A Swedish retirement home may seem an unlikely setting for an experiment about the future of work, but a small group of elderly-care nurses in Sweden have made radical changes to their daily lives in an effort to improve quality and efficiency.

In February the nurses switched from an eight-hour to a six-hour working day for the same wage - the first controlled trial of shorter hours since a rightward political shift in Sweden a decade ago snuffed out earlier efforts to explore alternatives to the traditional working week.

"I used to be exhausted all the time, I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa," says Lise-Lotte Pettersson, 41, an assistant nurse at Svartedalens care home in Gothenburg. "But not now. I am much more alert: I have much more energy for my work, and also for family life."

A small plane rolling down the street is not what you usually expect to see at the traffic lights while returning from home. However, commuters in a California city had the thrill of watching just that on Wednesday.

The Piper Cherokee aircraft mingled with cars and SUV's during rush-hour traffic in Irving in Orange Country. The plane is owned by Orange Coast College and is based at the John Wayne Airport.

A commuter caught the moment on a dashcam, although the driver's reaction was extremely calm - reminiscent of how Russian drivers took in witnessing a meteor exploding in the sky in February 2013. He did exclaim: "Are you kidding me" when the plane crossed the road.

The unorthodox procedure was a necessity, although the authorities did not report the cause of the emergency. A student and an instructor were in the cockpit and nobody was hurt in the incident.

Since Francois Hollande was elected (in May 2012), France has seen its joblessness ranks rise 36 of 39 months by a stunning 648,000. The latest month added another 20,000 as it appears the brief respite in June and July is well and truly over. At 3.571 million, this is the highest number of jobseekers France has ever had...

Record high joblessness, well played Hollande!

This program is mind blowing, when you consider the many connections between pop culture and music icons, and the military industrial complex. There is obviously a great deal that hasn't been explained to the naive and believing public, who identify with these figures, and refuse to ask critical questions that could diminish the popular images with whom they identify. Nevertheless, there are endless connections between these celebrated individuals and ongoing experiments in MK Ultra and mind control - perhaps operating on the mass population level.

If even some of this is true, it is interesting and significant; but more so, this is a window into the doors of perception that were used to steer the CIA-created counterculture in order to re-engineer society.

Staff in 47 Christian schools serving Palestinians within present-day Israel have gone on strike to protest against funding cuts imposed on them by the government. They say they may escalate their protest by seeking the closure of Christian holy sites that attract thousands of tourists each year.

While the State of Israel previously funded up to 70 percent of the budget for these schools, it has sharply reduced its contribution during the past few years.Today, the state pays only 29 percent of their operating costs. Palestinian citizens of Israel perceive the cuts as an attack on their culture and identity.

The Christian schools — which teach 30,000 children — are among the few Palestinian institutions in present-day Israel that survived the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing conducted by Zionist forces during and after Israel's establishment in 1948. Run on a semi-public basis, they follow the core Israeli curriculum but also give lessons on religion and Palestinian history.

The funding cuts appear discriminatory. Schools for ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have similarly been run on a semi-public basis, even though they focus on religious instruction, rather than the Israeli curriculum.Yet the Israeli government has steadily increased its funding for such schools in recent years to the extent that they are almost totally financed by the state's budget.

Palestinian Christians comprise less than 2 percent of Israel's population. Their schools — which accept Muslims and Druze students, too — are high-performing, with a large number of their pupils later attending university.

A Muslim schoolboy was questioned by staff about Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) after he used the term 'eco-terrorist' in a classroom discussion about the environment.

The 14-year-old, who wishes not to be named, said the experience of being taken out of his class and questioned about an international terrorist organization was "scary."

Central Foundation School in Old Street, London, said they acted to protect the welfare of the child in line with the government's controversial counter-extremism 'Prevent' policy.

The schoolboy's parents are taking legal action against the school, claiming he was left "visibly distressed" by the experience.

Molotov cocktails, car bombs and IEDs, they've been a common sight in one part of Albuquerque this week. Investigators have been blowing stuff up left and right, and all that destruction, is part of an effort to make you safer. "Unfortunately this is the world we live in, IEDs, bombs of various types, we certainly see them throughout the world being used in domestic terrorism," said ATF Special Agent Tom Mangan.

That's why investigators are here in Albuquerque this week sharpening their skills. ATF officials have brought together state and local bomb technicians and first responders. Mangan said, "We want to bring this collective, there are no egos here, we check those at the door."

The group spent classroom time examining bomb pieces before and after blasts. Now they're out in the desert just south of the Sunport, seeing the explosions firsthand, then taking a hard look at what's left behind. "They're going to shift through that scene, looking for pieces and components, set those aside and then they will reconstruct that device," said Mangan.

