Defying Madrid's demand to "firmly" keep order, supporters of jailed Catalan pro-independence leaders launched a fresh rally in Barcelona. The protest later turned into scuffles with police and barricades were also set ablaze.

The unrest is gripping the Catalan capital, as well as other cities, for the third consecutive day. The mass rallies were sparked by Spain's Supreme Court's Monday ruling that sentenced nine Catalan pro-independence top brass to jail terms between nine and 13 years over their roles in the failed 2017 independence bid.

A seven-storey residential building has collapsed in the city of Fortaleza in north-eastern Brazil, killing at least one person, firefighters say.

Seven people were rescued after the building came crashing down. But 10 more are feared trapped in the rubble.

A student who was trapped sent a smiling "selfie" to family members to show he was well, O Globo website says. He was later rescued.

Rescuers risk being caught in further collapses, officials warn.

As new revelations about CNN emerge from Project Veritas (see also ExposeCNN.com for updates), here is a backgrounder I wrote and published several years ago. It brings back fond memories, and offers the beleaguered children at CNN solutions to their never-ending problems...

"CNN is still licking their wounds after a rather disastrous couple of weeks, where a shoddy Russia-Trump story led to three staffers resigning, a Project Veritas investigation exposed that the network's producers peddled the Russia story for ratings, and what came off as a wholly inappropriate veiled threat against an anonymous Reddit user who created a Trump WWE video, which the president tweeted before the Fourth of July Holiday. The video shows Trump beating up WWE's Vince McMahon, whose face has been superimposed with the CNN logo. The media went apoplectic as an attack against the press; it wasn't. This spurred the network's reporters to find the user and pretty much threaten to dox him if he continues to post things CNN doesn't like." (Townhall, Matt Vespa, 7/7/17)

If you create a giant, you gain extraordinary visibility, and if the giant develops an unsightly and grotesque case of fungal disease, that's a problem.

CNN was born in 1980. At the time, it was the first television network offering 24/7 news, and it was the first network offering nothing but news in the US.

In 1991, CNN's coverage of the Gulf War reached a billion viewers worldwide.

Today, CNN International reaches 200 countries.

That's a giant.

It is an idea that has always united radicals, from the sans-culottes of the French Revolution to current student activists at the University of Missouri: they have all detested the scourge of social hierarchy, the peculiar fact that some people rank higher than others and enjoy privileged access to some resources — be they power, esteem, attention or financial reward. It is, of course, not only radicals of past and present who shun hierarchies. Even in the more polite circles of newsrooms, sociology departments or centrist party academies, there is broad agreement that abolishing hierarchies has to be a moral imperative. Prestigious philosophers, like, say, Elizabeth Anderson, who can in no way be associated with the radical fringes, demand the dismantling of social hierarchies. In effect, the discourse of social justice is now largely synonymous with outlining what an abolition of status hierarchies would involve and if you ever wanted to make enemies and alienate people try to suggest at the next board meeting: "Well, let's introduce a clear, steep hierarchy for a change!"

Yet at the same time, the attitude of ordinary folk towards hierarchies seems pretty relaxed. Undisturbed by the consensus on the intrinsic maliciousness of hierarchies, most people seem rather at ease with their given place in hierarchies and happily navigate their every-day lives therein, from the various ranks in their companies, over league tables of colleges or sports teams, to prestige systems in their gym, tiers in frequent flyer programs, or follower-number contests on Instagram. Unsupervised by politicians, philosophers or life coaches, most of us are perfectly happy to constantly add to the vertical dimension of our lives and to introduce ever new forms of social stratification, forms of super- and subordination to which we joyfully submit. I don't even think that the most publicly committed status-egalitarians privately act any differently and the academic departments in which they operate tend to be the fiercest hierarchical environments. We are all engaged in status struggles, we orient our lives in relation to hierarchies, make sense of our goals and our world in their terms and perceive their absence as chaos and cacophony.

Editor's note: Last Thursday, Norman Finkelstein spoke on a panel at Princeton titled "Black and Palestinian Solidarity," and made harsh comments about Israel's treatment of Gaza. The Daily Princetonian covered the event on October 11, and the headline stated flatly, "Finkelstein GS [Graduate School] '87 delivers anti-Semitic remarks at panel..."

The article focused on Finkelstein's exchange with a Princeton freshman who said he had served in the Israeli Defense Forces on the Gaza fence. Jacob Katz said, "he did witness violence from the Palestinian side, contrary to Finkelstein's claim that Palestinian peace efforts are entirely nonviolent."

Finkelstein responded, per the Princetonian:

"'You have to deal with the fact that you come here and you announce that you were on the border. You are a concentration camp guard. That's a hard thing for a Jew to have to swallow. But that is [a] fact.... No shame,' Finkelstein went on. 'Most concentration camps guards don't go around now broadcasting that fact. There should be a lot of shame at what you are doing.'"

