"Consider the reality of today's job market. We have a massive skills gap. Even with record unemployment, millions of skilled jobs are unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them. Meanwhile unemployment among college graduates is at an all-time high, and the majority of those graduates with jobs are not even working in their field of study. Plus, they owe a trillion dollars in student loans. A trillion! And still, we push a four-year college degree as the best way for the most people to find a successful career?" -Mike Rowe

For better or for worse, what we do for a living often defines us. It's one of the first questions we ask people when we meet them for the first time. It's where we will end up spending 90,000 hours of our life, over the course of 40-some years. Unfortunately, most people count themselves as unhappy with their work (by two to one worldwide!). Pop culture endlessly makes fun of the drone-like office employee, and yet that's where most of us are.

The campus coup d'etat was over.

After two top University of Missouri system officials announced their resignations Monday following allegations that they had not sufficiently addressed racial issues on campus, students danced on the quad where activists had set up a tent city. The football team announced that it was ending its strike and would resume practicing for this weekend's football game.

At an outdoor amphitheater, hundreds of students chanted in the sun, "I ... am ... a ... revolutionary!" Social media users around the world joined in, tweeting more than 100,000 times about the day's protest. The uprising was partly a ripple effect from last year's protests in Ferguson, Mo. Missouri again proved itself a cauldron for black radicalism, with students pairing bold physical protests with a social media megaphone to demand a renewed focus on racial inequality from their university administration.

"The frustration and anger that I see is clear, real, and I don't doubt it for a second," said university President Tim Wolfe as he resigned Monday morning at a meeting of the system's governing body, the Board of Curators. "I take full responsibility for this frustration and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred," said Wolfe, a businessman who took charge of Missouri's public university system in 2012. "Use my resignation to heal and start talking again."

Tens of thousands of Germans are demanding that authorities ban a PEGIDA demonstration in Dresden on Monday, the anniversary of the so-called Kristallnacht 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom under Adolf Hitler.

In an online petition posted on Change.org, activists say it is unacceptable for local authorities to let the far-right, anti-immigrant PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) rally on the anniversary of this notorious date in German history.

They are urging city authorities to "abolish or suspend" PEGIDA's demonstration on this "historically significant day - the Reich's Kristallnacht" - when 1,400 synagogues were torched and residential areas and Jewish cemeteries were destroyed. On the next day, November 10, 1938, around 30.000 German Jews were rounded up and thrown into concentration camps, with hundreds being killed in custody.

The Spartanburg Methodist College campus in South Carolina is on lockdown Monday evening after campus police said an officer-involved shooting had occurred. A coroner has been called to the scene, according to Fox Carolina.

Campus police said a shooting occurred at Spartanburg Methodist College on Monday night.

The shooting happened around 8:30 p.m. near Powell Mill Road.

The coroner was called to the scene. SLED said a Spartanburg Methodist College officer was involved. Agents and crime scene technicians were headed to the scene.

SLED said one person was dead and another was in custody. An officer responded to a report of a car break-in. The officer encountered two people in a vehicle and attempted to detain them.

The officer fired after reported being struck by the fleeing vehicle, according to SLED.

Parents are bravely standing up to trends that restrict kids' freedom and love of learning.

America's public schools are the training ground for our next generation of engineers, doctors, artists, lawyers, and other professions that form our dynamic economy. Schools are also here to nurture our children, to allow them to grow, explore and have fun in an environment that is conducive to personal freedom.

But a troubling cultural undercurrent has been creeping into our education system, converting the educational experience into something that can range from the gratuitously stressful to downright racist and cruel, from high-stakes testing to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Parents are bravely standing up to these trends in a growing number of ways.

Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Recent events at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina have cast a spotlight on the increasing utilization of police officers in public schools for disciplinary tasks that used to be handled by teachers, administrators and parents. Protesters outside the state capitol called for the prosecution of the officer involved, and many said a wider institutional system that is over-policing schools is to blame. As budgetary pressures weigh down on schools, some districts are cutting back on these school resource officer (SRO) programs, as they are called.

Schools in Chico, Calif. canceled their SRO program for the first time in 15 years, thanks to budget shortfalls in April 2013. Sometimes police departments themselves are withdrawing.

An employee of Russia's Academy of Sciences was killed on Monday when a canister filled with a nonflammable gas known as Freon exploded, the TASS news agency reported, citing an unidentified law enforcement official.

"The incident occurred in one of the rooms in the academy building, located on Leninsky Prospekt. A tank with Freon exploded. As a result, one person died," the source said. The Moscow police press service confirmed the incident, TASS reported.

An unidentified adviser to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences also told TASS about the explosion, claiming an employee servicing refrigeration equipment — which uses Freon gas — "made a technical error" while conducting maintenance.

A kidnapped woman's dramatic escape led police to a house of horrors in New Orleans, complete with hidden compartments, false doors and cameras behind two-way mirrors. Apartment resident Mario Perez-Roque, 56, was arrested Friday evening on charges of kidnapping one of his co-workers, a 36-year-old Cuban national he tried and failed to court.

The unnamed woman was kidnapped from her home on Martinique Avenue in New Orleans earlier that same day, and taken to Perez-Roque's rear apartment in a shotgun home, where he held her before she was able to free herself and flee. However, police believe two men were involved in the kidnapping, and are still searching for the second man.
Police say the victim worked with Perez-Roque and had turned him down when he expressed interest in dating her.

