Houston, Texas - The imprisoned father of two Texas children found living in an abandoned school bus is claiming the home was only meant to be temporary.

Mark Shorten said he planned to build a house on a wooded lot near Houston before he and his wife were arrested for embezzlement in 2010. Child welfare officials took custody of his children earlier this week after the siblings -- a 5-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl -- were found living in the dilapidated bus at the end of a muddy, one-lane road in Splendora, home to one of the poorest school districts in the state.
Fox affiliate KRIV-TV reported Thursday that no charges have been filed yet in the case. The children's parents are in federal prison for stealing money from victims of Hurricane Ike, which struck in 2008, according to the station.

The postal carrier saw the kids Wednesday near Houston, and the two were swiftly placed in foster care while authorities investigate.

"The little girl's hair was just matted, like a stray dog's," Vanessa Picazo said.

Trayvon Martin traveled to Sanford on a trip with his father. The teen returned to his Miami home in a body bag.

Martin, 17, was shot and killed Feb. 26 by a neighborhood crime watch captain.

The circumstances of the shooting are still unknown, but the 26-year-old man who shot Martin, George Zimmerman, gave a statement to police that he shot in self-defense.

Martin's grieving family said the teen went out around 7:30 on that Sunday during the NBA All-Star Game halftime to get snacks from a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store. He purchased Skittles candies and an Arizona iced tea for his stepbrother.

Somehow, on the way back to the Central Florida townhouse where Martin was staying, he ran into Zimmerman, who was armed with a 9mm handgun, reports said.

Martin was shot once in the chest.

"He had a gun, and Trayvon had Skittles," said Benjamin Crump, the family's attorney. "We want justice."

While most people have played the "if I had a million dollars I would ____ " thought game, few fill that blank in with "stay on public assistance."

Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old from Lincoln Park, Mich., is one of the few who does, and she is getting away with it. Clayton won $1 million from the Michigan State Lottery this fall, but she is still collecting and using $200 a month in food assistance from the taxpayers with her Michigan Bridge Card.

"I thought that they would cut me off, but since they didn't, I thought maybe it was okay because I'm not working," the lottery winner who just purchased a new house and car told Local 4 in Detroit. The station even filmed her shamelessly purchasing goods.

When Local 4 asked if she felt she had a right to the money, Clayton responded, "I mean I kinda do."

On the 10th of November 2010 it was discovered that an online member's forum operating under the name of the Groucho Club forum was being used over a prolonged period of time by a network of paedophiles.

The forum contained hundreds of web pages and links to pornographic videos and images of young children and infants available for sex. This discovery was made by award winning filmmaker and writer Tyrone D Murphy while investigating the sale of alcohol through the Groucho Club's website for Chapter 13 of his book The Groucho Gate Affair. The filmmaker immediately reported the discovery to the Metropolitan Police Service and to CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre).

The search terms on Google that led to the discovery of the child exploitation was 'Site:thegrouchoclub.com' and 'Site:thegrouchoclub.co.uk'. These search terms on Google will only list all the web pages within a specific domain. Murphy also discovered that the evidence of the offensive content was being deleted from the website forum, and the links on the Google listings were now forwarded to a home page of the Groucho Club's own website. However, the evidence was also stored on cache pages (snapshot) by the search engine Google of the Groucho Club forum and the illegal content. Within a week of the report to the Police, Murphy discovered that the cache pages were now also being discreetly deleted.

The preservation of the evidence at this stage was crucial to assist any criminal investigation and prosecute the offenders. Murphy again contacted the Metropolitan Police Service and CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) several times by telephone and e-mail as a matter of extreme urgency, and he relayed his concerns that the evidence was now being destroyed.

Shantelle Hicks, a 15-year-old from Gallup, N.M. claims she was first forced to leave the Wingate Elementary School and then publicly outed as being pregnant in front of all students and employees, KOB-TV reports.

Wingate Elementary is a public boarding school for Native American children from kindergarten through 8th grade.

Now, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Hicks has filed suit against the school, claiming they violated her constitutional rights. According to the complaint, school officials kicked Hicks out of school after learning of her pregnancy, but readmitted her four days later when the ACLU of New Mexico informed the school that it's illegal to deny a student access to education for being pregnant.

