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."

Six people were injured after a Boeing 757 with more than 120 people on board crash-landed at Guyana's Georgetown airport, officials said. The aircraft was en route to Canada.

Less than 20 minutes after takeoff, the Toronto-bound jet had to change course and return to the departure airport due to mid-air malfunction. The crew noticed a problem with the hydraulic system and was forced to turn the aircraft back to Cheddi Jagan Airport.

However, the emergency landing resulted in a crash, as the Boeing 757 overran the runway and hit a barrier. The incident led to the brief closure of the airport, but it has now been reopened, according to local media.

An ISIS-linked inmate is suspected to be an instigator of a prison riot that left more than 25 people killed in a high security prison in northern Tajikistan, according to media reports.

Violence broke out at the prison in the second-largest Tajik city of Khujand late on Wednesday. The prisoners joined a fellow inmate, allegedly an Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) militant, who attacked an officer and took away his weapon, Reuters reported citing security officials.

Rioters reportedly managed to take over one of the buildings of the facility, before special forces intervened and regained control.

German police descended on as many as 29 flats and offices of Greenpeace activists in response to the group's offbeat July stunt that saw tons yellow paint being poured on a busy roundabout in the German capital.

Back in July, Greenpeace activists distributed 3,500 liters of "environment-friendly" paint on a busy Berlin road to protest the use of coal. Apart from a doubtful rationale behind the action, the stunt had almost brought the traffic on the five-exit junction to a halt around one of the most famous Berlin's landmarks - the Victory Column.

Local police report that two people, including a minor, were injured in the incident which ostensibly occured after the driver had lost control of the vehicle and drove it onto the sidewalk, colliding with several parked motorcycles.

A driver in Barcelona reportedly lost control of his vehicle and veered it onto the sidewalk on Friday morning, colliding with several pedestrians and parked motorcycles.