Kenner police Lt Brian McGregor described the home as a 'house of horrors'.'We found restraints. They've got false walls and everything else inside the house,' McGregor told the New Orleans Advocate. 'That's pretty much what it is, a house of horrors. Who wants to be restrained? Who wants to be tied up in somebody else's house?' On Friday, Perez-Roque came to the woman's house on Martinique Avenue and kidnapped her, bringing her back to his apartment where he gagged her, placed a bag over her head and tied her to a chair inside the apartment.

The woman told police that at one point, she heard two men whispering in Spanish about leaving the apartment. She was eventually able to free one of her hands and take the bag off her head to find that she was sitting directly across from a picture of herself. The woman then managed to take off all of the restraints and she ran out of the house.

Unfortunately one of the men saw her and started chasing her and nearly succeeded in recapturing her when a Good Samaritan intervened Gary Messina told WWL that he was driving down the street with his wife and son when he saw the man chasing the woman and knew something was wrong. 'I just jumped out of the car to try to stop the guy from pulling her back. As soon as I jumped out of the car he looked at me and he had her around the neck in a headlock and just wasn't going to let her go' Messina explained. The man eventually fled when Messina screamed that the police were on the way.

A widespread practice in the US known as "pay to stay" charges jail inmates a daily fee while they are incarcerated. For those who are in and out of the local county or city lock-ups - particularly those struggling with addiction - that can lead to sky-high debts.

David Mahoney is $21,000 (£13,650) in debt. Not from credit cards. Not from school loans.

He's accumulated the massive tab because of the days he spent locked up in the local jail in Marion, Ohio, which is a small town with a major heroin epidemic. Mahoney, a lanky 41-year-old, has struggled with addiction since he was a teenager, eventually stealing to fuel his habit. He got caught a lot, even burgling the same bar twice.

"The urge to use cocaine and crack - that's what it led to it. Once I start using there's no going back for me," he says.

Today, he's 14 months sober, and is a resident and employee of the Arnita Pittman Community Recovery Center, a sober living house on the northern edge of town. His counsellor says he is doing "awesome" and he hopes to one day to become an addiction counsellor himself.

But while Mahoney may have left his habits behind, he can't shake his debt. It has accumulated over 15 years of trouble with the law and is a separate charge from the restitution he must pay to the victims he stole from, or any administrative costs he has incurred by going to court.

It comes from a daily "pay-to-stay" fee - sometimes called "pay for stay" - that he was charged by the local jail, the Multi-County Correctional Center. He was charged $50 each day he spent in jail, plus a $100 booking fee. It works almost as if he checked into a hotel and got a bill when he checked out.

"Obviously, it's my fault I'm in the situation I am in. I'm trying to start over," he says. "People that end up in jail are usually down on their luck anyway. They're going through some trials and tribulations in life. Why focus on the people who are already struggling?"

What was one of the better kept secrets of the 21st century is now blown totally open. The three corporations above are responsible for much of the world's chocolate influx, 60% of which comes out of West Africa.

In 2000, it was revealed that the harvesting and processing of the cacao plant was left to children, often unpaid and living in slavery. Imprisoned, forced to go to the bathroom on the roof or in a cup and malnourished, children would either be sold into it for $30 or be kidnapped, thinking they were applying for some sort of paying job.

The rules and regulations are so lax there that there is no government to step in and stop the atrocities. This horrific state of child slavery is also the perfect cheap labor for candy companies that want to sell you chocolate for dirt cheap prices. Why do you think it only costs $1 for a chocolate bar?

The information was revealed in the documentary, Slavery: A Global Investigation, which can be watched here:

In Amsterdam speech to event hosted by far-left Jewish group, Joint List lawmaker says Jewish state engaged in 'ethnic cleansing' against Palestinians

Denouncing Israel for "racist policies" against the Palestinians, firebrand MK Hanin Zoabi of the Joint (Arab) List party accused the Jewish state of crimes akin to those committed by the Nazis. She was speaking at an event marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht in the heart of Amsterdam's decimated Jewish quarter on Sunday.

Organized by the city's far-left Platform Stop Racism and Exclusion, the commemoration drew more than 200 attendees, with dozens of them wearing kippot or draped in Israeli flags.

Leading up to Zoabi's speech, several organizers delivered remarks comparing the Holocaust to Israel's treatment of Palestinians. At least half a dozen pro-Israel protesters were escorted from the gathering by security personnel and uniformed Amsterdam city police, when at various points they yelled in protest of the speakers' condemnations of Israel.

At an event devoid of signs and banners, there was not a Palestinian flag in sight as mournful Yiddish songs were performed by a klezmer trio leading up to Zoabi's keynote speech.

"I am not an immigrant in my homeland," chanted Zoabi to applause from the crowd, which waited almost an hour for her remarks.

Calling herself "one of 120,000 of her people who were not expelled by Israel in 1948," Zoabi — who was born in Nazareth in 1969 — lashed the Jewish state for creating "more than 80 laws" that discriminate against Palestinians.

The Israeli rules, said Zoabi, are similar to the conditions under which Jews lived at the time of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany.