Broward County - A Florida judge presiding over misdemeanor drug cases reportedly showed up to work intoxicated and had to be removed from court. In a palpable irony, even a person who has dedicated her career toward meddling in other people's lives and using the force of government against them is herself incapable of keeping herself sober at work.

The judge faces no legal consequences and instead of being carted off to jail like so many of the recreational drug users she has dealt with, she will voluntarily put herself in rehab.

Judge Gisele Pollack, who founded Boward County's misdemeanor drug court in 2005, was seen verbally assaulting her judicial assistant and yelling for her car keys to be returned before another judge intervened, according to an unidentified source.

The tirade followed Pollack's abrupt dismissal of the day's session after only serving an hour and a half on the bench, during which time she began slurring her words while addressing defendants.

One can only speculate how many cases Pollack, an admitted alcoholic, may have presided over while under the influence. She says she will address what she calls "health issues" during an intensive two week outpatient program before returning to the bench.

Not everyone in the legal community feels that's quite an adequate remedy.

Two months after she moved a second hand couch into her bedroom, a Grand Rapids woman discovered a boa constrictor was living under the cushions.

Holly Wright says she doesn't know where the snake came from; she found the couch on the curb outside a house in Heritage Hill.

Wright, along with her boyfriend, videotaped the discovery. "It's been living in the couch for like two months in my bedroom and I had no idea and it looks pretty big."

Wright says the couch was along the curb with a free sign in front of it. She didn't think twice about bringing it home. "We smelled it and everything-- it looked OK. We peeled off the cushions, cleaned it up, never saw anything," said Wright.

• The first train - carrying 112 cars of soybeans - derailed at around 2pm

• A second train carrying 106 cars of oil struck multiple cars of the first derailed train

• Multiple explosions sent flames and toxic clouds hundreds of feet in the air

• North Dakota town of Casselton evacuated

A train derailed Monday afternoon and burst into flames after being hit by another train just outside the North Dakota town of Casselton - which authorities have now ordered to be fully evacuated.

As many as a dozen train cars carrying the highly flammable cargo jumped the tracks at around 2pm before the second train filled with oil barreled into them, causing multiple massive explosions.

The toxic plume of flames and smoke has led officials to have the entire town evacuated. Casselton is a suburban town about 25 miles west of Fargo and has a population of about 2,500 people.

In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.

But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.

So the conceptualization of possibilities is something that I take very seriously. That's why I, and many people, think it's way past time to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED.

So my TED talk is not about my work or my new book - the usual spiel - but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn't work.

The first reason is over-simplification.

To be clear, I think that having smart people who do very smart things explain what they doing in a way that everyone can understand is a good thing. But TED goes way beyond that.

Julian Stevenson, who confessed to murdering his two children, found hanged in fitness room at Corbas jail in Lyon

A Briton who confessed to the gruesome murder of his two young children, when involved in an acrimonious custody battle with his French ex-wife, has hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in Lyon.

Julian Stevenson was arrested in May after slitting the throats of his son Matthew, 10, and daughter Carla, 5, with a kitchen knife. He was remanded in custody after being placed under investigation.

Stevenson, 48, was found hanged on Monday morning in the prison fitness room reserved for prisoners in solitary confinement at Corbas jail in a Lyon suburb, according to Pascal Guinot, the Lyon deputy prosecutor. "He was alone in the room, and used one of the fitness machines there to commit suicide," he said.

Dear Readers,

On behalf of nearly 100 volunteer editors located around the world, we would like to wish you all very happy holidays and a fruitful New Year. That's the standard holiday greeting, but let's not kid ourselves: obviously, from SOTT's perspective, a mass awakening of humanity and unified action to take back control of our lives from the psychopaths steering our planet to destruction is what would make the coming year fruitful and happy for all. The task can be compared to turning an ocean liner around: as big as it is (over 200,000 tons), it only takes a rudder to do it! Nothing is impossible with your support!

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Over the years, we've held fund-raisers for specific goals, and the response has always been gratifying; obviously, many people do appreciate our work. YOUR contributions - whether as direct donations or product purchases - keep us up and running on a daily basis and we are immensely thankful to all. What you have helped us accomplish over the past eleven years is amazing. Thanks to you, our readers and your support, SOTT readership has increased from merely thousands to the millions. To give you an example, according to Google Analytics: December 8, 2012 SOTT had 92,072 page views and one year later, on December 4, 2013 SOTT had 166,209 page views. That's an 80% increase to a consistent 5 million page views per month! In addition, you have spoken via Facebook, and we currently have over 74,000 likes across our 4 SOTT sites: English, Spanish, French, and German.

Thanks to you, our readers, the information about psychopathy in power which we began publishing back in 2002, has spread so far and wide that now, the mainstream media is being forced to deal with the issue with concerted programs of damage control! Thanks to YOU, our readers and supporters, the words "Political Ponerology" have entered the lexicon of cyberspace and we are sure it won't be long before they, too, receive a directed reaction from the psychopaths in power. In short, SOTT is making waves, even in the face of long-term and ongoing efforts to slander and marginalize us.

