Thousands have gathered in the city of Donetsk, picketing the Security Council building. The protesters called for the current Kiev authorities to release the local governor and pro-Russian activists detained earlier, threatening to storm the building.

The protesters blocked the Security Council building trying to break the doors and smashing windows on Saturday afternoon. Activists removed the Ukrainian flag from the top of the building, hoisting a Russian tricolor.

The protesters were demanding the release of local governor Pavel Gubarev and 70 pro-Russian activists previously detained by the current Kiev authorities. They also urged local law enforcement to take their side.

The local head of the Security Council has promised the protesters to release the activists and Gubarev, according to Life news. He then reportedly escaped through the back door of the building.

Los Angeles County prosecutors have charged a man with murdering his live-in boyfriend and dumping his severed head, hands and feet near the Hollywood sign two years ago.

Police announced the arrest of Gabriel Campos-Martinez, 38, on suspicion of killing Hervey Coronado Medellin, 66, of Los Angeles. Campos-Martinez was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday with the help of local authorities and was being held on $1 million bail pending an extradition hearing.

Campos-Martinez was charged on Monday with one felony count of murder with malice aforethought in the slaying of Medellin, who had been dating Campos-Martinez and was living with him at the time of his disappearance, Deputy District Attorney Bobby Grace said. It wasn't clear if Campos-Martinez was represented by an attorney.

A felony complaint alleges Medellin was killed on or around Dec. 27, 2011. A coroner's report found that he had died of asphyxiation and ruled it a homicide.

Two women discovered Medellin's head while walking dogs on a trail in Griffith Park on Jan. 17, 2012. One of the dogs, which was off its leash, had started to play with a plastic bag. When the dog shook the bag, the head fell out.

Raising the minimum wage would give our economy much more bang for the buck than we get from the financial industry's yearly windfalls.

Purveyors of Ferraris and high-end Swiss watches keep their fingers crossed toward the end of each calendar year, hoping that the big Wall Street banks will be generous with their annual cash bonuses.

New figures show that the bonus bonanza of 2013 didn't disappoint. According to the New York State Comptroller's office, Wall Street firms handed out $26.7 billion in bonuses to their 165,200 employees last year, up 15 percent over the previous year. That's their third-largest haul on record.
That money will no doubt boost sales of luxury goods. Just imagine how much greater the economic benefit would be if that same amount of money had gone into the pockets of minimum-wage workers.

The $26.7 billion Wall Streeters pocketed in bonuses would cover the cost of more than doubling the paychecks for all of the 1,085,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

And boosting their pay in that way would give our economy much more bang for the buck. That's because low-wage workers tend to spend nearly every dollar they make to meet their basic needs. The wealthy can afford to squirrel away a much greater share of their earnings.

Cleveland - A court approved the involuntary detainment of a woman in a psychiatric ward when hospital staff interpreted her prayers as signs of psychosis, a lawsuit alleges.

The woman, 56, is a Pentecostal Christian and a self-published spiritual author. The violation of her rights occurred last year during an act of spiritual devotion.

As part of her faith, she periodically abstains from food and consumes only water. This process, known as fasting, has been observed for thousands of years for a wide variety of spiritual and health reasons. A fast typically ranges from one full day up to a period of weeks. The Bible states that Jesus Christ fasted for 40 days in the desert.

On July 10th, 2013, Jane Doe was in the 15th day of a fasting period. As her lawsuit states, "while at a BP gas station in the city of Cleveland, Doe became confused and disoriented, and she contacted her mother for assistance."

Doe went to the emergency room at St. Vincent Charity Medical Center in Cleveland. "Blood tests taken at the time of Doe's admission revealed low sodium, potassium and electrolyte levels, indicative of water intoxication and hyponatremia," Courthouse News reported. "Notwithstanding the results of Doe's blood tests, Dr. Brar diagnosed Doe on admission as suffering from bipolar disorder with psychotic features."

In Peter Lanza's new house, on a secluded private road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is an attic room overflowing with shipping crates of what he calls "the stuff." Since the day in December, 2012, when his son Adam killed his own mother, himself, and twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, strangers from across the world have sent thousands upon thousands of letters and other keepsakes: prayer shawls, Bibles, Teddy bears, homemade toys; stories with titles such as "My First Christmas in Heaven"; crosses, including one made by prison inmates. People sent candy, too, and when I visited Peter, last fall, he showed me a bag of year-old caramels. He had not wanted to throw away anything that people sent. But he said, "I was wary about eating anything," and he didn't let Shelley Lanza - his second wife - eat any of the candy, either. There was no way to be sure it wasn't poisoned. Downstairs, in Peter's home office, I spotted a box of family photographs. He used to display them, he told me, but now he couldn't look at Adam, and it seemed strange to put up photos of his older son, Ryan, without Adam's. "I'm not dealing with it," he said. Later, he added, "You can't mourn for the little boy he once was. You can't fool yourself."

