One of the world's longest high-speed railways has started operating in China, linking the country's prosperous eastern coast to the less-developed southwest, the state Xinhua news agency has reported.

The 2,264-kilometer Shanghai-Kunming rail line runs across the five provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou and Yunnan. It cuts the travel time from Shanghai to the capital of Southwest China's Yunnan province Kunming from 34 to 11 hours.

According to train driver Wang Jinda, the trains can travel at speeds up to 330 kilometers per hour.

Across the United States, the opioid epidemic isn't just affecting addicts. It's hurting their children, who are going into an increasingly beleaguered foster care system. Demand for foster homes can't keep up with the numbers of kids needing placements.

Across the United States, the opioid epidemic isn't just affecting addicts. It's hurting their children, who are going into an increasingly beleaguered foster care system. Demand for foster homes can't keep up with the numbers of kids needing placements.

Indiana is particularly feeling the burden in its foster-care system due to the drug epidemic in the state. "It is very hard. We get multiple calls daily from the Department Of Child Services looking for homes for children that have been removed and we have to turn them down because we just don't have any open beds for them," Jen Rasey, who manages 13 foster homes in the South Bend area, told WSBT.

Earlier this month, the director of Indiana's Department of Child Services told the General Assembly Budget Committee that the opioid epidemic has meant more children having to be removed from their homes. It's a trend occurring in at least 32 states.

In the 2015 fiscal year, there were nearly 429,000 children in foster care around the country, a 6.7 percent increase over fiscal year 2013, according to data released in October by the Administration on Children and Families (ACF). There was also a significant boost in the number of children entering the system in 2015, with 71 percent of states reporting a hike between 2014 and 2015.

About 15,000 patients in the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services had their information shared on social media, including their names and Social Security numbers. An investigation found a former psychiatric patient was behind the breach.

The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) experienced a massive data breach thanks to one patient who accessed a personal computer left in the hospital library. DHHS announced Tuesday that the breach occurred in October 2015 but did not learn of it until November 4, 2016.

The patient was seen accessing non-confidential DHHS information in the New Hampshire Hospital Library by staff members who changed their policy regarding use of computers but did not file any reports about the incident with the hospital or DHHS.

However, in August security officials found that the patient had been sharing information on social media. They informed DHHS, who in turn reported it to the Department of Information Technology (DIT). An investigation was launched but it did not turn up any evidence of a breach or that sensitive information was being shared.

The Russian military has delivered some 45 tons of presents collected by thousands of the country's kids for children of the same ages in war-torn Syria. The gifts included Russian folk art handmade crafts and personal greetings.

The supplies were handed over to the Russian Defense Ministry as part of the all-Russian humanitarian initiative "Children of Russia - to Children of Syria," TASS reports, citing the Russian military. The initiative, proposed by the children themselves, saw thousands of pupils from over 10 Russian regions taking part.


It also included the students of Russian military schools such as the renowned Suvorov Military School and the Nakhimov Naval Academy as well as ordinary pupils in Russian public schools.


Each individual package dispatched to Syria included a handmade item, which could be a postcard, a drawing, a clay figure or even a piece of self-penned poetry, besides other presents, the Russian Defense Ministry reported Tuesday.

Every pupil who took part in the initiative also sent a handwritten postcard with best wishes for the New Year to children in war-ravaged Syria.

Why do I look like Justin Timberlake?"

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on stage wearing a virtual reality headset, feigning surprise at an expressive cartoon simulacrum that seemed to perfectly follow his every gesture.

The audience laughed. Zuckerberg was in the middle of what he described as the first live demo inside VR, manipulating his digital avatar to show off the new social features of the Rift headset from Facebook subsidiary Oculus. The venue was an Oculus developer conference convened earlier this fall in San Jose. Moments later, Zuckerberg and two Oculus employees were transported to his glass-enclosed office at Facebook, and then to his infamously sequestered home in Palo Alto. Using the Rift and its newly revealed Touch hand controllers, their avatars gestured and emoted in real time, waving to Zuckerberg's Puli sheepdog, dynamically changing facial expressions to match their owner's voice, and taking photos with a virtual selfie stick — to post on Facebook, of course.

The demo encapsulated Facebook's utopian vision for social VR, first hinted at two years ago when the company acquired Oculus and its crowd-funded Rift headset for $2 billion. And just as in 2014, Zuckerberg confidently declared that VR would be "the next major computing platform," changing the way we connect, work, and socialize.

"Avatars are going to form the foundation of your identity in VR," said Oculus platform product manager Lauren Vegter after the demo. "This is the very first time that technology has made this level of presence possible."

But as the tech industry continues to build VR's social future, the very systems that enable immersive experiences are already establishing new forms of shockingly intimate surveillance. Once they are in place, researchers warn, the psychological aspects of digital embodiment — combined with the troves of data that consumer VR products can freely mine from our bodies, like head movements and facial expressions — will give corporations and governments unprecedented insight and power over our emotions and physical behavior.

This is the moment kindhearted neighbours formed a human chain around a mum's house - to stop her being kicked out in a 'revenge eviction'.

Nimo Abdullahi, 39, was told she and her family would be thrown out of their home of 12 years after she complained to her landlord about damp.

But in a bid to protect the mum-of-five from a 'revenge eviction', residents and campaigners turned out to stop it happening.

Around 30 people stood side by side, arms linked, to build a wall of bodies in front of the privately-rented property in Easton, Bristol.

All morning, more neighbours joined the blockade - with a newlywed couple living opposite the family cutting up their wedding cake to keep the protesters sustained.

When bailiffs turned up at 11am on Tuesday, they weren't able to get inside.

Following exceedingly unpopular moves by China and India, the European Commission has now proposed to tighten controls on cash and precious metals — going so far as to allow confiscations of gold and assets — of anyone even believed to be associated with terrorism or terrorists.

These confiscations and strictures around personal wealth would be part of the European Union's "action plan against terrorist financing," proposed following the terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015 — except the impetus to apply the measures came when a truck plowed through a bustling Christmas market in Berlin on December 19, killing 12 people and injuring scores more.

It appears the Commission surreptitiously proposed tighter controls on cash and precious metals after the market attack but in just before the holidays — possibly to avoid an acrimonious backlash.

Reuters reports:

"Under the new proposals, customs officials in European Union states can step up checks on cash and prepaid payment cards sent by post or in freight shipments."

The lobby of Trump Tower has reportedly been evacuated due to a suspicious package, the New York Police Department has said. President-elect Donald Trump is not on the premises.

The New York City police and fire departments are on the scene.

Through the month of December, students from across Russia participated in a donation drive to collect gifts for Syrian children. The effort, organized under the 'Children of Russia to Children of Syria' campaign, has culminated in the Russian military delivering over 45 tons-worth of presents to the war-torn country in time for the holidays.

On Tuesday, a Defense Ministry spokesman confirmed that about 45 metric tons of gifts have been delivered during the course of the campaign, including individualized greetings and a wide variety of presents, which differed from region to region. For example, the spokesman said, "students in the Kursk and Vologda regions...collected over a thousand boxes with gifts, including traditional crafts, postcards, and stationery, but also keepsakes specific to those regions."

The message tells people across the city that they may be at risk from a bombing

Facebook is warning people about a fake explosion in Bangkok, falsely suggesting that the entire city is at risk.

The site has activated its "Safety Check" feature across Thailand's capital. That means that anyone it thinks is in the area will see a message informing them that there has been "an explosion", and encouraging them to mark themselves safe from it.

But no such explosion actually happened and the fake alert seems to be the result of changes that the company has made to its Safety Check feature. It appears to have been activated by a minor incident, reported only in the local news, where a man took firecrackers to a government building in an apparent protest.

The message gives none of the context and instead just mentions the explosion and asks people whether they are safe.

That seems to have become seen as a major incident because people on Facebook were discussing it. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would be using people's posts to help decide when the Safety Check would be activated - meaning that it didn't necessarily need to be turned on by staff at the social network.