But two weeks after her readmission, a school counselor and the director of the middle school forced the teen to stand before the middle school assembly and announced her condition -- allegedly before anyone but her sister knew.

"It was so embarrassing to have all the other kids staring at me as I walked into the gymnasium," said Hicks, according to KOB. "I didn't want the whole school to know I was pregnant because it's not their business, and it wasn't right for my teachers to single me out."

A bioethicist at Loyola University claims that comedian Jon Stewart is currently the top public intellectual in the United States, a position that has typically been attributed to Henry Kissinger.

"Jon Stewart is our greatest public intellectual. This is no joke," Dr. Kayhan Parsi wrote in an article published in the American Journal of Bioethics.

"Although Stewart himself would deride such an assertion as the kind of hyperbole that too often permeates our political discourse, this is simply a fact," he said. "Stewart has emerged as our voice of sanity in a sea of insanity in a new media age with its ephemeral nature and lack of substance."

For the past 12 years, Stewart has mocked political theatrics in America. On The Daily Show, he often juxtaposes media clips to humorously analyze political discourse, pointing out hyperbole and misleading news narratives, or lampooning politicians' hypocrisy.

"Today, the effective public intellectual has to be less the pedant and more the artful catalyst for independent thought," Parsi wrote. "Perhaps unwittingly or even unknowingly, Stewart has taken on this role with relish and gusto."

US: Richmond, Virginia - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government's war on drugs has failed.

The outspoken evangelical Christian and host of The 700 Club on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network he founded said the war on drugs is costing taxpayers billions of dollars. He said people should not be sent to prison for marijuana possession.

The 81-year-old first became a self-proclaimed "hero of the hippie culture" in 2010 when he called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions.

"I just think it's shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of a controlled substance," Robertson said on his show March 1. "The whole thing is crazy. We've said, 'Well, we're conservatives, we're tough on crime.' That's baloney."

France - The wealthiest square in Paris was evacuated today after a huge fire broke out underneath the French capital's Ritz Hotel.

Dozens of people were treated for smoke inhalation and at least 15 luxury cars were destroyed in the blaze in an underground car park in Place Vendome.

France's Ministry of Justice was among buildings evacuated, along with numerous jewellery and designer fashion shops.

The "socialist bank" will give loans with no conditions, Ortega says

Bad credit? No credit? No problem!

President Daniel Ortega is putting on his banker's visor and taking time off from denouncing the evils of savage capitalism to try to raise startup capital for the newly announced Bank of ALBA, or BALBA.

The president-turned banking booster told Nicaraguans last night that he'd feel a lot better if Nicaragua took some of its $1.7 billion in international reserves out of established banks around the world and put it the trusted care of BALBA, which is almost one week old.

The birth of BALBA was celebrated during last weekend's summit of ALBA nations in Venezuela. The idea is that each member country - Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines - support the bank to the tune of what each economy can afford.

In Nicaragua's case, the country is expected to cough up 1% of its international reserves, whose purse strings are controlled exclusively by the autonomous Central Bank. Ortega is also asking the Sandinista-controlled National Assembly to pony up $4 million for the ALBA bank.

Athens - Greek unemployment hit another record high in December and for the first time the number of young people without a job outnumbered those in work.

Statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday that the overall jobless rate rose to 21 percent from 20.9 percent in November, twice the euro zone rate.

The average unemployment rate for 2011 jumped to 17.3 percent from 12.5 percent in the previous year, according to the figures, which are not adjusted for seasonal factors.

Youth were particularly hit. For the first time on record, more people between 15-24 years were without a job than with one. Unemployment in that age group rose to 51.1 percent, twice as high as three years ago.

Budget cuts imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund as a condition for saving the debt-laden country from a chaotic default have caused a wave of corporate closures and bankruptcies.

Greece's economy is estimated to have shrunk by a about a fifth since 2008, when it plunged into its deepest and longest post-war recession. About 600,000 jobs, more than one in ten, have been destroyed in the process.