A building that was to be repurposed into a home for refugee children has been set ablaze in a second apparent arson attack in the east of Sweden. Firefighters managed to contain the fire, but not before it devoured the former school building.

Firefighters were still at the scene Monday morning in the city of Haernoesand, according to Aftonbladet daily, after receiving a call at 4am. No one was injured in the incident, though the building was totally destroyed. An investigation has been launched, while the incident was classified as an arson, according to local media.

Sweden is refurbishing old buildings to house arriving refugees, 163,000 of whom came to the country in 2015, making it the European Union's most active asylum host, with most arrivals per capita.

The former school was to be made into accommodation for children unaccompanied by parents. But apparently not everyone agrees with the policy on welcoming refugees: the same building was targeted in a failed arson attempt on April 9.

On Saturday, economists in U.S. President Barack Obama's administration released a report detailing the adverse effects on the economy derived from locking non-violent drug offenders and criminals behind bars.

For decades, a guiding philosophy of authoritarians was that locking more people up would result in less crime. This has created a prison state in the U.S., which represents 4.4% of the world's population yet houses 22% of the world's prisoners.

Since 1980 alone, the US prison population has skyrocketed by nearly 5 times.

However, the negative effects of such a totalitarian approach to drug crimes and other victimless offenses is having a staggering economic impact on the United States.

If nobody is working in one out of every five U.S. families, then how in the world can the unemployment rate be close to 5 percent as the Obama administration keeps insisting? The truth, of course, is that the U.S. economy is in far worse condition than we are being told. Last week, I discussed the fact that the Federal Reserve has found that 47 percent of all Americans would not be able to come up with $400 for an unexpected visit to the emergency room without borrowing it or selling something. But Barack Obama and his minions never bring up that number. Nor do they ever bring up the fact that 20 percent of all families in America are completely unemployed. The following comes directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

In 2015, the share of families with an employed member was 80.3 percent, up by 0.2 percentage point from 2014. The likelihood of having an employed family member rose in 2015 for Black families (from 76.4 percent to 77.7 percent) and for Hispanic families (from 85.9 percent to 86.4 percent). The likelihood for White and Asian families showed little or no change (80.1 percent and 88.6 percent, respectively).

Fracking should be banned as a "global threat" as it causes methane leaks contaminating water in the communities near gas wells, says an Australian MP who literally set a river ablaze to draw attention to the adverse effects of the practice.

The companies that extract coal seam gas via fracking are duping people into believing that their technology is safe, while in reality it has contributed greatly to the pollution of sites like Condamine river located in the Australian state of Queensland just near the fracking site, Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham said in an interview to RT.

"This gas is leaking out of the ground because of the fracking. They have thousands of gas wells around this river, around this site. They drill, they frack, but the gas isn't just flowing up their gas wells, it's coming through the ground," he said, stressing that Origin Energy company, that operate the wells, "should be condemned for polluting one of our most important rivers."

In our part of the world, it's not often that potential "collateral damage" speaks, but it happened last week. A Pakistani tribal leader, Malik Jalal, flew to England to plead in a newspaper piece he wrote and in media interviews to be taken off the Obama White House's "kill list." ("I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead.") Jalal, who lives in Pakistan's tribal borderlands, is a local leader and part of a peace committee sanctioned by the Pakistani government that is trying to tamp down the violence in the region. He believes that he's been targeted for assassination by Washington. (Four drone missiles, he claims, have just missed him or his car.) His family, he says, is traumatized by the drones. "I don't want to end up a 'Bugsplat' -- the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone," he writes. "More importantly, I don't want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized."

Normally, what "they" do to us, or our European counterparts (think: Brussels, Paris, or San Bernardino), preoccupies us 24/7. What we do to "them" -- and them turns out to be far more than groups of terrorists -- seldom touches our world at all. As TomDispatch readers know, this website has paid careful attention to the almost 300 wedding celebrants killed by U.S. air power between late 2001 and the end of 2013 -- eight wedding parties eviscerated in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen). These are deaths that, unlike the 14 Americans murdered in San Bernardino, the 32 Belgians and others killed in Brussels, and the 130 French and others slaughtered in Paris, have caused not even a ripple here (though imagine for a second the reaction if even a single wedding, no less eight of them and hundreds of revelers, had been wiped out by a terror attack in the U.S. in these years).

