A Turkish Airlines Airbus A330 jet flying from New York City to Istanbul was sharply diverted mid-air and landed in Halifax, Canada due to a bomb threat. Firefighting crews and police have evacuated the aircraft.

256 passengers and crew have been moved to the terminal building, and "all is going smoothly," the emergency services stated on their Twitter account.

Canadian emergency services and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are responding to the situation, East Hants Fire Service Dispatches reported on Facebook. The fire department earlier tweeted that a bomb threat has been made.

The flight in question is Turkish Airlines TYH2 / TK2. While the nature of the threat has not been confirmed, plane watchers on social media have speculated it may have been made online.

An investigation into the bomb threat is currently taking place, they added.

The 'Great Recession' was evidently so bad for the economy that it stopped the net influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico. For the first time since the 1940s, more Mexicans have been leaving the U.S. to return home than arriving, a reversal that brings down the curtain on the largest immigration wave in modern American history. As WSJ reports, the Pew Research Center figures released Thursday suggest that the surge in legal and illegal Mexican immigration that helped transform America - and remains a contentious issue on the presidential campaign trail - may have peaked for good.

Pew Hispanic found that, according to official numbers, more than 800,000 undocumented workers came to the United States during 2009-2014 while more than 1 million fled the U.S. during the same period. It seems that employment became more difficult after the 2008 economic crisis, while Mexico's economy actually improved.

Fear is toxic to a democracy. Fear divides. Fear overreacts. Fear discriminates.

It's a lesson we've learned throughout our history, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II to the post-9/11 Patriot Act. And now in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks, we're relearning that lesson again as some of our leaders put forth proposals that would undermine our commitment to a free, pluralistic, compassionate, and open society.

Currently 31 governors are on record opposing resettling any Syrian refugees in their states. These efforts to subvert federal policy would be unconstitutional. Only the federal government has the authority to determine who is allowed to enter the country -- the states do not. And once immigrants are admitted, the states cannot restrict them from settling wherever they choose.

The governors say they worry that terrorists may hide among those who are fleeing the Islamic State and the Assad regime. This is a good argument for a rigorous and multi-layered screening process -- but we already have one. The current U.S. refugee screening system includes background checks by multiple agencies, biometric tests, medical screenings, and in-person interviews with Department of Homeland Security officials.

Drug companies have brought a host of expensive new medicines to market in the United States and Europe this year, figures show, another bumper haul for an industry often accused of over-charging.

Drug prices are set to be a major issue in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election next year, with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton having pledged to rein in costs in a country that has the world's highest prices.


The busy drug pipeline to the West also illustrates how the vast bulk of research cash is spent on developing money-spinning medicines for rich countries, rather than to tackle tropical diseases that kill millions in the developing world.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has so far approved 37 novel drugs in 2015, more than the 34 that had been cleared by this stage a year ago and just short of 2014's final total of 41, which was an 18-year high.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is also waving through more products, recommending a total of 84 new medicines so far, up from 75 in the first 11 months of 2014, according to data released on Friday. Unlike the FDA, the EMA includes generic drugs in its list.

RT spoke to Jurgen Todenhofer, the first Western journalist who was allowed to enter territory controlled by the so-called Islamic State. A year ago, he spent 10 days among the terrorists, also visiting Raqqa, the capital of the self-proclaimed caliphate.

To arrange the journey, Todenhofer held Skype discussions with Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL) for six months before they agreed to his visit.

Finally, the jihadists gave him official guarantee safety. "It was in their interest to fulfill their promises that I would come back alive - and I came back alive," he said.

After spending several days with ISIS militants, having long discussions with them and observing their daily life, the German journalist said: "They don't care if we call them terrorists."

Debates on whether the use of physical force to discipline children is ever acceptable have once again been reignited with legislation passed in Ireland in early November to remove the defence of "reasonable chastisement" for corporal punishment.

In new research conducted by the Young Lives study at the University of Oxford using longitudinal data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, we found that children who experienced corporal punishment performed worse in maths, four years later. The research was part of UNICEF's Multi Country Study on the Drivers of Violence Affecting Children.

The use of physical punishment, such as smacking, slapping or hitting with a hand or implement, is contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by all states except the US. Yet only 47 countries have, like Ireland, introduced legislation to protect children from corporal punishment in all settings, including the home and school.

Corporal punishment excites strong points of view. Proponents argue that "mild" or "moderate" forms of corporal punishment are an effective and non-detrimental means of instilling discipline and obedience into children. When talking about my research on corporal punishment I often encounter the response: "I was hit and it never did me any harm". Opponents stress the hypocrisy of laws that do not extend the same protection to children as is afforded to adults.

