegian law, the government could force the striking workers back to duty and has done so in the past to protect the vital industry on which much of the country's economy depends.

The dispute - now in its third week - has raised eyebrows in Norway, where oil and gas workers are already the world's best paid, raking in an average $180,000 a year. [ID:nL6E8I67WH] Offshore workers clock 16 weeks a year but cite tough conditions for their call for early retirement at 62.

The oil industry has refused to budge.

"The companies are now ready to close down production on the Norwegian continental shelf if the government doesn't intervene before midnight," Eli Ane Nedreskaar, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian oil industry association (OLF), told Reuters.

Leif Sande, leader of Industri Energi, the biggest of the three unions, said he had not heard from the OLF, nor received any signals of potential government moves.

"Our members are preparing for the lockout and will travel back to land at midnight," he said.

As Americans spent July 4 celebrating the anniversary of the United States' independence from Britain, German-born Kim Dotcom was reveling in a re-birth. According to the founder of Megaupload, his file storage site will rise again.

In a tweet to his followers this week, the man behind the world's most famous file-locker site - and one of the FBI's biggest foes - hinted that Megaupload will be brought back to life.

"SOPA is dead. PIPA is dead. ACTA is dead. MEGA will return. Bigger. Better. Faster. Free of charge & shielded from attacks. Evolution!" reads a tweet from the official @KimDotcom Twitter account. Dotcom - born Kim Schmitz - is currently being targeted by international authorities over his role with the website, which American official say was the centerpiece in a vast online piracy conspiracy.

By masterminding the operations of Megaupload, the Federal Bureau of Investigations insists that Dotcom caused the American entertainment industry to lose $500 million in revenue. Law enforcement agents raided his home this past January in a highly publicized sting that has since been condemned by not just Dotcom and his supporters but even justices in New Zealand.

A Miramar, Florida police captain is being investigated by the department over allegations that he insisted that a 15-year-old girl strip in front of him so he could inspect her body to make sure she wasn't having sex.

Miramar Police Capt. Juan De Los Rios, 46, is free on bail after being arrested on Friday over lewd conduct charges stemming from a January 18 incident. According to the victims - a 15-year-old girl and a 19-year-old male - Capt. De Los Rios approached a parked car the teens were in earlier this year, interrogated them and then insisted that the female passenger disrobe and demonstrate to the officer that she was not having sex.

The two teenagers say that they were parked outside of a Miramar, FL industrial complex when a man dressed in dark blue and brandishing a gold badge approached their car and began questioning them through the window.

Three South Florida police officers are on administrative leave from the force after posting bond this week. All three cops are being charged with a string of beatings that targeted immigrants.

Officer Giovanni Soto, 40, Sgt. Lizanne Deegan, 44, and Sgt. Jeffrey Rome, 56, are all believed to be involved in a rash of incidents that started as early as February 2011.The Homestead Police Department officials were brought into custody this week after arrest warrants were filed following the culmination of a year-long investigation that involved the FBI and local law enforcement, during which all three officers were placed on extended paid leave.

According to Internal Affairs Detective Antonio Aquino, on February 6, 2011 Sgt. Rome attacked a man outside of Celio's Latin Quarter Bar in Homestead, FL near Miami, a known hangout for Spanish-speaking migrant workers. The establishment had been rigged with undercover surveillance cameras due to a human trafficking investigation, which also caught the cop on film allegedly beating a man with a metal baton. The footage has also been described to the media to show Officer Sotto involving himself in the attack. The victim allegedly called 911 for assistance after the incident, to which Sgt. Deegan was dispatched to file a complaint - the officer did not follow through, though.

Norway has approved plans to build a specially-designed psychiatric ward inside Oslo's Ila Prison to hold Anders Behring Breivik, the self-confessed mass killer responsible for the massacre at a Norwegian youth camp.

Regardless of whether or not Breivik is found criminally insane, he is likely to remain in the prison where he has been held since the July 22 attacks. Norway's Health Directorate has therefore agreed to a plan to build a new psychiatric ward there, AP reports.

The 33-year-old right-wing extremist who carried out the twin attacks that claimed 77 innocent lives has admitted to murder but pleaded not guilty. The key issue now is deciding his mental state. The court ruling is expected to be announced on August 24.

If he is found sane he will be sentenced to a maximum sentence of 21 years but could be held longer if considered a danger to society. If Breivik is ruled to be insane, he could be held indefinitely.

Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe the nation - the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty - to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation.

Human societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification. They trust naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance. This is what nationalism is about - lies. And if a culture loses its ability for thought and expression, if it effectively silences dissident voices, if it retreats into what Sigmund Freud called "screen memories," those reassuring mixtures of fact and fiction, it dies. It surrenders its internal mechanism for puncturing self-delusion. It makes war on beauty and truth. It abolishes the sacred. It turns education into vocational training. It leaves us blind. And this is what has occurred. We are lost at sea in a great tempest. We do not know where we are. We do not know where we are going. And we do not know what is about to happen to us.

A suspected human skull found in a river by a Hapton couple out walking their dogs in May was an elaborate hoax.

Police said forensic experts initially thought the skull belonged to a man but when they tried to subject it to carbon dating, they realised it was a fake.

Further chemical tests confirmed that it was an elaborate replica of a skull belonging to an Aboriginal man.

The fake skull even had a fracture which had healed, incision marks suggesting a pre-death operation and signs of a significant infection around the nose and mouth.

It was initially handed to police by Mr and Mrs Mick and Elaine Bell, of Valley Gardens, who had been walking their dogs near to a shallow section of water which flows through Spa Wood, between Burnley Cemetery and Hapton Colliery.

Det. Sgt Charlie Haynes, of Burnley CID, said that it had been cast from an original skull.

"A visual examination of photographs by the anthropologist indicated that the skull was that of a human male," he said.

"Given the close proximity to the colliery and the cemetery this was not surprising, and a number of theories emerged including the possibility that the skull had been washed away from the rear of the cemetery by the recent heavy rain, or had been washed out of the colliery having been the remains of a miner who had died there prior to the 1962 disaster.

Native Americans' resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.

The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the "expanding" wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.

Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits." This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.