I don't believe that in engineering classes there is time to do this..."

Hundreds of high school students in the greater-Seattle area are protesting a new Common Core-aligned standardized test, prompting one local reporter to ask college students to complete math questions from the controversial education standard.

Speaking with several engineering and finance students, Kiro 7 reporter Natasha Chen explained how a simple math problem such as 175 minus 79 is no longer solved using tried-and-true methods.

"Now can I show you how they're teaching the kids now with Common Core?" Chen asked before explaining the new convoluted method.

After examining the mandatory use of arrows, dots, crosses and columns, the college students were less than impressed.

"I don't believe that in engineering classes there is time to do this..." one student argued.

Palestinian civil society activists have heralded the decision by French corporate giant Veolia to sell off nearly all of its business activity in Israel as a huge victory for the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The sale follows a worldwide campaign against the company's role in illegal Israeli settlements that cost the firm billions of dollars of lost contracts.

The boycott Veolia campaign was launched in Bilbao, the Basque Country, in November 2008, to pressure the company to end its involvement in illegal Israeli projects that serve settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT).

​Under BDS pressure, Veolia has failed to win massive contracts with local authorities across Europe​,​ the US​ and Kuwait​​. City councils across Europe have passed resolutions ​excluding the firm from ​tenders ​due to its involvement in Israeli human rights violations.

Under international law, Israel is prohibited from using occupied land for the sole benefit of its own civilian population. In Resolution 63/201 of 28 January 2009, the UN General Assembly explicitly called upon Israel to cease the dumping of all kinds of waste materials in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan. In mid-August, 2012, Veolia subsidiary YRAV Sherutei Noy 1985 won a contract for waste collection services from the Israeli army bases in the Jordan Valley. According to the Civil Administration, eight Israeli companies hold permits to transfer waste to Tovlan landfill, including Veolia subsidiaries TMM Integrated Recycling Services and YRAV Sherutei Noy. The waste transferred to the landfill consists of municipal solid waste, construction waste, sterilized medical waste and electronic waste. The Civil Administration mentioned that there is no permit for bringing hazardous waste into the site.

Facebook says it's begun fixing a bug that tracks web users even when they're not registered on the social network. However, it rejected other accusations presented in a report by Belgian scholars questioning the legality of the revised privacy policy.

The bug led to people who hadn't signed up for Facebook being tracked - through code stored in their browsers - while visiting web pages that integrated certain Facebook technology. The report on the problem was first published in February and came to light a month later

On Thursday, Facebook's European policy chief, Richard Allan, acknowledged in a blog post that the Belgian "researchers did find a bug that may have sent cookies to some people when they weren't on Facebook.

"This was not our intention - a fix for this is already under way," he stressed, adding that the violations were few and they're to be addressed on case by case basis.

But Allan criticized the rest of the report, which found that Facebook's updated terms of use that went into effect on January 31 don't comply with European consumer protection law in a number of ways.

The controversial California bill that would make vaccines mandatory passed its first committee on Wednesday with a vote of 6-2 by the Senate Health Committee, according to the Sacramento Bee.

SB277 aims to remove the "personal belief" exception that has allowed thousands of parents to avoid having their children vaccinated against highly infectious diseases such as measles and whooping cough.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, who is also a pediatrician, drew intense reaction from a packed audience that mostly seemed to disagree with the arguments put forth by pro-vaccine legislators.

About 120 New York University (NYU) professors are calling on the school to divest from companies linked to the Israeli occupation.

It's unclear which companies NYU is invested in. The students and professors pushing for divestment under the name NYU Out of Occupied Palestine say the university is not transparent about its investments. But they suspect that the university, like other institutions in the U.S., has investments in U.S. companies that supply the Israeli army with weapons they use for assaults on Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank.

The call from professors is part of the larger boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that has found some success in student governments, particularly in California. The BDS movement on campus has sparked conversation about Israel/Palestine and also lead to tensions between pro-Israel students and activists working for divestment. In March, NYU's Students for Justice in Palestine displayed a mock separation wall during Israeli Apartheid Week, while across the street pro-Israel students rallied with Israeli flags.

At NYU, students and faculty are not calling on the student government to pass a divestment resolution. They are taking a different path by deploying prominent professors to call for transparency in the school's investments and for divestment. It's similar to how Princeton University professors called for divestment last year.

