Nearly two decades after a US reporter was humiliated for connecting the CIA to a drug-trafficking trade that funded the Nicaraguan Contras, important players in the scandal - which led to the journalist's suicide - are coming forward to back his claims.

Back in 1996, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News broke a story stating not only that the Nicaraguan Contras - supported by the United States in a rebellion against their left-leaning government - were involved in the US crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, but also that the CIA knew and turned a blind eye to the operation.

As a result, Webb concluded, the CIA was complicit in a drug trade that was wreaking havoc on African American communities in Los Angeles.

The US and UK will stage a comprehensive simulation next week check whether the countries' financial and banking sectors are still vulnerable to the problem of the 'too big to fail' institutions and coordinate their actions in case of such collapse.

Government financial leaders from Britain and US will simulate a failure of a large banking institution on Monday in Washington, DC, to test the effectiveness of each county's banking regulations.

They hope the simulation - which will not mimic the collapse of any particular 'too big to fail' institution - will demonstrate what the officials have learned from the financial crisis about their respective roles, and how new practices should shield taxpayers from further bailouts. The simulation will run through procedures if a large UK bank with US operations failed, and those for a US bank with a British presence.

"We are going to make sure we can handle an institution that was previously regarded as too big to fail," said UK chancellor, John Osborne, speaking to journalists at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington on Friday. "This demonstrates the distance we have come over the last few years to build resilience and learn the lessons of the financial crisis."

Carlos III hospital treating virus-hit nurse Teresa Romero Ramos suffers staff shortage amid concerns over training and safety

Concerns about a lack of training and safety standards have left some staff refusing to attend to possible Ebola cases at Madrid's Carlos III hospital, where the first known person to contract the disease outside west Africa is being treated.

Fourteen people are in quarantine at the hospital, including four health workers who treated Teresa Romero Ramos, the Spanish nurse who contracted the virus after treating an Ebola patient repatriated from Sierra Leone.

Seven people, including two hairdressers who had given Romero a beauty treatment before she was diagnosed, entered the isolation unit on Thursday. None has tested positive for the disease except Romero, whose condition was described by the hospital as serious but stable. Her treatment has included injections with antibodies extracted from the blood of Ebola survivors.

A woman who spent 17 years in prison after being convicted of murder in the death of a homeless man was exonerated Friday by a Los Angeles County judge who said she should not spend another minute behind bars.

The courtroom burst into applause after superior court judge Mark Arnold overturned the conviction of Susan Mellen, who was to be processed for release from the courthouse.

Mellen had entered the courtroom in tears, and her children also wept.

The judge said that in Mellen's case the justice system failed and she had inadequate representation by her attorney at trial.

"I believe that not only is Ms Mellen not guilty, based on what I have read I believe she is innocent," Arnold said. "For that reason I believe in this case the justice system failed."

His past was Jewish, but today he sees Israel as one of the most racist societies in the western world. Historian Shlomo Sand explains why he doesn't want to be Jewish anymore

During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to rabbis. At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world. Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman - who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an ethnocentric view - I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected minority. In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.

Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.

Although the state of Israel is not disposed to transform my official nationality from "Jew" to "Israeli", I dare to hope that kindly philosemites, committed Zionists and exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will respect my desire and cease to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they think matters little to me, and still less what the remaining antisemitic idiots think. In the light of the historic tragedies of the 20th century, I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.

By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of disappearing. I know that by insisting that only my historical past was Jewish, while my everyday present (for better or worse) is Israeli, and finally that my future and that of my children (at least the future I wish for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I run counter to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism.

A plane was briefly quarantined at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport Friday after a report that a passenger on the plane was showing symptoms similar to Ebola.

The Delta Airlines Flight left New York's JFK International Airport Friday morning, bound for Las Vegas. Six ambulances surrounded the plane at Terminal 1, according to Las Vegas station KSNV.

Shortly after landing, the plane was quarantined at the gate "after reports that a passenger who had recently traveled in Africa vomited on board the aircraft," according to a statement from airport officials.

"After a thorough assessment, it has been determined that the affected passenger does not meet the criteria for Ebola," according to the airport statement. All passenger were allowed to exit the plane after the medical assessment, according to Delta.

A Flint, Michigan couple is suing Department of Corrections officer, Michael Hughes in federal court for shooting their fifteen year old dog during a wrong-house raid. Authorities are refusing to comment on the lawsuit, filed on October 3, though the dog's owners say at the time of the incident, the officers acknowledged their error and said it would be taken care of.