The article also stated,

"During the talk, Finkelstein expressed an anti-Semitic trope, saying, 'They [the Israelis] are biped bloodhounds drinking the blood of one million [Palestinian] children.'... Finkelstein later asserted that Gaza is a concentration camp, saying that any refugees' attempts to leave result in death, regardless of age or ability... 'They just want to breathe and to live,' Finkelstein said repeatedly.

An organizer of the panel, Leopoldo Solis, was quoted saying, "We do not condone how these words changed the conversation to a less-productive space."

U.S. crude oil production growth may have slowed down this year, but the largest oil-producing counties in the Permian basin continue to feel a shortage of labor.

The predicament for small oil services business owners in New Mexico is aggravated by the surge in worksite audits, investigations, and arrests as part of U.S. President Donald Trump's tougher stance on illegal immigration.

A growing number of owners of oil-related businesses in the second-biggest oil-producing county in the United States, Lea County in New Mexico, now avoid hiring undocumented immigrants for oil field work, fearing the clampdown on immigration will affect their business, Reuters reporter Andrew Hay writes.

There are still oil field services business owners who continue to hire an illegal labor force.

Yet, those who want to play by the rules find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, President Trump's pro-oil policies clash with impact from the crackdown on immigration, which makes business owners idle drilling rigs and equipment not because they have drilled out all the shale wells in Lea County, but because they can't find legal immigrant workers to do some of the dangerous difficult jobs on the oil field that some Americans shun.

Filmmakers Patricia Marcoccia and Maziar Ghaderi have been making the media rounds for their new documentary on Jordan Peterson — the Canadian psychologist who's exploded in popularity for his no-holds-barred opposition to all things politically correct — and the pair received a text in the middle of their interview with Seattle paper The Stranger.

The text came from a pastor outside of Portland, Oregon, who agreed to show the film — "The Rise of Jordan Peterson" — at his church and had been getting complaints and threats as a result, the paper said. The pastor forwarded one of the threats to Ghaderi, the Stranger reported:

"Fair warning," it read, "several community organizations are planning to shut down your showing of the Jordan Peterson propaganda film. While many of us aren't Christian and some even flat-out condemn the religion, we do not want any harm to come to your place of worship or those within. However, we cannot allow fascism to continue to rise and will not tolerate its presence in our city, whether it is on the streets or on the waterfront or in a church. Read some history books, read about eugenics, read about sex and gender and then compare it to Peterson. Pray on it if you must. Do the right thing. As much as we joke about it, we really don't want to have to bring out the guillotine to fix society."

Though the recordings from inside CNN by Project Veritas are generating lots of interest, the hashtag is not auto-completing or showing up as trending on Twitter. But if it really is being throttled, it wouldn't be the first time.

The conservative gadflies at Veritas, best known for making undercover videos of mainstream media figures saying things they'd rather keep private, have released a flurry of videos from inside CNN since Monday with the help of a whistleblower technician who worked for the network. The recordings purport to show CNN as being obsessed with resisting President Donald Trump.

Even before the first video dropped, however, Veritas director James O'Keefe made a point of showing how the hashtag #ExposeCNN is not being allowed to trend or auto-complete on Twitter, despite being vastly more popular than others suggested in its stead.

On Saturday morning, a Portland-area man was killed under mysterious circumstances.

Twenty-three-year-old Sean Kealiher, who was known locally in the Antifa community under the pseudonym "Armeanio Lewis," died of blunt-force trauma after being hit by a car, according to police. The vehicle that allegedly hit him had been shot at and was found crashed outside the building of the Democratic Party of Oregon. Local politicians, media and activists are praising Kealiher as a progressive hero. Full disclosure: I had numerous run-ins with Keahiler in my capacity as a journalist documenting antifa's activities.

So far, no one knows what really happened on early Saturday morning when Kealiher was killed. Portland Police have mostly kept mum about their early investigation, though they are pleading for witnesses to come forward. Antifa ideologues have a code of never allowing each other to cooperate with police. Police did confirm that the crime scene and car showed damage from gunfire. Unsurprisingly, the police and emergency responders were never called by Kealiher's comrades. In fact, a homeless man who lives in a tent across from the Democratic Party headquarters told local media he saw Kealiher's friends drag his body into a car, leaving a trail of blood.

Despite the uncertainties, this hasn't kept the local media from running stories that insinuate — without evidence — that he may have been targeted for his left-wing activism. Many headlines have focused on the fact that Kealiher was fatally injured after leaving Cider Riot, an antifa pub found by state regulators this year to be a militant left-wing hotbed where patrons were allowed to carry illegal weapons.

India has halved its poverty rate since the 1990s and achieved a seven plus growth rate over the last 15 years, the World Bank said on October 15.

India is both critical to the success of global development efforts, including eliminating extreme poverty, and as an influential leader for global goods such as addressing climate change, the bank said ahead of the annual meeting between it and the International Monetary Fund.

The country has achieved annual growth exceeding 7% over the last 15 years, halved its poverty rate since the 1990s, and enjoyed strong improvements in most human development outcomes, the World Bank said.