About 400,000 traditionalists take to streets to oppose new law

Riot police fought running battles with hard-right protesters in the heart of Paris at the end of a mostly peaceful demonstration against gay marriage.

About 200 young people, many of them masked, pelted police lines with bottles, stones, fireworks and flares. The crowd - led bizarrely at one stage by a lone bagpiper - chased and beat up TV crews and press photographers. Police and gendarmes responded with tear gas and baton charges.

There were surreal battle scenes on the Esplanade des Invalides beside the foreign ministry as 200 gendarmes in riot gear formed into defensive squares to beat off attacks from running bands of protesters. Although a hard core of about 200 hard-right youths started the fighting, many hundreds of other, soberly dressed, middle-class protesters cheered them on.

A 17-year-old high school junior from Oregon planned a Columbine-style attack on his high school, manufacturing six different bombs and hiding them in a secret compartment in his bedroom.

Grant Acord will be charged as an adult, said Benton County District Attorney John Haroldson.

He said Acord had written plans, a checklist and a specific timeline for the attack. The bombs that investigators found included pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, a Drano bomb and a napalm bomb, Haroldson said.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

- Frederick Douglass
I think my daughter's eyes are blue. They might be green. She hasn't been around long enough to tell just yet, but they are certainly something. She recognized me for the first time just a few days ago, and smiled up at me in a simple, sweet way that obliterated my heart. She cannot focus on anything more than a few feet from her face, but that, like everything else about her, will change in time. Someday soon, she will be able to see everything, and tragically, this will be the world within her view.

A report released early this year by the organization Oxfam International revealed that the combined income of the richest 100 people in the world is enough to end global poverty four times over, and that the gap between rich and poor has exploded by some 60% in the last 20 years. Rather than hinder this division, the recent global economic crisis has exacerbated it. Money does not disappear, you see, but tends to be translated up the income ladder in times of financial distress.

For nine months, the midwife had been giving the woman herbs to take and several things indicated she was indeed pregnant. Her stomach had swelled, so had her feet.

She had spent many years trying to conceive and now, at 61, she was finally with child, twins in fact - or so she thought.

Even when it came time to give birth, the woman still believed she was an expectant mother. She went back to the midwife, was given seeds to chew and started feeling drowsy.

The woman, Desope Cecilia, says the midwife told her to start pushing and that soon after she heard the cry of one baby and then another. Her miracle babies.

There was even blood, making the delivery scenario all the more real.

It wasn't until some time later, when she took the twins to be immunised, that someone smelled a rat and alerted authorities.

Tests confirmed that Cecilia was not the mother of the two babies. She had paid 1.5 million naira ($9800) for the services of the midwife, Oby George, in Port Harcourt in Nigeria's south.

Protesters march against Monsanto across US, dozens of countries in collective anti-GMO rally

Marches and rallies against seed giant Monsanto were held across the U.S. and in dozens of other countries Saturday.

"March Against Monsanto" protesters say they want to call attention to the dangers posed by genetically modified food and the food giants that produce it. Marches were planned for more than 250 cities around the globe, according to organizers.

Genetically modified plants are grown from seeds that are engineered to resist insecticides and herbicides, add nutritional benefits or otherwise improve crop yields and increase the global food supply. Most corn, soybean and cotton crops grown in the United States today have been genetically modified. But some say genetically modified organisms can lead to serious health conditions and harm the environment.

In the U.S., hundreds of people held marches in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. In Washington, D.C., protesters wearing yellow-and-black shirts lay on the sidewalk in a bee die-in outside Monsanto's headquarters. Abroad, protests took place in London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Vienna, Durban, South Africa, and Melbourne, Australia, among other places. In Cairo, a female protester held up a sign reading "I am not a science experiment."

Monsanto Co., based in St. Louis, said Saturday that it respects people's rights to express their opinion on the topic, but maintains that its seeds improve agriculture by helping farmers produce more from their land while conserving resources such as water and energy.

Some sixth grade students at Hillsdale Elementary School in North Highlands, California, may face felony charges for child porn for passing around a naked photo of a female classmate (video below).

