A plane has crashed in Kazakhstan with five cabin crew members and at least 15 passengers on board, Interfax reported, quoting local Emergency Ministry workers.

Reuters, however, quoted a list published by the prosecutor-general's office which said the number of people killed in the crash was 21, not 20.

The plane, which according to reports is a Challenger-200, crashed near Almaty, the largest city in the country. At 1:15pm local time (7:15 GMT) it disappeared from radar.

The passengers were mostly business professionals, with one child among those on board, local authorities said. The plane broke into several parts after falling to the ground, they added.

The California Highway Patrol hopes to locate a group of drivers who briefly shut down the I-880 near Oakland by doing donuts in the middle of the highway.

A YouTube video entitled "Idiots start drifting in the middle of the highway" showed about half a dozen tuned cars driving in circles and peeling out as traffic piled up behind them.

A 69-year-old war veteran and former missionary was arrested over the weekend on the suspicion of killing a 22-year-old Cuban immigrant who mistakenly arrived in his driveway because of faulty GPS directions.

Gwinnett County jail records obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution indicated that Phillip Walker Sailors was charged on Sunday with the murder of Rodrigo Abad Diaz.

Friends who were in the car with Diaz told WSB-TV that they were trying to pick up a friend on the way to ice skating on Saturday but their GPS directed them to the wrong address. The friends said that they waited in the driveway for a few minutes before Sailors emerged from the house and fired a gun into the air.

A Zimbabwean man was recently robbed of his dreadlocks at a South African night club to feed a growing demand for human hair extensions, a local paper reported Tuesday.

The Times said Mutsa Madonko had his long locks that he has grown for 10 years, cut off while partying at a Johannesburg club.

Natural dreadlocks are sold as hair extensions for anything between 200 rand ($22, 16 euro) and 2,500 rand ($204, 278 euro) depending on the length, said The Times.

News out of North Korean in notorious unreliable, but food shortages in the country have gotten so bad and people so desperate that there are now reports of men murdering their own children for food. These startling reports were compiled by independent reporters commissioned by Asia Press, a independent press agency focusing on Asia, and were published by the Sunday Times. And here's one of the most disturbing thing you'll read this morning:

The source said: "While his wife was away on business he killed his eldest daughter and, because his son saw what he had done, he killed his son as well. When the wife came home, he offered her food, saying: 'We have meat.'

"But his wife, suspicious, notified the Ministry of Public Security, which led to the discovery of part of their children's bodies under the eaves."

And another from Gu Gwang-ho, one of the Asia Press's citizen journalists said:

"There was an incident when a man was arrested for digging up the grave of his grandchild and eating the remains."

The big question here is whether this is all true or new urban legends. Considering this is North Korea and taking into account the country's propensity to keep secrets and publish propaganda pieces - we'll likely never get real confirmation from their end. But Asia Press has worked with citizen reporters in the famine-struck regions of North and South Hwanghae for the past year, and The Independent considers their reports credible.

Regulators have long deemed deep aquifers too expensive to tap, but what happens if traditional reservoirs dry up?

Mexico City plans to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The Mexican effort challenges a key tenet of U.S. clean water policy: that water far underground can be intentionally polluted because it will never be used.

U.S. environmental regulators have long assumed that reservoirs located thousands of feet underground will be too expensive to tap. So even as population increases, temperatures rise, and traditional water supplies dry up, American scientists and policy-makers often exempt these deep aquifers from clean water protections and allow energy and mining companies to inject pollutants directly into them.

As ProPublica has reported in an ongoing investigation about America's management of its underground water, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued more than 1,500 permits for companies to pollute such aquifers in some of the driest regions. Frequently, the reason was that the water lies too deep to be worth protecting.

An Australian teen missing for nine weeks and feared dead was finally found by two hikers Saturday outside the town of Westleigh, near Sydney. Matthew Allen, 18, was discovered covered in leeches and other insect bites, and suffering from gangrene in his feet and lower legs. He had lost half his body weight and has been rendered partially blind by malnourishment. Matthew was taken immediately by helicopter to a nearby hospital where he is recovering.

No explanation has been given for why Matthew entered the bushland in late November, but survival experts are in awe of his ability to subsist with virtually no food during a record heat wave. "He was not living under any shelter and was exposed to the full conditions," said Glyn Baker of the Hornsby police. "Anyone who is missing for that length of time in those kind of conditions ... you wouldn't expect to see them again." Some reports have suggested that Matthew may have survived by eating small animals from a nearby urban runoff creek.

Local troops could decide for themselves whether to change their membership policy or continue to exclude gays

As early as next week, the Boy Scouts of America may announce it will allow gay Scouts and troop leaders, a spokesman for the group has told USA TODAY.

If this policy shift is approved by the national board meeting next week, it will be a sharp reversal of the Scouts' decades' old national policy banning homosexuals.

"The policy change under discussion would allow the religious, civic or educational organizations that oversee and deliver Scouting to determine how to address this issue," BSA spokesman Deron Smith said in a statement to USA TODAY.

If you're looking for evidence that the differences between men and women are greatly exaggerated, the fact that women are equally capable as men of mind-blowing misogyny should erase all doubt. New Mexico state Rep. Cathrynn Brown proved that this week by introducing a bill aimed at throwing rape victims in jail if they refuse to honor their rapist's right to control their body by carrying his child. This sort of insult to rapists will not stand, so Brown, standing up bravely for rapists who want the suffering they've inflicted to carry on and on for their victims, has proposed banning abortion for rape victims on the phony grounds that it's "tampering with evidence".

Of course, the entire idea that having a rapist's baby would somehow be treated as proof of a rape is beyond silly. After all, the defense against the charge of rape is rarely to claim that the penis didn't go into the vagina, but to accuse the victim of consenting and then, due to the unique viciousness of women, claiming it was rape for the lulz. Or to conceal her epic sluttiness by having the police grill her about her sex life, the defense attorney question her about it for the public record, and the entire community gossip about what a big slut she must be to press rape charges. I suspect Brown knows this, coming from the same anti-choice circles as Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin, where the belief is that women are deceitful creatures who will lie and kill to conceal how much fun sex they're having.

Saudi authorities have ordered shops employing both men and women to build separation walls to enforce the strict segregation laws of the ultra-conservative kingdom, local press reported Monday.

The order that was issued by labour minister Adel Faqih also had the stamp of Abdullatif al-Sheikh, the head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, commonly known as Mutawa and religious police, several dailies reported.

It stipulated that a separation barrier, not shorter than 1.6 metres (over five feet), should be erected to divide working men and women.