A Republican Senator from Salt Lake City, Utah is on a mission to allow people to sue companies which publish porn on the internet.

Todd Weiler believes porn is a "a public health hazard," and in 2016 sponsored a resolution declaring it "epidemic" calling on the industry to keep "evil, degrading, addictive" materials away from children.

Now, he plans to send "a message to the pornography industry" and is drafting legislation to pave the way for people to sue porn companies for damages.

A Catholic priest in Italy has been accused of staging orgies in his rectory, pimping out at least some of his 15 lovers, as well as hiding pornographic home videos in covers with the names of popes on them.

Father Andrea Contin, a 48-year-old parish priest at the church of San Lazzaro in Padua, is now under investigation after police received complaints from three of his parishioners.

Sex toys and videos of the orgies have already been seized, and he is suspected of pimping out his lovers to other men, who paid to participate in the orgies, Italian media reported.

Swiss police say they have located the gunman who shot two policemen during a house search in Rehetobel in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden.

The police said in a new statement that "there is no danger to the population" and "that is not a terrorist act."

Earlier local police reported that the armed and "dangerous" gunman had fled after shooting two policemen during a house search on Tuesday, shortly after 9am local time (08:00 GMT).

A video selfie of the alleged Istanbul attacker, in which he is seen walking around tourist spots at Taksim square, is circulating in the media.

NBC News reported that police have confirmed that the man in the video was walking through Taksim Square during a book fair that ended two days before New Year's Eve.

Earlier on Monday, Turkish police released the first images of the suspect. The manhunt is still ongoing for the gunman who killed 39 people and injured 69 at the Reina nightclub in Istanbul on New Year's Eve.

Thousands of travelers experienced lengthy delays at major airports across the US due to a massive system outage that affected the computers of US Customs and Border Protection.

"US Customs and Border Protection is experiencing a temporary outage with its processing systems at various air ports of entry and taking immediate action to address the technology disruption," the US agency said in a statement.

Stranded travelers took to social media to vent their frustration. Passengers reported delays ranging from 30 minutes to several hours.

JFK International in New York, LAX in Los Angeles, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Washington Dulles International Airports have been affected by the outage.

Austria's minister for families is calling for a ban on smoking for children younger than 18 years old, which would increase the current legal smoking age by two years.

Such a ban should be introduced to protect Austria's younger generation, Sophie Karmasin, the country's family minister, said in an interview with Austria Presse Agentur (APA), according to Salzburger Nachrichten.

Austria has some of the highest smoking rates among young people in Europe. More than 50 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 28 and some 34 percent of women of the same age smoke.

"This is dramatic. We can't accept that," Karmasin said.

Austria is among the few European countries that allow smoking at 16.

Apart from prevention efforts and a ban on smoking in some public places that has already been imposed, the next important step should be banning smoking under 18 on the federal level, Karmasin said.

The matter was on the agenda at a youth conference in the spring of 2016 and, according to the minister, she is planning to make a final decision on the ban in 2017.

Karmasin tried to push the initiative forward two years ago, but it was dismissed by the vice chancellor and Austrian People's Party head Reinhold Mitterlehner, who said it was "not necessary."

However, Karmasin is convinced that once the states make up their minds on the ban, she will have enough support to turn her plans into reality. The "health argument," in her opinion, is more important than any other issue.

The minister doesn't believe that the initiative could be undermined by the fact that teenagers would find other ways to get cigarettes. She hopes to introduce harsh penalties for breaking the ban, but has yet to specify them exactly.

A Syrian asylum seeker has been detained in Germany on suspicion of asking ISIS for money to buy and booby trap cars to kill a large number of "non-Muslim" people in "Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands," German authorities say.

The 38-year old man was detained early Saturday by German special forces in his flat in the city of Saarbrucken in the Federal State of Saarland. Official confirmation of the operation and further details emerged only on Monday. The Syrian refugee was arrested after Saarland police received a tip off from the Federal Criminal police.

According to the Prosecutor's office, the man in custody is suspected of having reached out to an Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorist group's contact person in December "who he knew was in a position to obtain IS money for terror financing." The asylum seeker apparently "asked him [IS contact person] to provide €180,000 so he [the suspect] can use the money to buy vehicles, which he planned to bobby trap with explosives," a statement by the Prosecutor's office reads.

At least 60 people have been killed at a prison in Manaus, a city in the Brazilian Amazon, in one of the bloodiest riots in recent years, according to officials.

The riot at the Complex Penitentiary Anísio Jobim (COMPAJ) began on Sunday afternoon and lasted around 17 hours until approximately 8:40 am local time Monday morning, when authorities successfully negotiated the release of the remaining hostages and the surrender of the mutinous prisoners, according to Brazilian media.

During the riot, twelve prison officers were taken hostage, while the severed heads of six prisoners were thrown over the penitentiary walls, reports say.

With Chicago's homicide rates for 2016 at their highest since 1996, Donald Trump has called on city officials to "ask for Federal help" if authorities can't curb the city's increasing violence.

The Chicago Tribune's homicide count reports 779 homicides in 2016, making it the worst year for homicides since 1996, which saw 796. The Chicago Police Department's tally of 762 doesn't count police-related shootings, self-defense killings or those which take place on area expressways.

With over 700 murders and more than 4,331 shooting victims in 2016, Chicago has the unfortunate claim of having more casualties than Los Angeles and New York combined.

With three people dead and 16 wounded in the first six hours of 2017, along with 13 more injured in a spate shootings across the city in 2017 so far, the problem seems likely to persist.

Chicago saw 480 murders in 2015, although in terms of murder rates per 100,000, Chicago ranks 24th in the top 25 US cities for 2015, with St Louis, Missouri ranking highest.

A special commission in the northern German city of Braunschweig will investigate over 300 cases of fraud committed by asylum applicants, who gamed the welfare system by using multiple IDs to claim benefits - and that may just be the tip of the iceberg. The estimated total loss of taxpayer money in the state of Lower Saxony alone has been put at three to five million euros ($3.2-5.3 million), Regional German broadcaster NDR reported.

In the majority of cases, the scheme was employed by Sudanese refugees who were applying for benefits within the social welfare system, the head of the newly established investigative commission, Joern Memenga, said, as cited by Deutsche Welle. The scammers allegedly took advantage of the extreme workload the civil servants who were registering the applications were under in the summer of 2015, at the peak of the European migrant crisis. "At that point, we wanted to avoid one thing - homelessness," Memenga said, adding that in some cases the same employees had registered more than one alias per applicant.

The welfare claimants would simply change their appearance to receive additional documents from unsuspecting social service workers. The not so sophisticated con met few road bumps, as the refugees did not have to give their fingerprints and, since they had no documents, were identified only from photographs. "Sometimes just growing a beard, or putting on a pair of glasses, having shorter hair, but always different surnames," Memenga said, as cited by DPA.

The system was also susceptible to rigging because the civil servants did not have time to sift through all of the applications processed at other municipalities in Lower Saxony, so the same asylum seeker could collect money from different places. Eventually, one of the employees noticed that some of men in the photos look strikingly similar and sounded the alarm, reporting his suspicions to the police, regional broadcaster NRP, which broke the story, reported. In one of the most extreme cases uncovered so far, one man was able to bamboozle the state to the tune of tens of thousands of euros using twelve fake identities. "Our crassest case has twelve alias-personalities. Damage: 45,000 euros, at least," Memenga said, as cited by NRP.