The only university to have divested from companies linked to the occupation is Hampshire.

In a pleasantly surprising yet most welcome turn of events legislators have proposed a bill that will protect photographers' rights and increase police oversight, rather than limit them suggested by several recent bills.

Unlike the bill proposed in the nearby state of Texas, banning photography within 25 feet of police, Colorado's bill seeks to punish officers who interfere with lawful recordings of police activity by imposing significant penalties on violators.

The bill, titled "Concerning Prohibiting A Peace Officer From Interfering With A Person Lawfully Recording A Peace Officer-Involved Incident", is just one of the steps being considered in order to increase police oversight in Colorado and hopefully it will lead to similar legislation in other states.

Joe Salazar (D-Thornton), co-sponsor of House Bill 15-1290, said the bill "came up as a result of the number of news reports we've been seeing about police officers telling people, 'Give me your camera,' or taking the data away, and that is unacceptable conduct".

The Vatican has been embroiled in two separate, highly embarrassing, scandals.

In one, a north Italian priest has been removed from office after allegations emerged that he had been surfing the internet to find gay lovers and had been involved in gay orgies.

The other, which has generated - if possible - even more lurid press coverage in Italy, alleges a priest in the south of the country is under investigation on suspicion of murdering one of his parishioners.

Father Gratien Alabi, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is under investigation for murder following the discovery of female bones under the flagstones of an ancient mountain chapel.

The bones are anticipated to belong to Guerrina Piscaglia, 50, who disappeared from nearby Arezzo in Tuscany last year, The Times reported.

Last Saturday, Walter Scott was driving his Mercedes in North Charleston, S.C., when he was pulled over by police officer Michael Slager for driving with a broken taillight. Scott had a complicated life, as many of us do. He was employed and engaged; he owed back child support; in all likelihood he really didn't want to go to jail. When Slager approached, Scott ran.

There is video of what happened next. Our first clear view is of Scott twisting his doughy body away and moving—half-sprinting, half-waddling—from Slager through an abandoned, grassy lot. Initially, the scene is almost comical. Scott's legs have 50 years' worth of wear on them, and appear to have but 50 yards' worth of running in them. For a brief moment, the video takes on a familiar quality, like something from an episode of Cops. Instead of pursuing, though, Slager, 33, draws his handgun and fires seven times. After a pregnant pause, Slager shoots once more. Around 30—less? more?—feet into his desperate dash, Scott falls to his knees, and then onto his belly, and sprawls facedown beneath a tree.

Only then does Slager move again, walking toward Scott.

"Put your hands behind your back now!" he orders. Scott doesn't comply. When the officer gets to the body, he handcuffs Scott's arms behind his back, then stands up, like he's forgotten something. He first walks, then jogs back to the spot from where he shot, and picks an object off the ground. As a second officer approaches Scott, speaking into his walkie-talkie for a medical kit, Slager ambles back over, then drops the object on the ground next to the dead man.

"This just doesn't sound right," Scott's surviving brother, Anthony, would later say. "How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?"

On Tuesday, Slager was charged with murder after a cell-phone video of Scott's death was released. Thanks to technology and chance, we now know a lot about Scott's final seconds. He was executed. It's right here:

"He came out of the woods at me running at a trotting pace and I felt threatened so I shot and killed him....I was following orders"

In one of the most cowardly moves by law enforcement that we've ever witnessed, a Michigan DNR officer shot and killed a family's miniature pig Thursday after he "felt threatened." Two years ago, Tony Gervasi and Brandy Savelle decided to get another pet. They adopted a miniature pig named Caesar, and he's been a part of their family every since. "He just instantly became one of us, cuddled, slept in our bed. Just like another dog," said Gervasi. Caesar was mostly an indoor pet, but recently they've been letting him explore their 28-acre property. Last week, after Caesar went out on one of his exploration trips, he never returned.

With yet another controversial police shooting of an unarmed African American man -- this time in South Carolina - making headlines, there's another sobering statistic making the rounds.

Police in the United States killed more black people in 2014 than were killed during the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

This according to an analysis by Raw Story of data released by the Centers for Disease Control. The analysis also includes numbers gathered by the website KilledByPolice.net.

The numbers show that in 2014, law enforcement killed 238 African Americans. In the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, 215 African Americans died after terrorists slammed two jet planes into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan.