Families in Norway are handing over their houses free to disadvantaged families while they go off on their summer holidays, in a trend started by Kristine Åsbø, from Nærbø south of Stavanger.

Åsbø has achieved minor celebrity in Norway since she announced the scheme on Facebook on Monday, offering to give out her family's charming wooden house and their BMW estate car to a disadvantaged family.

As well as the car and house, the family will get a host of additional goodies, including pizza vouchers, a course at a local surf school, a season ticket to the indoor play area Leo's Lekland, and free entrance to both the local zoo and to Stavanger's oil museum.

Her post was shared nearly 25,000 times, on Wednesday she appeared on God Morgen Norge, the country's leading breakfast TV programme, to talk about the scheme, and on Thursday she announced that she had found a family to take over her house from 25 July to 25 August.

Barack Obama traveled to a Native American reservation in North Dakota, his first visit as US president to "Indian Country," where he focused Friday on education and economic development.

The president, accompanied by First Lady Michelle Obama, visited the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation in the central far northern state.

The Sioux, which include the Lakota and Dakota nations, are the people of Sitting Bull, the chief famous for his victory over the US cavalry in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn.

Ahead of the visit officials announced a series of initiatives on improving education and economic development for Native American communities.

Obama began the visit with a stop at a local elementary school, where he and his wife met with tribal children in their classrooms.

When the couple arrived at Standing Rock, dancers in colorful tribal outfits greeted the Obamas, who met with senior tribal officials.

A federal judge in Idaho agreed this week that officials have no right to keep protesters from demonstrating on the lawn of the state capitol building in Boise.

United States District Judge Lynn Winmill's Wednesday decision declares that efforts in 2012 to remove protesters from a localized Occupy Wall Street offshoot were unconstitutional.

As that movement began to gain momentum across the US in late 2011, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter signed a law that enacted a handful of rules concerning Occupy Boise protesters wishing to protest on state property, including provisions that outlawed anything on the capitol property considered to be camping.

Judge Winmill wrote this week that a lawsuit filed on behalf of the protesters in 2012 is now moot since the laws were later rescinded, but he nevertheless agreed to make a decision requested by Occupy Boise that could open the door for future protests like the ones that were previously outlawed.

As part of the ruling, Winmill issued a permanent injunction that hereby blocks the state from removing protest tents because he said such conduct "targets political speech for suppression."

Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned the French left it could "disappear" and populist leader Marine Le Pen get through to a presidential election run-off, calling on his Socialist party to back his government's business-friendly reform plans.

France's Socialists are reeling from humiliating losses in local and European elections this year, with the latter seeing the hard-right National Front top a national vote for the first time.

President Francois Hollande has promised to reverse a rise in unemployment to record highs, helped by tax cuts for companies and lower public spending, but this policy shift is being challenged by the left wing of his Socialist party.

"I called for a sense of responsibility. The left could disappear and France could fall apart such has been the succession of crises - economic crisis, crisis of identity, cultural crisis," Valls said.

Pope Francis has launched a scathing attack on the global economic system, warning it is near collapse because of a 'throwaway culture' of greed and the 'atrocity' of youth unemployment.

The Roman Catholic leader openly blasted the 'idolatrous' economy for disregarding the young, which he says has led to shocking levels of youth unemployment and will lead to a lost generation.

The 77-year-old also criticised the economy - which he said had 'fallen into a sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money' - for surviving on the profits of war.

The Pope's damning message came amid comments he made about the break-up of countries such as Scotland and Catalonia, which came as a huge blow to the Scottish Yes campaign.

In an interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, he said: 'Our world cannot take it anymore. Our global economic system can't take any more.'

'We discard a whole generation to maintain an economic system that no longer endures - a system that to survive has to make war, as the big empires have always done.'

A mom says she was left mortified Monday after a JetBlue flight attendant refused to let her daughter use the restroom before takeoff, ultimately resulting in the young child relieving herself at her seat.

"We were on the tarmac," Jennifer Devereaux told WCVB-TV. "We hadn't taken off yet so I asked the flight attendant if she could quickly use the bathroom. The flight attendant snapped back at me, 'No, sit down.' I sat down immediately. I was pretty shocked."

The mom told the local outlet that she was traveling with her two children for the 30-minute flight. Her 3-year-old daughter Summer couldn't hold it.

Dr. Richard Rockefeller, son of the billionaire and prominent philanthropist David Rockefeller, was killed Friday morning when the small plane he was piloting crashed shortly after takeoff, according to a spokesman for the family.

Dr. Rockefeller, 65, was the only person on board the plane, which the authorities identified as a Piper Meridian single-engine turboprop.

The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.

Dr. Rockefeller took off from Westchester County Airport at 8:08 a.m., departing from Runway 16 into dense fog and steady rain. Less than 10 minutes later, the Federal Aviation Administration notified airport officials that it could not reach the pilot.

At 8:23 a.m., the local police reported that the plane had crashed less than a mile from the airport, near Cottage Avenue in the town of Harrison.

It smashed through several trees and narrowly missed an occupied house before hitting the ground and breaking into pieces, the authorities said.

Dr. Rockefeller was flying home after visiting his father, David, at the family's estate in Pocantico Hills, a hamlet in the town of Mount Pleasant. Mr. Rockefeller's 99th birthday was Thursday.

Rabat - One of Africa's oldest national parks is under attack "from all fronts," said its director on Friday after 68 elephants were slaughtered over the past two months by poachers wielding chain saws and grenades and shooting them from helicopters.

Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo is under constant assault by renegade Congolese soldiers, gunmen from South Sudan and others. And this is just a slice of the carnage: international wildlife regulators say 20 000 elephants were killed just in Africa in 2013.

The Johannesburg-based African Parks group, which manages the park, said that since mid-May, the 5000km² Garamba National Park in Congo, which was established in 1938, has faced an onslaught from several bands of poachers who have already killed 4% of its elephant population.

"The situation is extremely serious," Garamba park manger Jean-Marc Froment said in the statement. "The park is under attack on all fronts." A 2012 census found just 2 000 elephants in Garamba Park, down from 20 000 in the 1960s.

One group is shooting the elephants with rifles from a helicopter and then taking off their tusks with a chain saw. They are removing the elephants' brains and genitals as well.

Conservationists say a thriving ivory market in Asia is helping fuel the worst poaching epidemic of African elephants in decades.

In some cases the attacks in Garamba seem to be indiscriminate, killing baby elephants that do not yet possess the valuable ivory tusks.

African Parks, which runs seven parks in six countries in cooperation with local authorities, said the poachers include renegade elements of the Congolese army, gunmen from South Sudan, and members of the Lord's Resistance Army, a militant rebel group whose fugitive leader Joseph Kony is an alleged war criminal.

In one skirmish with poachers, park guards had to try to protect themselves from hand grenades thrown by Southern Sudanese poachers, some wearing military uniforms.

Islamist militants are closing in on Baghdad after capturing two towns north of Iraq's capital.

Officials said Iraqi soldiers abandoned their posts with no resistance when fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) pushed into Diyala province.

Militants driving machine gun-mounted pickups entered the towns of Jalula and Sadiyah on Thursday night, police said. Jalula is 80 miles from Baghdad and Sadiyah is 60 miles away.

Sunni fundamentalist fighters have vowed to capture Baghdad and Shia holy cities further south after overrunning Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, and driving the army out of northern provinces.

The UN said hundreds have been killed - with militants carrying out summary executions of civilians in Mosul, including 17 civilians in one street.

A dozen Iraqi security personnel were also killed and four women committed suicide after being raped.

UNAMI, the UN's mission to Iraq, estimates that almost 1,000 people may have been injured in recent days and half a million residents have fled Mosul.

Climate Depot Exclusive

Dr. Caleb Rossiter was "terminated" via email as an "Associate Fellow" from the progressive group Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), following his May 4th, 2014 Wall Street Journal OpEd titled "Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change," in which he called man-made global warming an "unproved science." Rossiter also championed the expansion of carbon based energy in Africa. Dr. Rossiter is an adjunct professor at American University. Rossiter, who has taught courses in climate statistics, holds a PhD in policy analysis and a masters degree in mathematics.

In an exclusive interview with Climate Depot, Dr. Rossiter explained: "If people ever say that fears of censorship for 'climate change' views are overblown, have them take a look at this: Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the 'all of the above' energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies terminated my 23-year relationship with them...because my analysis and theirs 'diverge.'"

"I have tried to get [IPS] to discuss and explain their rejection of my analysis,' Rossiter told Climate Depot. "When I countered a claim of 'rapidly accelerating' temperature change with the [UN] IPCC's own data', showing the nearly 20-year temperature pause - the best response I ever got was 'Caleb, I don't have time for this.'"


[Climate Depot Note: Intimidation of skeptical scientists has been well documented.Climate scientist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson - who converted from warmist to skeptic - resigns from skeptical group after 'enormous group pressure' from warmists - Now 'worried about my health and safety' - 'Colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship'

Many politically left of center scientists are also converting to skeptics: Scientist Dr. Daniel Botkin Tells Congress why he reversed his belief in global warming to become a skeptic: 'There are several lines of evidence suggesting that it (AGW) is a weaker case today, not a stronger case'

Flashback: Left-wing Env. Scientist Bails Out Of Global Warming Movement: Declares it a 'corrupt social phenomenon...strictly an imaginary problem of the 1st World middleclass'] 

Climate Depot has obtained a copy of a May 7, 2014 email that John Cavanagh, the director of IPS since 1998, sent to Rossiter with the subject "Ending IPS Associate Fellowship."

"Dear Caleb, We would like to inform you that we are terminating your position as an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies," Cavanagh wrote in the opening sentence of the email.

"Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours that a productive working relationship is untenable. The other project directors of IPS feel the same," Cavanagh explained.

"We thank you for that work and wish you the best in your future endeavors," Cavanagh and his IPS associate Emira Woods added. [Full text of IPS email is reproduced further below.]