On June 18, Katti Putnam answered her door to find her home surrounded by police and a tactical team. She was told they were looking for a fugitive, but as she was talking to them, an officer pointed out that they were at the wrong house. They had actually meant to raid the home next door. As Putnam walked to get her ID, she says she heard a loud popping noise:

"I went inside to get my identification and I heard a pop...I looked out the door to the back yard and there was an officer with his arm raised and a gun in his hand. I immediately realized Clohe had gone outside."

According to Putnam, the Hughes fired another shot, which missed, at which point Putnam ran outside to put herself between the officer and her dog. Putnam recalls:

"I was yelling at him,...I said, 'Why are you shooting my dog? What are you doing? You're at the wrong house."

Clohe, the elderly mutt who was already shot in the face, started to walk back inside, trailing blood behind her. Putnam's partner, Erica Moreno, saw and cradled her.

Putnam's neighbor, Jimmy Armstrong, who witnessed the entire event, stated in an affadavit that he saw Clohe enter the backyard. Armstrong stated the dog was not attacking or threatening any officer at any time.

He said:

"[Hughes] shot Clohe for no reason at all."

Putnam said her dog has no history of biting anyone and wasn't barking at the time. She explained:

"Clohe did not charge them or anything. She is old. She has a hard time getting on our couch as it is and she hobbles down the steps when she goes outside. She does not run or charge."

At the time, police said they would "take care of this" and advised them to take their dog to a vet, but went on to ignore all attempts at contact from the couple.

Three of UK's big four mobile phone networks are providing customer data to police forces automatically through Ripa

Three of the UK's four big mobile phone networks have made customers' call records available at the click of a mouse to police forces through automated systems, a Guardian investigation has revealed.

EE, Vodafone and Three operate automated systems that hand over customer data "like a cash machine", as one phone company employee described it.

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, a transparency watchdog, said: "If companies are providing communications data to law enforcement on automatic pilot, it's as good as giving police direct access [to individual phone bills]."

O2, by contrast, is the only major phone network requiring staff to review all police information requests, the company said.

Mobile operators must by law store a year of call records of all of their customers, which police forces and other agencies can then access without a warrant using the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa).

Ripa is the interception law giving authority to much of GCHQ's mass surveillance. The law was again under the spotlight recently after it was used to identify sources of journalists from at least two national newspapers, the Sun and the Mail on Sunday.

Documents from software providers and conversations with mobile companies staff reveal how automatic this system has become, with the "vast majority" of records demanded by police delivered through automated systems, without the involvement of any phone company staff.

Video obtained by CBS 6 shows four Christian boarding school workers chasing down and beating the trouble youths they were supposed to be helping.

In the video, which was taken in April, three life coaches and a program director at Abundant Life Academy in Caroline County, Virginia can be seen beating a 14-year-old in their charge. He attempted to run away, but the four employees chased him down and began assaulting him again.

According to The Free Lance-Star, the teen was tackled and then violently restrained because he had been caught "talking to a girl."

The investigation into abuse at the Christian center began in April, when four teenagers escaped from the facility. When authorities captured them, they claimed that they had fled the facility because of rampant abuse.

The boarding school's mission, according to its website, is to "equip students and families to live a life of love, acceptance and forgiveness through modeling and training of biblical principles, bridging the gap between parents and children."

"These children were brought into a situation that supposed to improve their lives with guidance, Christian fellowship and involve their families," local resident Nina Fogg told CBS 6. "And to find out there's abuse - that's not what any child deserves."

Timothy Jordan, Jovanny Rivera, Carey Honea and Liam Galligan were charged with mob assault and simple assault. The state dropped the mob assault charges in exchange for all four pleading guilty to simple assault.

Happy Breast Cancer Industry Month! Bring On the Highly Questionable Profit-Driven Alliances!

In what's being touted as the most egregious example ever of the pinkwashing of cancer in the name of profit, Susan G. Komen, America's largest and sketchiest breast cancer organization, has partnered with Baker Hughes, one of the world's largest oilfield companies, to introduce a thousand hand-painted pink drill bits "for the cure," thus facilitating a thousand fracking operations emitting a host of toxic chemicals, including benzene and formaldehyde, known to lead to leukemia and - yes! - breast cancer.