Since the shootings, Peter has avoided the press, but in September, as the first anniversary of his son's rampage approached, he contacted me to say that he was ready to tell his story. We met six times, for interviews lasting as long as seven hours. Shelley, a librarian at the University of Connecticut, usually joined us and made soup or chili or salads for lunch. Sometimes we played with their German shepherd. When Peter speaks, you can still hear a strong trace of rural Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, where he and his first wife - Nancy, Adam's mother - grew up. He is an affable man with a poise that often hides his despair. An accountant who is a vice-president for taxes at a General Electric subsidiary, he maintains a nearly fanatical insistence on facts, and nothing annoyed him more in our conversations than speculation - by me, the media, or anyone else. He is not by nature given to self-examination, and often it was Shelley who underlined the emotional ramifications of what he said.

Hundreds of protesters marched through Manchester, England on Sunday in what is believed to be one of the largest anti-fracking rallies to take place in the UK.

A recent survey carried out by the Manchester Evening News found that 73 percent of Greater Manchester residents are opposed to the controversial gas extraction technique - so on Sunday at noon, up to 1,000 demonstrators gathered in downtown to march from Piccadilly Gardens to Cathedral Gardens.

Many of the speakers and demonstrators included members of the long-standing Barton Moss protest camp in neighboring Irlam, just south of Manchester. There, energy firm IGas is carrying out test drilling to explore potential shale gas reserves beneath the green belt site at Barton Moss.

[PHOTO 7] #Salford Says... Anti #fracking demo #Manchester 09/03/14 pic.twitter.com/sbQzT1sknb
- Sara Firth (@SaraFirth_RT) March 9, 2014

The purpose of the march in Manchester was to send a clear message to the government and energy companies that the vast majority of Britons oppose fracking, Martin Porter, a spokesman for the Barton Moss camp and a member of Frack Free Greater Manchester, told the Manchester Evening News.

• Israel wants to extend its compulsory military service to some of its most religious residents
• Many ultra-Orthodox Israelis see this as a form of religious persecution
• The demonstration was a show of solidarity with Israeli ultra-Orthodox who've been protesting the proposal for weeks
• Last Sunday, hundreds of thousands of the devout Jews brought Jerusalem to a stand still in a massive show of force

Ten city blocks of Manhattan became a river of black Sunday as 50,000 dark-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews took to the streets to protest Israel's proposal to force their young boys into its army.

The gathering took up a stretch of Water Street, with demonstrators standing behind police barricades amid tight security as they prayed in solidarity with their brethren in Israel.

'These kids, a lot of them don't know how to hold a gun. They don't know what physical warfare is,' said Long Island rabbinical student Shmuel Gruis.

The throngs of demonstrators briefly shut down Water and Wall Streets in Manhattan's financial district.

Israel's parliament, the Knesset, is expected to vote on the conscription bill later this month.

Suspicions continue that missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have been hijacked, after it's revealed the final message from the cockpit, "all right, good night," was sent after the first of two communications systems was disabled

1.28pm AEST

Hello, and welcome to the Guardian's rolling coverage of the search for missing flight MH370.

People in Crimea are gripped by the feeling that their dreams have come true - a desire to join Russia, which can guarantee the stabilization in their social and political life, the head of the monitors' commission, Polish MP Mateusz Piskorski told RT.

RT: You were an observer at this referendum voting, can you tell us what you have witnessed during the voting session?

Mateusz Piskorski: The referendum has been organized professionally, considering there was very little time for all the institutions to prepare, all the staff for polling stations, for electoral commission.

Everything went like in a professionally prepared country with professionally prepared staff. And this is an interesting point. This indicates that Crimea has already created its own state institutions which are able to work even in such extraordinary conditions, even having such a short time preparing such a huge project - all-national referendum.

So when it comes to the whole evaluation of the referendum, I would like to stress not only that it was very professional but very calm, with all guarantees of safety at polling stations but without too much exposure of police presence at the polling stations, and so on. So very peaceful, calm.

It was organized according not only to the law of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea but also according to most basic, most important international standards.

Link to video: Pro-Russian separatists: Crimea is just the beginning

With Soviet-era music blaring from loudspeakers and the Russian tricolour everywhere, the overwhelming feeling in Sevastopol was that the city was finally "going home" after a 23-year stay in Ukraine.

The home of the Russian Black Sea fleet, and a bastion of pro-Russian support in Crimea, there was barely a dissenting voice in the port during Sunday's referendum, which most of the world considers illegitimate but here is seen as a just exercise in self-determination.

With half the ballots counted, Crimean officials said that 95.5% of voters had chosen union with Russia, with a turnout of over 80%. Given the absence of recognised election observers, it was impossible to verify how honestly the ballots were counted, but in Sevastopol at least, such figures did not seem implausible.

"Today is the greatest day of my life; we are returning to mother Russia," said Ludmila Balatskaya, 72, a former deputy in the city government, as she sat on a bench beneath a flag of Sevastopol in a polling station.

"I was just a little girl when they just informed us that Crimea was now Ukraine. Everything fell down around me. We are Russia, we have always been Russian people in our souls here in Crimea, but today that becomes a practical reality again" she said, tears in her eyes.