People in Sweden have been suffering recently from thieves, who dress in ghost costumes, according to police reports.

Now, police in Sweden are warning tourists in Stockholm, to be on the lookout for people in ghosts costumes, who try to distract their victims and then pick their pockets.

Police said that tourists have reported that their pockets were picked while they were distracted by people wearing white sheets with white face paint.

"The thieves are always finding new methods. Often, the theft is carried out using some sort of distraction. They come onto people very strongly and aggressively, which scares people," Stockholm police spokesperson Gunnar Thun said.

"Many tourists think that Stockholm is a safe city. It is indeed a pretty safe city when it comes to violent crimes, but not when it comes to crimes against personal property. People got robbed often here," Thun said.

He warned tourists to watch out from the ghosts. "People should keep a safe distance from them," he said.

A woman broke into tears at a town hall event with Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) during a discussion about President Barack Obama's plan to reduce Social Security cost of living increases.

Throughout this year, the White House has been considering adopting what's known as chained CPI, a less generous way of calculating Social Security cost-of-living increases that assumes seniors will change their buying habits as certain items become more expensive.

Compared with the current model, advocacy group Social Security Works has said that a person who began drawing Social Security at the age of 62 would be receiving 7.32 percent less in benefits per year by the age of 88 under chained CPI.

"I'm sorry to say that the president of my own party has advocated this and he's wrong," Harkin told a group of seniors at a retirement center on Tuesday. "I'm so tired of people saying we've got to cut Social Security. I thought, we got to come back and say something, no, you've got to increase Social Security."

Russia has destroyed more than 30,000 metric tons of chemical warfare agents, or about 76 percent of its chemical weapons stockpile, Russia's industry and trade minister said Thursday.

Russia has destroyed more chemical agents than any other of the 180 signees of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, Minister Denis Manturov said while visiting a chemical weapons disposal facility in the Bryansk Region, which borders Ukraine and Belarus.

More than 500 inspections of Russia's chemical weapons stockpile have been conducted since the convention came into effect, and not a single violation has been detected in this respect, the official added.

Last year, Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Georgy Kalamanov said Russia planned to destroy all of its chemical weapons by 2015.

A 95-year-old world War II veteran died after being Tasered and hit with bean bag rounds by police for threatening care home staff - but his family insist he was killed unnecessarily.

Police say that John Wrana, who lived in a Chicago assisting living home, was brandishing his cane, a metal shoehorn and a knife before officers shocked him and hit him with bean bag rounds.
The senior citizen had been reported to authorities because he was being 'involuntarily' committed for medical treatment by staff at the Victory Centre, the Chicago Tribune reported.

He was behaving in 'combative' manner, by threatening staff with his cane and a shoehorn. Wrana was reportedly scheduled to undergo a risky surgery, and was apparently afraid to end up on life support.

When police arrived at Park Forest at around 8.45pm, they said he was ordered to surrender, but he refused to and continued to berate staff and threaten them.

At just 17, Israel Hernandez-Llach was already an award-winning artist, on the threshold of acclaim in Miami Beach art circles. He was a sculptor, painter, writer and photographer whose craft was inspired by his home country of Colombia and his adopted city, Miami.

He was also a graffiti artist, known as "Reefa," who sprayed colorful splashes of paint on the city's abandoned buildings while playing cat-and-mouse with cops, who, like many, consider graffiti taggers to be vandals, not artists.

It was while spray-painting a shuttered McDonald's early Tuesday morning that Hernandez-Llach was chased down by Miami Beach police and shot in the chest with a Taser. He later died.

A massive early-morning fire has destroyed the arrivals hall at Kenya's main international airport - the largest in east Africa - forcing its closure and the rerouting of all inbound flights.

No serious injuries were reported at Jomo Kenyatta international airport (JKIA), said Michael Kamau, the cabinet secretary for transport and infrastructure. Two people were treated for smoke inhalation.

The blaze broke out on the 15th anniversary of the bombings of the US embassy buildings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, in neighboring Tanzania, but there were no immediate signs of terrorism in Wednesday's fire. Kenya's anti-terror police chief, Boniface Mwaniki, told the Associated Press that he was waiting for the fire to be put out so he could inspect the scene before making a judgment.

Black smoke was visible across much of Nairobi as emergency teams battled the blaze. Passengers reported a slow response by the under-resourced fire brigade. The fire raged for more than four hours before being contained, though flames still persisted two hours later.

Joshua Hill's daughter, Alexandria, was taken from him and his wife in November 2012 because they smoked pot in their Round Rock, Texas, home while their child slept.

The 2-year-old child was then placed in an abusive foster home by a private agency contracted by Child Protective Services.

"She would come to visitation with bruises on her, and mold and mildew in her bag," Hill told KVUE-TV (video below). "It got to a point where I actually told CPS that they would have to have me arrested because I wouldn't let her go back."

Alexandria was placed in a second foster home with Sherill Small in Rockdale, Texas, seven months ago.

It would be her last home.

Disturbing video has surfaced of an attack on a school bus in Pinellas County, Fla. In the video, three 15-year-old teenagers are seen brutally beating a 13-year-old boy. After the fight, the victim left the bus with black eyes, bruises and a broken arm.

Since the video has been publicized, many have called into question whether the bus driver, 64-year-old John Moody, did enough to stop the fight. Moody can be heard frantically calling dispatchers during the fight, even saying "they're going to beat this boy to death," but he never physically intervenes in an attempt to stop the beating.

"You gotta get somebody here quick, quick, quick, quick," he told dispatchers. "They're about to beat this boy to death over here. Please get somebody here quick. They're still doing it. There's nothing I can do."

Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an "emergency" that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country's nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.

Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) are only a temporary solution, he said.

Tepco's "sense of crisis is weak," Kinjo said. "This is why you can't just leave it up to Tepco alone" to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

"Right now, we have an emergency," he said.

What could possibly go wrong when miners, frackers, and drillers reshape the geology beneath our feet? Talk to the evacuees of Bayou Corne, Louisiana.

About once a month, the residents of Bayou Corne, Louisiana, meet at the Assumption Parish library in the early evening to talk about the hole in their lives. "It was just like going through cancer all over again," says one. "You fight and you fight and you fight and you think, 'Doggone it, I've beaten this thing,' and then it's back." Another spent last Thanksgiving at a 24-hour washateria because she and her disabled husband had nowhere else to go. As the box of tissues circulates, a third woman confesses that after 20 years of sobriety she recently testified at a public meeting under the influence.

"The God of my understanding says, 'As you sow, so shall you reap,'" says Kenny Simoneaux, a balding man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He has instructed his grandchildren to lock up the ammunition. "I'm so goddamn mad I could kill somebody."

But the support group isn't for addiction, PTSD, or cancer, though all of these maladies are present. The hole in their lives is a literal one. One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine, forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne's 350 residents - an exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.

Texas Brine's operation sits atop a three-mile-wide, mile-plus-deep salt deposit known as the Napoleonville Dome, which is sheathed by a layer of oil and natural gas, a common feature of the salt domes prevalent in Gulf Coast states. The company specializes in a process known as injection mining, and it had sunk a series of wells deep into the salt dome, flushing them out with high-pressure streams of freshwater and pumping the resulting saltwater to the surface. From there, the brine is piped and trucked to refineries along the Mississippi River and broken down into sodium hydroxide and chlorine for use in manufacturing everything from paper to medical supplies.

Bayou Corne is the biggest ongoing disaster in the United States you haven't heard of.