Thousands of people rallied in Moldova's capital, Chisinau, on Sunday in the latest act of a long-running anti-government protest demanding snap elections and the government's resignation. Some protesters fought with police, leaving 14 officers injured.

The rally was staged by the right-wing Dignity and Truth Platform Party, the Liberal Reformist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Moldova. Protesters began gathering near the parliament building on Sunday afternoon chanting "Snap elections!" and "Down with the government and the parliament," according to Sputnik.

Members of Dignity and Truth accuse the government of being highly corrupt, dependent on local oligarchs, and responsible for the impoverishment of the population. The party, which is comprised of former politicians and advocates promoting reunification with Romania, also blames the Moldovan leadership for being slow in its efforts to integrate with the EU.

Has something gone adrift within the moral compass of our 'news' reporting? In the past week, 64 Afghans have been killed in the largest bomb to have exploded in Kabul in 15 years. At least 340 were wounded. The Taliban set off their explosives at the very wall of the 'elite' security force - watch out for that word 'elite' - which was supposed to protect the capital. Whole families were annihilated. No autopsies for them. Local television showed an entire family - a mother and father and three children blown to pieces in a millisecond - while the city's ambulance service reported that its entire fleet (a miserable 15 vehicles) were mobilised for the rescue effort. One ambulance was so packed with wounded that the back doors came off their hinges.

But Prince also died this week.

Protests surrounding a rally at Stone Mountain erupted in violence Saturday as demonstrators trying to reach a white power group hurled rocks and fireworks at police attempting to block them.

Eight counterprotesters had been arrested by late morning for refusing to take their masks off, authorities said.

At least one was seen spraying a Georgia State Patrol officer with pepper spray. Others engaged in physical skirmishes with law enforcement officers dressed in riot gear, said John Bankhead, Stone Mountain Park police spokesman.

Happiness can't be downloaded like a cellphone app, Pope Francis has said in a special mass for the teens in the Vatican on Sunday.

"Happiness has no price," the Pontiff said, adding that it's "not an app that you can download on your phones, nor will the latest update bring you freedom and grandeur in love," AP reported.

On Saturday, the head of the Catholic Church has made a surprise appearance before tens of thousands of youths gathered at St Peter's Square for a Holy Year weekend for teenagers.

Despite no earlier arrangements made, Pope Francis heard confessions from 16 youths, aged from 13 to 16 years.

Currency investors and money managers have started exiting the US dollar for the first time since mid-2014 as neither the US economy, nor central bank policy, nor corporate earnings have provided any evidence that buying into the greenback will be profitable anytime soon.

As US corporate quarterly earnings figures have proven to be a disappointment for a third consecutive quarter, and macroeconomic data indicate the broader economy is increasingly exposed to the risk of recession, US hedge funds' bearish bets on the greenback are outweighing bullish positions for the first time since July 2014. Investors are exiting the US currency for one more reason: the Federal Reserve's dovishness on policy, stemming from the weak performance of the economy, with the Fed's April policy meeting likely to end with interest rates unchanged. Subsequently, the dollar's weakness opens opportunities for US enterprises to regain some of their international competitiveness, which they lost to the greenback's rally in the last 18 months, while pushing oil and commodity prices higher, to the relief of select emerging markets.

The number of US hedge funds' selling positions on the dollar surpassed buying ones by a total of 21,567 contracts in mid-April, according to data provided by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The greenback is thus poised to slide against its eight major peers for the first time since July 2014, easing the currently rife imbalances in international trade, relieving emerging markets somewhat, and exacerbating disinflationary pressures for Japan, where the yen's strength is hitting exporters' competitiveness.