A girl's mom got a reality check from Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax after she felt justified in excluding a little boy from a public playground.

The anonymous mother wrote to Hax about her "playground drama." It seems she and other moms of daughters had unofficially claimed a local playground as their girls-only meetup place at a set time each week.

Until disaster struck and a strange mother brought her son to the public park and dared to let him slide, swing and play during their special time.

The girl's mom asked the mom of the boy to leave and was shocked when the other woman seemed upset.

"If she comes back, is there a better way I can approach her? This has been such a sweet time for moms and daughters and having a boy there is naturally going to change things. We live in a world where boys get everything and girls are left with the crumbs, and I would think this mom would realize that, but she seems to think her son is entitled to crash this girls-only time. I know I can't legally keep her from a public park, but can I appeal to her better nature?" the mom asked Hax.

The editor-in-chief of foreign-funded Russian website Meduza has resigned over a sexual harassment scandal. The man allegedly groped a colleague's wife at a drunken party and told her he would easily get away with it.

The incident occurred on October 20 when Meduza journalists were celebrating the fourth birthday of their outlet. It was apparently a wild party, with a lot of booze involved, at the Meduza headquarters in the Latvian capital, Riga.

At one point, the editor-in-chief, Ivan Kolpakov, allegedly approached the wife of one of his colleagues and grabbed her bottom. The victim later recalled that the heavily intoxicated man explained his actions by saying: "You're the only one at this party who I can harass and get away with it."

The woman's husband told Meduza's editorial board about Kolpakov's behavior and said he would quit if the man kept his position as editor-in-chief. He eventually carried out his ultimatum and filed for voluntary leave, despite the outlet trying to persuade him to stay or switch to working remotely.

Broward County, Florida, home of the now infamous "hanging chad" fiasco during the 2000 showdown between George Bush and Al Gore, may be on the verge of yet another controversial election cycle. Historically a democrat stronghold, Broward County always comes under extra scrutiny during presidential elections as it can single-highhandedly swing the entire state of Florida in one direction or another.

Per a new report from NewsMax, the 2016 election cycle may be among the most controversial yet as a temporary worker for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office has been fired after reporting what she thought to be "election fraud." In a sworn affidavit presented to the Florida State Attorney General, this temporary worker claims that she witnessed "four Supervisor of Elections employees sitting at the same table actively filling out election ballots." Further, according to the affidavit, each of the four workers "had a stack of blank ballots to the right of them ... and a stack of completed ballots to their left."

In a glorious example of swift justice, a 65-year-old man has been hospitalized after a botched attempt to topple a monument of Yugoslav anti-fascist martyr Rade Končar caused the statue to fall on him and break his leg.

The shattered limb isn't the only punishment the man will receive for the act of "savage vandalism," according to the police. He will also be hit with a fine, and possibly even jail time after being released from the hospital. Meanwhile, the statue has been restored to its full glory.

Končar fought against the Nazi-backed Ustaše regime during the second World War, but was eventually ambushed and killed by firing squad. After his death, he became a resistance symbol and he remains a figure of national pride for many Croatians.

A man shot by police after stabbing three people in Melbourne's Bourke Street has died in hospital.

One of the stabbing victims died of his injuries at the scene, while two others, a 59-year-old man and a 26-year-old man, are in hospital being treated for non-life threatening injuries.

Police shot the man in the chest after he charged at them with the knife.

He was taken to hospital in a critical condition and kept under guard before succumbing to his injuries.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton told a press conference tonight the attack was being treated as an act of terrorism.

"From what we know of that individual, we are treating this as a terrorism incident."

He said the attacker, 31, was known to "federal intelligence authorities" as well as to Victoria Police.

Israel's gross diamond exports have crashed by a staggering 45 per cent since the 2014 massacre in Gaza that resulted in the death of over 2,200 people, mainly civilians including over 550 children.

The net value of Israel's diamond exports has fallen even further, by 60 per cent from $11.25 billion to $4.4 billion over the period. This is about the same as the value of Israel's total arms exports.

The Israeli diamond exchange initially blamed the decline on weak global demand and more recently on globalisation but the sudden step decline shows that's plainly not the case.

Freedom once meant something significant for mankind. It meant ceasing to be suppressed and imprisoned by forces that endeavour to control one. The word 'freedom' conjured a sense of what it means, at least to some degree, to be master of one's destiny.

No longer, For many, the new freedom has almost exactly the opposite meaning. Now freedom seems to be associated with having someone or something doing one's thinking for one; making decisions that one 'can't be bothered 'or doesn't want to make - and ultimately completely relieving one from responsibility for taking any form of action other than that which enriches one's pocket and/or one's narcissist fantasies.

In fact this new 'freedom' offers - on a plate - to the oppressor of old the chance to continue his mastery of human control, but under a new guise: the tantalising deception of 'convenience'. That which by-passes the need for mental creative effort (and often physical effort as well) and which makes one believe that there is really little or nothing to do, other than tap a keyboard and get tuned into a cyberspace virtual reality world which will do the rest for one. This is the great tempter of our age. The one that lays out the red carpet for a soft and sly take-over by nothing less than a non human artificial intelligence.

Yes, the superficial seductiveness of the pocket sized touch-button technology of passivity, the human masters of which sit in Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, monitoring every move that serves the further advancement of the totalitarian central control system.

Did slavery ever loose its grip on the great mass of humanity? Have the majority always preferred the safety of mindlessness to the dangers of consciousness? Was Shakespeare on the button when he had Hamlet pose the infamous rhetorical question "To be or not to be, that is the question".

It's a question that should never need to be posed, and indeed never would have been had some betrayal of the divine nature of humanity not taken place, many thousands of years ago. After all, the spirit infused natural make-up of mankind provided all the fuel needed to guide us on our way to the full expression of our potentiality as universal beings. Yet a deviation from this path was established, and has proved to be a strong opiate - a formidable obstacle to the spiritual evolution of our species.

This deviation has gone so far, that nothing less than the ability to retain the power of independent thought is now at stake.

Police in North Carolina responded to reports of an active shooter at Topsail High School, near Wilmington. Instead of finding a gunman, they found a noisy and malfunctioning water heater.

Local law enforcement responded to a call from the school some time around 6.30am on Friday, and instantly prepared for the worst.

"It's extremely busy right now," an emergency dispatcher told Time magazine. "All of our units are trying to take this person into custody."

Reports from social media suggested that the shooter may have been on the roof of the school, but it emerged a short while later that there never was a shooter at all.

An Istanbul criminal court on Thursday handed a jail sentence to a journalist working for Syria's SANA news agency after he criticized the Turkish president.

Hosni Mahali was convicted for insulting Recep Tayyip Erdogan over his policies and blaming his government for letting terrorists cross into Syria, the state news agency said.

The charges added up to a cumulative prison time of four years and one month.

The court commuted the sentence to probation as Mahali has no criminal record, according to CNN Turk. His defense team said they would appeal the verdict in the Turkish top court.

A federal judge in Montana has issued an injunction once again halting construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, saying that President Trump had "simply discarded" the environmental impact the pipeline would have.

In a 54-page order issued late Thursday, Judge Morris alleges the US Department of State committed multiple violations when it approved the construction of the $8 billion, 1,900-kilometer pipeline in 2017. The project has been embroiled in legal battles for over a decade amid challenges from both Native Americans and environmentalists.

"The Department instead simply discarded prior factual findings related to climate change to support its course reversal,"Morris wrote. "An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past, any more than it can ignore inconvenient facts when it writes on a blank slate."

Trump hit back against the court's decision on Friday, saying it was politically motivated and a "disgrace."