Pieces that could mean little by themselves, but all together help investigators put the puzzle back together. Mangan said, "We're all here to determine the cause and origins of these blasts and ultimately leading to the arrest of that person or persons who are responsible in the real world."

The Game

In October of 1994, University of Manitoba psychology professor Bob Altemeyer performed an experiment. After screening participants using a personality survey disguised as an opinion poll, he selected 68 highly authoritarian college students to play a political governance and resource management simulation called the Global Change Game. In this game, each player represents 100 million people in one of nine different regions of the world. Play consists of making decisions about how to deal with various social, economic, and environmental matters. Each player's viability depends on three factors: food, health care, and employment. Lose access to one factor, and you earn a black armband. Earn three black armbands and all the people you represent die. A worldwide environmental crisis occurs at a randomly determined point during game play, testing the players' ability to respond to a global emergency.

The game also involves regional leaders, called "Elites", who control their region's bank account, which they can use to buy factories, hospitals, armies, and so on. They're allowed to travel the world, to make deals with other Elites, and to declare war if they can gather enough support from their fellow region members. Success in war means increased territory and assets. Elites can also secretly funnel some of their region's money into their own pockets. (Unbeknownst to the rest of the players, the Elites are simultaneously vying for the prize of World's Richest Person.)

The Global Change Game was originally designed to educate students about various challenges facing the modern world, including population growth, hunger, climate change, international relations, war, and resource distribution. But that day in 1994, Bob Altemeyer used it for a different purpose: to see what would happen in a world populated exclusively by right-wing authoritarians.

It looks like Team Australia, smells like Team Australia, sounds like Team Australia. But in fact it was a game used to simulate real world global politics, and the results were startling. Back in the real world, Dr Lissa Johnson looks at the collision of government and fantasy in the lucky country.

In 2003 Robert Altemeyer, the father of contemporary Right-wing authoritarianism research, reported on a series of global leadership simulations. Publishing in the Journal "Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy" Altemeyer named his paper, "What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth? A Simulation".

The last couple of weeks in Australian politics brings Altemeyer's simulations to mind, not because our reality looks like what happens when authoritarians inherit the earth. Because it looks worse.

Using a paradigm known as the Global Change Game, Altemeyer created two mock worlds, one in which leaders and followers were high on Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and one in which they were low. Right-wing authoritarianism correlates with political conservatism and involves punitive submission to authority and the status quo.

Americans are no strangers to embarrassing exports (sorry for Grey's Anatomy and Papa John's pizza, Planet Earth!). And our political nutbaggery is no exception. But when it comes to Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, we may have outdone ourselves. The GOP frontrunner is a woman-hating reality TV star whose campaign has mostly focused on his lust for ethnic cleansing. The global reaction to Trump mania has been a sense of disgust; Trump is the native son of a country that worships selfishness above empathy, corporate interests over justice and notoriety over prestige. As French author Marie-Cecile Naves put it to Politico, "Trump represents the America we love to hate...He is our negative mirror image, a man we see as brutal, who worships money and lacks culture — someone who lets us feel a bit superior about being European."

In short, the rest of the world seems as flabbergasted about Trump's rise as we should be. Here's how seven other countries have reacted to his befuddling popularity.

1. Mexico

Mexicans have a special right to resent Trump, given his well-documented disdain for them. He's pushed blackmailing Mexico into paying for a border fence, called undocumented Latinos "rapists" who are "bringing drugs and crime," and even vowed to implement a mass deportation of millions of undocumented people and their American children. One July issue of Mexican comic book El Peso Hero featured its hero slugging Donald Trump in the mug on its cover, just as Captain America once socked Hitler. Not to be outdone, Mexican artist Dalton Javier Avalos Ramirez designed a special Donald Trump piñata so people can fulfill their dreams of bashing Trump with a stick.

2. France

France's Liberation Newspaper didn't go for subtlety in its August 27 cover story, "Trump: The American Nightmare." Text that ran alongside his pink grimace declared him to be "vulgar and opportunistic." Resentment against Trump has long been brewing in the land of brie and berets: back in January, he sparked widespread outrage when he blamed the Charlie Hebdo murders on strict gun laws. (Say quoi?!) More recently, Trump's nationalism and tendency to make outrageous comments in the media led a columnist at Le Figaro to dub him the American Le Pen, a comparison to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the notorious patriarch of France's far-right. Le Pen could also give Trump a master class on how to alienate practically everyone with reactionary bullshit: over the past year, Le Pen has gone off the deep end by denying the Holocaust and singing the praises of Nazi-collaborationist Vichy government occupiers who deported thousands of Jews during WWII.