The Twin Rivers School District said that the nude photo had been sent to cell phones of some students who forwarded it to more cell phones and posted to a Facebook group.

Hillsdale Elementary School principal Renee Scott-Femenella called the Twin Rivers Police Department over the incident, reports CBS Sacramento.

Seven people were injured early Saturday morning in southeastern Missouri after two freight trains collided, taking out a nearby overpass. A Union Pacific train t-boned a Burlington Northern train at an intersection, Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter told KFVS-TV. The collision, which occurred around 2:30 a.m., caused one of the trains to derail and hit a pillar under the overpass, collapsing it. There were no cars on the overpass when it collapsed, but Trooper Clark Parrott with Missouri Highway Patrol said two vehicles crashed after coming upon the bridge after it had fallen. Five people from those cars were taken to the hospital with arm and ankle fractures.

A train conductor and locomotive engineer on the Union Pacific train were also injured. Six of the victims were treated and released. A seventh remains hospitalized in good condition. One of the drivers, Christopher Cantrell, 22, said he didn't see the bridge had collapsed until it was too late. At least a dozen Union Pacific train cars and an unknown number of Burlington Northern cars derailed in the accident.

The Union Pacific train was hauling auto parts from Salem, Ill., to Arlington, Texas, according to Union Pacific spokesperson Calli Hite. The Burlington Northern train was hauling scrap metal, according to a spokesperson. The crash, which occurred near Chaffee, Mo., also ignited a fire that crews were able to extinguish quickly. The National Transportation Safety Board has been dispatched a team to investigate the incident. The collision comes just two days after a span of an Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington collapsed - caused when an oversized truck hit an overhead girder - and just over a week after a commuter train derailed in Bridgeport, Conn., suspending rail service along the heavily traveled New York-Boston corridor. - USA Today

US breeds a Chinese-style inmate labor scheme on its own soil. Both state and some of the biggest private companies are now enjoying the fruits of a cheap and readily available work force, with tens of millions of dollars spent by private prisons to keep their jails full.

Bank lobbyists have a direct influence on financial legislation drafted in Congress, and are in some cases even writing the measures themselves. Citigroup this month drafted a regulation bill that has already passed through a House committee.

To soften financial regulations, bank lobbyists frequently 'assist' lawmakers in writing draft legislation that serves to benefit them at the expense of American taxpayers, according to a New York Times investigation.

Lobbyists working for Citigroup Inc., a multinational financial services corporation, wrote 80 percent of a regulation bill that was approved by the House Financial Services Committee this month. Citigroup wrote 70 lines of 85-line bill, which exempts "broad swathes of trades" from new regulation, the Times reported based on e-mails it obtained.

Two paragraphs of the bill were copied "nearly word for word" from what Citigroup drafted. The only difference between the versions were two words, which lawmakers changed to make plural.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was signed into law in 2010, inflicted heavy financial regulatory reform following the most recent recession. The bill was pushed into law by Democrats, but now, both Democrats in the House and Senate are siding with bank lobbyists to roll back parts of the regulation overhaul.

Whenever one of our cities gets a star turn as host of some super-sparkly event, such as a national political gathering or the Super Bowl, its first move is to tidy up - by having the police sweep homeless people into jail, out of town, or under some rug.

But Houston's tidy-uppers aren't waiting for a world-class event to rationalize going after homeless down-and-outers. They've preemptively outlawed the "crime" of dumpster diving in the Texan city.

"I was just basically looking for something to eat," he told the Houston Chronicle. But, unbeknownst to both this indigent tourist and the great majority of Houston's generally generous citizens, an ordinance dating way back to 1942 says that "molesting garbage containers" is illegal. In March, James Kelly, a 44-year-old Navy veteran, was passing through Houston on his way to connect with family in California. Homeless, destitute, and hungry, he chose to check out the dining delicacies in a trash bin near City Hall. Spotted by police, Kelly was promptly charged with "disturbing the contents of a garbage can in the [central] business district." Seriously.