Millions of unsuspecting Indian farmers are spraying fake pesticides onto their fields, contaminating soil, cutting crop yields and putting both food security and human health at risk in the country of 1.25 billion people.

The use of spurious pesticides has exacerbated losses in the genetically modified (GM) cotton crop in northern India after an attack by whitefly, a pest, say officials. If unchecked, some of India's roughly $26 billion in annual farm exports could be hit.

Made secretly and given names that sometimes resemble the original, counterfeits account for up to 30 percent of the $4 billion pesticide market, according to a government-endorsed study.

And they are gaining market share in what is the world's No.4 pesticide maker and sixth biggest exporter.

Influential dealers in small towns peddle high-margin fake products to gullible farmers, in turn hurting established firms like Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, DuPont, BASF, PI Industries, Rallis India and Excel Crop Care.

"We are illiterate farmers; we seek advice from the vendor and just spray on the crop," said Harbans Singh, a farmer in Punjab's Bathinda region, whose three-acre (1.2-hectare) GM cotton crop was damaged by whitefly this year.

"It's a double loss when you see the crop wilting away and your money is spent on pesticides that don't work."

The authorities and experts from a number of States are ringing the alarm bells: The United States is being swamped by the legal Prescription Drug Trade, that is drugs and drug-containing medications purchased at pharmacies on prescriptions from doctors (i.e., prescription drug-containing medications - PDCM). A great number of people are involved in this criminal business. According to the management of the country's only specialized task unit that combats violations in the sphere of PDCM, the Drug Diversion Unit of the Police Department in Cincinnati, the illegal sale of prescription drug-containing medications amounts to 30% of all drug trafficking in the United States.

Street sale of these medications is carried out by so-called 'doctor-shoppers" who visit a dozen or more doctors a day in order to get prescriptions for the purchase of such medicines.

Sometimes when visiting a doctor they simply steal prescription forms, and then purchase the drugs at pharmacies in any quantity.

Drug addicts buy 2-3 pills of different PDCM, and prepare a dose for themselves, the efficacy of which is equal to heroin, but costs them no more than 10 US Dollars.

Health workers themselves are also rather active participants in this illegal business. For example, employees of the health care system usually make up one third of those arrested for criminal violations in this sphere by the police of Cincinnati alone. Experts of the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators (NADDI) conclude that if there are so many health workers arrested for PDCM violations in Cincinnati, the severity of the problem in other cities, where there are no specialized units to combat this type of crime, can hardly be imagined. However, despite the scale of the disaster becoming an epidemic, according to experts of the NADDI, the Heads of State Police Departments use only a minor part of their capabilities to tackle it and focus the efforts of their staff primarily on combating the illegal street trade of heroin and cocaine, pushing back PDCM to second place.

A Palestinian poet has been sentenced to death by a Saudi Arabian court for allegedly abandoning his Muslim faith, Human Rights Watch reports. The death sentence comes after an initial 2014 verdict that sentenced the poet to four years in prison and 800 lashes.

Poet Ashraf Fayadh was detained in Abha, southwest Saudi Arabia, in 2013 due to allegations by a prosecution witness, who claimed he heard Fayadh cursing God, the Prophet Mohammed and Saudi Arabia. Also, the prosecution alleged offenses based on a book of poems Fayadh had written several years prior to that.

The poet's friends, however, believe he was being punished for posting a video showing Saudi Arabia's religious police (mutaween) lashing a man in public.

"They accused me [of] atheism and spreading some destructive thoughts into society," Fayadh told The Guardian. The book, "Instructions Within," published in 2008, was "just about me being [a] Palestinian refugee ... about cultural and philosophical issues. But the religious extremists explained it as destructive ideas against God."

Human Rights Watch's Middle East researcher Adam Coogle, who says he has seen the trial documents, confirmed Friday that the death sentence handed down to Fayadh, a Palestinian national, was on charges of "apostasy."

Sixteen underground workers managed to escape, say Chinese authorities, in disaster at Jixi, near border with Russia

A fire at a coalmine in China's north-eastern province of Heilongjiang killed more than 20 people, state media reported on Saturday.

The fire broke out late on Friday evening at a mine in Jixi city operated by the state-owned Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group, said Xinhua.

Rescue workers found the bodies of 21 miners and were searching for one more. Sixteen others had managed to escape when the fire broke out.

Jixi city is close to the border with Russia.

China - the world's largest producer of coal - is grappling to improve standards in the poorly regulated sector where profits are often put above worker safety. Accidents in Chinese coal mines killed 931 people in 2014, a top work safety official said in March.

In July rescuers pulled six men from a flooded coal mine in Heilongjiang after they survived a week underground following an accident that killed at least four others, according to state media.