Together, we are making a difference!

All of this highlights how important YOUR SUPPORT is, especially in the face of a tanking economy. The Fight Against Lies goes on and we very much need your help to keep the lighthouse going until we reach that point where knowledge and awareness goes exponential, at which point, that Happy New Year we all hope for might become a real possibility. This is why your help now is more important than ever. And so, before the end of the fiscal year, we would just like to remind you that if you have extra income this year, donating to SOTT, a program of Quantum Future Group, Inc., a U.S. non-profit organization, is tax-deductible in the US. Wouldn't you rather give your money to a good cause, to the fight for truth and real information, than be funding War and Corruption?

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A Pennsylvania woman lost an arm due to injuries she claims were inflicted on her by sheriff's deputies and ignored by jail staff. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Amy J. Needham, 35, filed suit in Allegheny County Court on Monday after events in April of this year left her arm amputated above the elbow.

Needham was arrested on a warrant in April because she failed to appear at a preliminary hearing on charges of simple assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. Her attorney told the Post-Gazette that the woman was using the bathroom when sheriff's department officers broke down the door, shocked her with a taser and bound her in wrist and arm restraints that were too tight.

The rough treatment and confinement caused Needham's left arm to develop compartment syndrome, a medical condition in which muscle tissue is injured and swells, cutting off circulation to a compartment of the muscle.

Deprived of oxygen and nutrients, the muscle tissue in the blocked compartment dies and becomes necrotic. The damage then spreads to other tissues. Left unchecked, compartment syndrome can cost limbs and lives.

An official from the Chinese government announced Monday that approximately 3.33 million hectares, or 8 million acres, of China's farmland is now too polluted to grow crops, according to a Reuters report from Beijing.

China's Vice Minister of Land and Resources Wang Shiyuan reportedly told a news conference that current farming on the now-too-contaminated land - roughly the size of Belgium - will be halted and rehabilitated in order to ensure food safety. It was unclear late Monday whether food that had already been grown on that land would be sought out or recalled.

"These areas cannot continue farming," Wang said, noting that the Ministry of Environmental Protection had deemed all of the 8 million acres as having "moderate to severe pollution."

The Chinese government has said that the country needs at least 120 million hectares of arable land to ensure it is able to meet the vastly populated country's food needs. Though China started 2013 with a strong 135 million hectares of arable land, contamination - paired with recent efforts to convert farmland to forests, grasslands and wetlands - has caused the amount of stable cultivated land to drop to 120 million hectares, Wang said. Wang also said the country is committed to spending "tens of billions of yuan" a year for projects aimed at rehabilitating polluted land.

A giant yellow duck on display in a northern Taiwan port exploded Tuesday, just hours before it was expected to attract a big crowd to count down the new year.

The 18-metre-tall (59-feet) duck on show at Keelung burst around noon and deflated into a floating yellow disc, only 11 days after it went on display.

It was the second time that a giant inflatable duck -- a bath toy replica created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman -- had burst while on show in Taiwan.

"We want to apologise to the fans of the yellow rubber duck.... the weather is fine today and we haven't found the cause of the problem. We will carefully examine the duck to determine the cause," organiser Huang Jing-tai told reporters.

Organisers had planned to stay open past midnight Tuesday in anticipation of a large new year crowd.

The Central News Agency cited an eyewitness as saying the rubber bird might have fallen victim to eagles which scratched it with their claws.

Three Taiwanese cities exhibited their versions of the yellow duck in 2013. But all were forced temporarily to suspend the exhibit due to bad weather or damage.

From Harlem to the Bowery, the sentiment is the same: the man whose campaign told a tale of two cities has plenty of work to do

On a chilly Christmas Eve, it took only a minute for a group of staff and residents at a homeless shelter in Harlem to list what the city's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, needs to do when he takes office on 1 January.

"Reinstate rent-subsidy vouchers, bring back after-school programs to keep the kids away from drugs and violence, supply more affordable housing for low-income families, sort out food stamps," one woman rattled off sternly, as she dashed from the anonymous red-brick building on a quiet residential block to talk to a staff member on a cigarette break. "You want me to go on?"

The woman wasn't a user of the facility, listing demands for herself. She was a security guard, angry at the deterioration in the circumstances of the people she is employed to supervise and protect. Her colleague, shivering in the freezing temperatures, flicked his cigarette butt into the road and pointed to a building across the street - a typical example of low-income housing subsidized by the city but owned and run by a private landlord, he said.

"Housing like that is becoming less affordable. Landlords used to take families that made as little as $17,000 per household but now they demand $30,000 or sometimes $40,000, and who can afford that on minimum wage or disability payments? That keeps people in the shelters."