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About 20 per cent of people in China believe the Mayan calendar signifies doomsday

If you think the Mayan calendar signifies the end of the world this year, you are not alone.

A new survey conducted by Ipsos Reid for Reutersfound nine per cent of Canadians believe the end is near.

"Canadians are less superstitious compared to others, but they're not far behind," said Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos, to Postmedia News. Younger people and those in lower income brackets are more likely to believe.

"Perhaps those who are older have lived long enough to not be as concerned with what happens to their future," she said to Reuters.

Topping the list was China, with 20 per cent of its population thinking our last day alive will be Dec. 21 of this year. Second, with 13 per cent, was Turkey, Russia, Mexico, South Korea and Japan. In the U.S., 12 per cent of people believe the apocalypse is coming.

Overall around the world, 10 per cent of people think the world will end this year and 14 per cent think it will end in their lifetime.

US, San Diego - A college student picked up in a drug sweep in California was never arrested, never charged and should have been released. Instead he was forgotten in a holding cell for four days and says he had to drink his own urine to stay alive.

Without food, water or access to a toilet, Daniel Chong began hallucinating on the third day.

He told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he saw little Japanese-style cartoon characters that told him to dig into the walls to find water. Chong tore apart the plastic lining on the walls.

"I ripped the walls and waited for the room to flood for some reason," said the 23-year-old University of California, San Diego, student, three days after he left the hospital where he was treated for dehydration and kidney failure. "I can't explain my hallucinations too well because none of them make sense."

Later he added, "I felt like I was completely losing my mind."

Four days later, agents opened the door on a fluke and found him covered in his own feces, Chong said.

The top Drug Enforcement Administration agent in San Diego apologized Wednesday for Chong's treatment and promised an investigation into how his agents could have forgotten about him.

Four individuals, who are married in Salt Lake City, Utah, have kept polygamy in the family. Joe Darger is married to two twin sisters, Vicki and Valerie Darger, and their cousin Alina (video below).

According to ABC News, the Dargers are independent fundamentalist Mormons, who adhere to the tenet of plural marriage put forth by church founder Joseph Smith in the 19th century. The current Mormon Church abandoned polygamy decades ago.

The Daily Mail reports that the Dargers live in the same house and have 24 children. Each of the women has their own bedroom and Joe rotates them nightly. The three wives and their husband have co-written a book 'Love Times Three.'

Valerie defends the arrangement as normal: "The fact that Joe was married to Vicki didn't bother me at all. I took it as a sign he would be a good husband for me as well. As teenagers, Vicki and I liked some of the same guys. I thought it might even be good if we married the same man."

Vicki adds: "I know that some people are uncomfortable at the thought of two sisters sharing a husband. But there's a good chance if a husband is compatible with one sister, he'll be well matched with another."

"Even in our community joint courtships are rare. We knew we were taking on a huge challenge and responsibility."

"I was attracted to both girls," Joe explains, "Vicki opened my mind to it. I was attracted to both girls and knew that individual relationships would develop in time."

Joe was 18 when he began dating Vicki and her cousin Alina. He married them in a Mormon ceremony in 1990. Both women encouraged Joe to pursue Vicki's twin Valerie, whom he married in 2000.

In 1962, Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which said that polygamy was illegal in all US states.

Joe says that he would like to change the law: "We hope that by talking about our way of life, polygamy will step closer to being an accepted lifestyle and the laws that criminalize it might change."

On Sunday, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Pastor Sean Harris, of the Berean Baptist Church, slammed parents who allow their boys to act effeminate (audio below). He preached that parents should "man up" and punch small children who have "limp wrists."

Harris said that if girls want to play sports, they should be allowed to as long as they "dress themselves up" and try to look attractive.

While there is laughter from the audience, it is hard to tell if Harris is joking or not.

Harris supports North Carolina's proposed anti-gay Amendment One.

Residents of an East London apartment complex have new, perhaps unwanted neighbors on their roofs: a dozen armed soldiers and surface-to-air missiles.

As part of the largest peacetime mobilization in British history, the military is installing the missile system in order to protect the Olympic stadium, which the apartment complex overlooks.

Residents of the private gated Bow Quarter complex in the London borough of Tower Hamlets took to Twitter this morning to post photos of soldiers arriving with pieces of the missile launchers. The military chose the seven-building residential property, according to a leaflet given to the 700 residents over the weekend, because of a 100-foot-high tower that has unobstructed views of the Olympic complex.

The missiles in this week's test are dummies, and the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense has not yet made a final determination about where missiles will be sited for the 2012 Olympics, which begin on July 27.

At least nine protesters have been killed and 45 injured in a dawn attack on protesters gathered outside Egypt's ministry of defence, according to the health officials.

Clashes continued on Wednesday morning between protesters and the unidentified assailants, who threw petrol bombs and fired live ammunition, birdshot and teargas, according to witnesses.

"There is a deluge of blood on the street which extends for many metres. One injured man had his back sliced by the thugs," said Abdelrahman Hany, a rights advocate at the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information organisation who was present when the latest round of attacks began.

Hany said he believed the attackers were linked to the state security apparatus. "How else would they possess teargas to fire at us?" he asked.

Protesters had camped in Tahrir Square for a week before deciding on an impromptu march to the ministry of defence in east Cairo last Friday, where the sit-in resumed.

The sit-in was first attacked on Saturday night, when at least one person was reported killed. That attack comprised nail bombs, birdshots and automatic gunfire and lasted until early on Sunday morning, with no intervention by the military troops present.

Hundreds of internal Al Qaeda documents embedded inside a pornographic movie on a memory disk have revealed plots of carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, according to CNN (video below).

The documents revealed that Al Qaeda planned to hijack cruise ships and post footage of passengers, dressed in Guantanamo Bay-style orange jumpsuits, being executed, in order to pressure governments to release prisoners.

German interrogators questioning a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin,were surprised to find a digital storage device and memory cards hidden in his underpants.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called 'Kick Ass' and a file marked 'Sexy Tanja.'

Several weeks later, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video, more than 100 Al Qaeda documents.

CNN reported that one document called 'Future Works' appears to have been the product of discussions to find new targets and methods of attack. German investigators believe it was written in 2009.

© Getty Imagesphoto of bridges in the Czech Republic, although not the one that was stolen

The crooks provided paperwork and did it right in front of police

Thieves in the Czech Republic are proving if you want to steal something big don't do it under the cloak of darkness, but rather in broad daylight right in front of police.

That's how they recently managed to steal a 10-ton bridge that was built in 1901 near the town of Sokolov in the country's west.

"Thieves said they had been hired to demolish the bridge, and remove the unwanted railway track to make way for a new cycle route," said railroad spokesman Pavel Halla in an Inquisitr article.

They used a crane to pick up the large pieces and put them into trucks.

At one point during the robbery, a police officer stopped the thieves, but they showed the officer paperwork stating an agreement with the country's railway service and continued working.

Three former Canada Revenue Agency employees have been charged with corruption and fraud for allegedly trying to extort money from restaurant owners in exchange for lower tax assessments.

The RCMP-led "Project Coche" resulted in 12 charges filed against the former employees Tuesday.

"It's all the same type of pattern that they all [allegedly] did," said RCMP Cpl. Luc Thibault.

One of the accused, a 55-year-old former tax auditor who was let go from the CRA in 2011 during the RCMP investigation, allegedly offered a restaurant owner to lower his upcoming tax notice in exchange for $90,000, according to police.

The restaurant owner declined the deal.

A 50-year-old team leader, also "discharged" from the CRA 2011, allegedly received $100,000 in bribes from a Montreal restaurant owner between June 2007 and August 2008 to erase unreported income from the file.

The Japanese owner of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that was washed out to sea in the tsunami last April says its discovery on a remote beach on the West Coast of B.C. last week is a miracle.

The owner Ikuo Yokoyama, a 29-year-old resident of the town of Yamamoto, in Miyagi Prefecture, was tracked down by a Harley-Davidson representative in Japan who saw the story in the media.

A company spokeperson told CBC News they are now hoping to pay for the return of the bike to Yokoyama and to see if they can restore it for him.

Yokoyama told Japanese television station NHK that the discovery of the motorcycle was miraculous and he wished to thank the B.C. man who found it personally, but so far he has only been able to do so on TV.

He said he lost his home and three family members in the tsunami and is now living in temporary accommodation. The motorcycle was being kept at his house in the back section of a cube van that he was using as storage shed when the tsunami struck.