Health fears are growing after floodwater in Somerset has been found to contain 60 times the amount of safe bacteria for agricultural water.

Tests found samples contained 60,000 to 70,000 bacteria per 100 millilitres.

The World Health Organisation says agricultural water should have no more than 1,000 bacteria per 100 millilitres.

The safe level for bath water is capped at just 500 bacteria per 100 millilitres.

The research was commissioned by Sky News and carried out on Thursday by Microbiologist Nathaniel Storey from the University of Reading.

There is so sign of the weather letting up, as Flood-hit communities have been warned to be on their guard as high tides and gale-force winds could send water levels rising even further.

The Environment Agency has especially warned those living in parts of south-west England and the Midlands to take care as it issued nine severe flood warnings - meaning there is a danger to life - for the Cornwall and North Devon coasts and the River Severn, south of Gloucester.

A search was called off because of darkness early Saturday night for one of two people who jumped from an interstate bridge in southwestern Arkansas into an icy river to avoid a jackknifed 18-wheeler that was skidding toward them.

The search for the missing person along the Little Red River was to resume Sunday morning, according to Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, which was leading the search.

"The water is 25 feet or less, so it's pretty shallow," Stephens said. "But the current is pretty high from the snow and ice from the storms."

The missing person's name was not released.

Three people were outside their vehicles after an earlier accident on the icy Interstate 30 bridge near Fulton, Ark., when a commercial truck jackknifed and slid toward them. Two people leapt over the guardrail and into the water during 29-degree weather.

One person was recovered almost immediately, according to Arkansas State Police spokesman Bill Sadler.

Game and Fish Commission employees and water rescue units from Hempstead and Miller counties were called to the scene.

"Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes -- and his work so far shows -- that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

The ugly rash of financial services executive suicides appears to have spread once again. Following the jumping deaths of 2 London bankers and a former-Fed economist in the US, The Denver Post reports Richard Talley, founder and CEO of American Title, was found dead in his home from self-inflicted wounds - from a nail-gun. Talley's company was under investigation from insurance regulators.

Via The Denver Post,

Richard Talley, 57, and the company he founded in 2001 were under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death late Tuesday, an agency spokesman confirmed Thursday.

It was unclear how long the investigation had been ongoing or its primary focus.

A coroner's spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.

Also unclear is whether Talley's suicide was related to the investigation by the Colorado Division of Insurance, which regulates title companies.

This week, a number of commentators have published articles containing incorrect and irresponsible claims regarding the allegation of Woody Allen's having sexually abused his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow. As the author of two lengthy, heavily researched and thoroughly fact-checked articles that deal with that allegation - the first published in 1992, when Dylan was seven, and the second last fall, when she was 28 - I feel obliged to set the record straight. As such, I have compiled the following list of undeniable facts:

1. Mia never went to the police about the allegation of sexual abuse. Her lawyer told her on August 5, 1992, to take the seven-year-old Dylan to a pediatrician, who was bound by law to report Dylan's story of sexual violation to law enforcement and did so on August 6.

2. Allen had been in therapy for alleged inappropriate behavior toward Dylan with a child psychologist before the abuse allegation was presented to the authorities or made public. Mia Farrow had instructed her babysitters that Allen was never to be left alone with Dylan.

3. Allen refused to take a polygraph administered by the Connecticut state police.Instead, he took one from someone hired by his legal team. The Connecticut state police refused to accept the test as evidence. The state attorney, Frank Maco, says that Mia was never asked to take a lie-detector test during the investigation.

Thousands of children aged 10 and under are being treated for depression, stress and anxiety, an investigation by the Daily Mirror has revealed.

Tormented by bullies, under ­pressure to fit in and bombarded with school assessments, many youngsters today find themselves struggling to cope.

Savage Coalition cuts to the network of support for affected youngsters means many end up needing hospital treatment because their psychological problems have spiralled out of control - piling more ­pressure on NHS budgets.

A worrying 4,391 children aged 10 or under have received treatment for stress, anxiety or depression in the last five years, according to figures from two of Britain's biggest NHS mental health trusts. But the total number of primary school pupils affected is likely to be far higher.

Jacksonville, Florida - A woman says a SWAT team kicked her out of her home and then helped themselves inside to gain a "tactical advantage" over a neighbor who was under investigation.

Deborah Franz was told to leave her home on Sunday, February 2nd, when there was a domestic disturbance in the mobile home across the street. A neighbor had allegedly gotten physical with his father and displayed a handgun. The reaction was for a paramilitary force to cordon off the block and forcibly evacuate neighboring homes for the rest of the day.

