An Egyptian court on Monday banned the Muslim Brotherhood and its vast social services network in what could be a devastating blow to the Islamist organization, which swept Mohamed Morsi to the presidency just last year and has fiercely resisted the military coup that ousted him in July.

The far-reaching ruling appears to apply to any group remotely associated with the world's oldest Islamist movement, granting temporary legal cover to the military-backed government of Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to broaden a crackdown that has already left the Brotherhood battered.

Hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been killed and thousands have been arrested, including Morsi and other top leaders. Authorities have lately reached inside mosques to bar thousands of Islamist-leaning preachers.

The ban covers "all the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, the groups emerging from it, its associations, and any institution that branches from it or follows the group or receives financial support from it," according to Egypt's state media outlet, MENA, which offered the only account of a ruling that has not been made public.

Columbia University professor and physician Dr. Prabjot Singh was attacked by a mob of 20 young men Saturday in the middle of a New York City street in what the NYPD believes was a hate crime.

The mob harrassed and beat Dr. Singh, who wears a beard and a turban, because they though the Sikh professor was Muslim. Singh, 31, was just blocks from his home, when the attack occurred.

"It's incredibly sad," Singh told the New York Daily News. "It's not the neighborhood I know. I work in this community. It's just not American."

At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday, he was walking down 110th Street on the north side of Central Park, when he was verbally harassed by a group of men on bikes.

"There was a group of 25 to 30 young men. One of them said, 'Get him, Osama,'" Dr. Singh told the New York Daily News. "I got punched directly in the face about three times."

Singh was saved when a passerby came to his aid.

"I'm grateful to them," he said of the passerby, "It could have been a lot worse."

Send your child to college, and watch him earn a mental-disorder diagnosis.

What better target-rich environment for pharma/psychiatry to exploit than colleges?

Constantly renewing enrollments of the young and vulnerable, under pressure to perform academically, away from home for the first time, becoming aware that a degree may earn them zero security in the shrinking job market.

Through on-campus counseling services, feeder lines channel students into psychiatrists' office. Some colleges even have "crisis response teams" to guide students with problems into the heart of psychiatric-drug darkness.

The JED Foundation is an example of a group that networks with colleges to set up comprehensive systems for mental-health services. It boasts two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association on its boards. JED's medical director, Dr. Victor Schwartz, writes:

In the past year, 21.2 percent of college students received a psychiatric diagnosis or were treated for mental health issues such as depression or eating disorders, and an estimated 6.6 percent of students reported having serious thoughts of suicide...

Rising food prices are causing stress for four in 10 consumers, while a third say they are struggling to feed themselves or their family.

Almost eight in 10 shoppers (78%) are concerned about the increasing cost of food, with almost half (45%) spending a larger proportion of their available income at the supermarket compared to a year ago, the survey for Which? found.

Food prices have risen over and above general inflation by 12.6% over the past six years, according to the Office of National Statistics, while incomes have stagnated.

A tiny snake "about the width of a pencil" is responsible for grounding a jet of 370 passengers.

While the eight-inch reptile didn't cause quite the same high octane scenes as his cold-blooded cousins in the Samuel L Jackson film Snakes On A Plane, it succeeded in raising the profile of the humble Mandarin Rat Snake.

The live specimen was found in the passenger cabin of a Qantas Boeing 747 in Sydney on Sunday night.

Residential school reconciliation walk ends week-long of Truth and Reconciliation Commission event


Thousands of people braved a pouring rain in Vancouver Sunday to take part in a reconciliation walk marking the sad history of residential schools in Canada, erupting in a raucous cheer as the daughter of American civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. urged all Canadians to move forward and heal.

Bernice King told the crowd not to give up on the process of progress.

A young First Nations boy beats a drum as he walks with thousands of people during the Walk for Reconciliation in Vancouver, B.C., on Sunday September 22, 2013.

"My father said something very powerful about progress. He said, human progress is neither automatic, nor inevitable," she said from a stage set up at the start of the march, which drew a huge crowd that some estimates put more than 10,000.

"Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle."

Pope Francis has called for a global economic system that puts people and not "an idol called money" at its heart, drawing on the hardship of his immigrant family as he sympathised with unemployed workers in a part of Italy that has suffered greatly from the recession.

Addressing about 20,000 people in the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, the Argentinian pontiff said that his parents had "lost everything" after they emigrated from Italy and that he understood the suffering that came from joblessness.

"Where there is no work, there is no dignity," he said, in ad-libbed remarks after listening to three locals, including an unemployed worker who spoke of how joblessness "weakens the spirit". But the problem went far beyond the Italian island, said Francis, who has called for wholesale reform of the financial system.

"This is not just a problem of Sardinia; it is not just a problem of Italy or of some countries in Europe," he said. "It is the consequence of a global choice, an economic system which leads to this tragedy; an economic system which has at its centre an idol called money."

The 76-year-old said that God had wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world. "But now, in this ethics-less system, there is an idol at the centre and the world has become the idolater of this 'money-god'," he added.

A man strangled his wife to death because he felt divorce would be too costly, a court heard yesterday.

AQ, 23, from India, murdered Bushra Atif with the help of his friend RA, 28, from Pakistan, then wrapped her body in a bin bag and dumped it in the desert, prosecutors told the Criminal Court. The bag was discovered on the Dubai to Al Ain Road by a municipality cleaner who spotted the woman's head protruding and called police.

When officers tried to contact the woman's husband they discovered he had left the country on the same day as her death - March 11.

The court heard that the man had brought his wife to the UAE about three years ago but that he had moved out of their home and moved in with his friend, whom the wife believed to be a bad influence.

"She told me that she often warned him about his friend and asked him to stay away from him but he wouldn't listen," testified the dead woman's father-in-law, QA, 55.

The couple's problems grew after the man quit his job. Once he came home drunk and assaulted his wife because she asked him to look for work, said the father-in-law.

A bill to hand over control of research institutions in Russia from the country's Academy of Sciences to the federal government was approved on Wednesday in the federal parliament despite vehement objections from the scientific community.

The landmark bill, which has yet to be approved by the upper house of parliament and signed by the president, was hurriedly passed by the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, on Wednesday in the second and third readings while hundreds of scientists were rallying outside the legislature's building.

Despite decades of decline since the end of the Soviet Union, the Academy of Sciences is still the country's leading scientific research establishment comprising about 50,000 researchers across its 434 scholarly institutions.

New York, NY - Six students were arrested Tuesday evening in an unprovoked police attack against a peaceful protest lead by City University of New York (CUNY) students and faculty decrying the University's appointment of former CIA chief and ex-General, David Petraeus as an adjunct professor to the Honors College. Students were punched, pushed against parked vehicles and thrown to the pavement by police captains and officers after the NYPD forced them off the sidewalk and into the street. Tuesday's demonstration was called for by the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY.

The arrested students were arraigned Wednesday evening, September 18, at the Manhattan Criminal Court located at 100 Centre Street. The courtroom was flooded with supporters ranging from activists, to fellow students, to CUNY faculty outraged at the NYPD's response to their student's attempts to peaceably assemble.

"As students were chanting 'War Criminal Petraeus Out of CUNY Now,' I was shocked to see several police officers grab and brutalize one of the demonstrators," said City College student Yexenia Vanegas. "This was completely unprovoked, as demonstrators made [it] clear that they were there to defend our university in a peaceful protest."

The attack occurred in front of CUNY's Macaulay Honors College, where Petraeus has been appointed to teach a class on public policy. "Protestors were marching in a circle on the sidewalk and chanting, but the police forced them into the street and then charged. One of the most brutal things I saw was that five police officers slammed a Queens College student face down to the pavement across the street from Macaulay, put their knees on his back and he was then repeatedly kneed in the back," said Hunter student Michael Brian. "The student was one of those pointed out by 'white shirt' officers, then seized and brutalized. A Latina student was heaved through the air and slammed to the ground."