"The cop goes 'You all need to leave, you can't be in your house,'" Franz told WTEV.

Franz left for 6 hours while police blockaded the street. Little did she know that controlling the scene meant taking over the homes not involved with the investigation.

When she returned, she says she "froze" when she opened her door and her belongings had been obviously tampered with. Her television had been moved and her Xbox game console disconnected. Window drapes had been pulled to the floor.

The execution of women holds a special revulsion for Westerners, especially - let us be honest about this - when the women are decapitated, hanged or shot in the Muslim world. Our revulsion at the act of killing a woman is thus neatly dovetailed into our foundational conviction that Islam treats women not only as second-class citizens, as chattel, property, prizes of "honour" to be slaughtered if that "dignity" is even rumoured to be besmirched, or as sacrificial victims of their menfolk's crimes. Often male sadism is involved.

What do the masterful male executioners of Saudi Arabia think of when they hack off the head of a woman in a public marketplace? What of the Iranian state executioner who heard 23-year-old Delara Darabi screaming to her mother for help down her mobile phone: "Oh mother, I can see the hangman's noose in front of me. They are going to execute me. Please save me." And who, as the girl was strung up, sneered down the same phone to the mother that nothing could save her daughter now?

Delara Darabi's "crime" was to have confessed to killing her father's cousin, apparently to save the life of her boyfriend, who was said to have committed the crime and who would most certainly have hanged for it. But her family had already obtained a two-month stay of execution. She was an accomplished artist, an angel to her fellow prisoners. When I questioned the then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about her execution, he replied - pitifully - that he was against capital punishment but that the Iranian judiciary was "independent" of the government. "I do not want to kill even an ant," he told me.

Now the Iraqi authorities, executing male prisoners by the dozen - for "terrorism", of course - have taken to torturing, raping and occasionally executing some of the thousands of women illegally detained in their jails. Human Rights Watch - may its name be praised - has just revealed how a female prisoner entered her meeting with HRW's delegate on crutches. She had, she said, endured nine days of beatings and electric shocks that had left her permanently disabled. Her split nose, scars on her back and burns on her breast were consistent, the organisation said, with the abuse she had alleged. Then came - quite literally - the "killer" line in their official report: "She was executed in September 2013, seven months after Human Rights Watch interviewed her, despite lower court rulings that dismissed charges against her..."

A former grammar school student has become the first Briton to die as a result of accepting a 'Neknomination' dare.

Isaac Richardson, 20, told his friend he would "outdo" previous competitors in the controversial drinking game, before downing a lethal cocktail of wine, whisky, vodka, and lager, at O'Connor's backpacker hostel in Woolwich, south-east London.

After going to the bathroom to vomit, he was unconscious within two minutes, and was taken to hospital where he died in on Saturday morning, the Daily Mail reported.

"They did their best but he was dead," 35-year-old Tobi Obiwale, an employee at the hostel, told the Daily Mail.

The hotel receptionist is one of thousands of Britons to reportedly take part in the game of dares that originated in Australia, and has since spread across the world via the internet.

The number of Americans that renounced their citizenship was 221 percent higher in 2013 than it was in 2012. That is a staggering figure, and it is symptomatic of a larger trend. In recent years, a lot of really good people with very deep roots in this country have made the difficult decision to say goodbye to the United States permanently. A few actually go to the trouble to renounce their citizenship, and that is mostly done for tax purposes. But most willingly choose to leave America for other reasons.

Some were very serious when they said they would leave the U.S. if Barack Obama got a second term, some (such as Jesse Ventura) are dismayed at how our freedoms and liberties are eroding and are alarmed at the rise of the Big Brother police state, some are absolutely disgusted by the social and moral decay that is eating away at the foundations of our society, and there are yet others that consider "the grass to be greener" on the other side of the planet.

Personally, I have a number of friends that have made the very hard decision to relocate their families thousands of miles away because they see what is coming to America and they believe that there isn't any hope of turning things around at this point. I also have a lot of friends that are determined to stay in the United States no matter what. When it comes to the future of America, almost everyone has a very strong opinion, and these are discussions that we need to start having.

Once upon a time, the United States was seen as "the land of opportunity" all over the globe and it seemed like everyone wanted to come here.

But now that is all changing. As we have abandoned the principles that this country was founded upon, our economy has gone steadily downhill.