A string of recent complaints filed by alleged victims of wrongful arrest are bringing question to NYPD practices of arresting men in public restrooms. There are currently undercover cops posted up in public restrooms across New York City, waiting to catch sexual predators in the act.

However, according to dozens of alleged victims, average men are becoming entrapped by these undercover agents, when they have done nothing wrong. Many of the victims have claimed that after urinating, "shaking off" and zipping up their pants, they were accused of "simulating masturbation" in view of the police officer.

The New York Times recently reported that police have been standing in public restrooms and staring down everyone who passes through, while they use the urinals. If the person makes any movements that the officer does not approve of, they can be arrested for "lewdness" with no evidence aside from the testimony of the officer. Since police have been stationed in public bathrooms, lewdness arrests have increased 7-fold. In the past year alone, over 60 people were arrested in one bus terminal restroom, many of them for alleged "lewdness" in the bathroom stall.

Dozens of the people who have been arrested in this trap have sought legal representation from The Legal Aid Society and other independent sources. Many of these people reported that the police made them feel uncomfortable by staring at them while they used the restroom, and it seems that if anyone is guilty of lewdness it was actually the undercover officer.

Kailash Satyarthi, 60, who shared the prize with Malala Yousafzai, has campaigned all his life for children

Kailash Satyarthi was five when he first became aware that some children in India did not go to school the way he did, but worked for a living.

He had spotted a boy of his own age sitting on a doorstep polishing shoes. "Forget it," his relatives said: the child was poor, it happened. Still, he plucked up the courage to ask the boy's father why the child was working. "Sir, we are born to work," the man told him.

Even at that young age, Satyarthi felt that this was not the way the world should be. And when he finished his own education he turned his back on his intended engineering career and set out to put right the wrong he had perceived.

More than half of Germany's population thinks that the European Union should not be involved in the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis, according to an ICM poll commissioned by Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency.

The poll's results show that 58 percent of those polled think that the European Union should not participate in the settlement of the situation in Ukraine, with only 36 percent thinking otherwise.

The majority of people in Germany, 78 percent, are aware of the crisis in Ukraine. People aged 65 and older are most knowledgeable of the crisis, with 88 percent of them aware of the situation. People between 25 and 34 years old are the least aware, with only 61 percent knowing about the situation. Almost a quarter of the German population, or 22 percent, do not know about the crisis.

More men responded to have heard about the crisis in the media than women, at 84 and 72 percent respectively.

As most of the world has duly noted, Canada under the neo-Conservative Harper regime has been a front-runner in supporting Israel in its racial apartheid policies in Israel. Also recently a discussion comparing South Africa's apartheid system with that of Israel has occurred with South African testimony indicating that while they are not the same, they are very similar, and in some circumstances, Israel's apartheid is worse. What is not seen is Canada's role in modeling apartheid for South Africa under the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. Canada's role in developing these systems of apartheid has been seldom noted academically, and is given very little attention either domestically or internationally.

It is generally recognized that North America was a series of colonies from Great Britain, France, Spain, and Russia with a few Dutch thrown into the mix. The first 'discoverers' of America, the Norse Vikings, died out through their lack of ability to adapt to the climatic changes that overtook them. The later colonial settlers survived in part because they did accept the graciousness of the indigenous peoples in assisting them, from which Canada and the U.S. derive their respective national holiday, Thanksgiving.

At the moment, the Ebola virus is ravaging three countries - Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - where it is doubling every few weeks, but singular cases and clusters of them are cropping up in dense population centers across the world. An entirely separate Ebola outbreak in the Congo appears to be contained, but illustrates an important point: even if the current outbreak (to which some are already referring as a pandemic) is brought under control, continuing deforestation and natural habitat destruction in the areas where the fruit bats that carry the virus live make future outbreaks quite likely.

Ebola's mortality rate can be as high as 70%, but seems closer to 50% for the current major outbreak. This is significantly worse than the Bubonic plague, which killed off a third of Europe's population. Previous Ebola outbreaks occurred in rural, isolated locales, where they quickly burned themselves out by infecting everyone within a certain radius, then running out of new victims. But the current outbreak has spread to large population centers with highly mobile populations, and the chances of such a spontaneous end to this outbreak seem to be pretty much nil.

Ebola has an incubation period of some three weeks during which patients remain asymptomatic and, specialists assure us, noninfectious. However, it is known that some patients remain asymptomatic throughout, in spite of having a strong inflammatory response, and can infect others. Nevertheless, we are told that those who do not present symptoms of Ebola - such as high fever, nausea, fatigue, bloody stool, bloody vomit, nose bleeds and other signs of hemorrhage - cannot infect others. We are also told that Ebola can only be spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected individual, but it is known that among pigs and monkeys Ebola can be spread through the air, and the possibility of catching it via a cough, a sneeze, a handrail or a toilet seat is impossible to discount entirely. It is notable that many of the medical staff who became infected did so in spite of wearing protective gear - face masks, gloves, goggles and body suits. In short, nothing will guarantee your survival short of donning a space suit or relocating to a space station.

Seven people accused of witchcraft have been burned alive in Tanzania, police said Friday, adding they have arrested 23 people in connection with the crimes.

"They were attacked and burnt to death by a mob of villagers who accused them of engaging in witchcraft," the police chief for the western Kigoma region which borders Burundi, Jafari Mohamed, told AFP.

"Five of those killed were aged over 60, while the other two were aged over 40," he added.

Among those arrested on suspicion of carrying out the killings was the local traditional healer, or witch doctor.

Relatives of those killed described horrific scenes, with the bodies of family members hacked with machetes or burned almost beyond recognition.

"When I returned home in the evening, I found the body of my mother lying 10 metres away from our house, while the body of my father was burnt inside the house," said Josephat John, according to Tanzania's Mwananchi newspaper.

The attack in the village of Murufiti took place on Monday but reports only emerged after police announced the arrest of the suspects.

Nearly two decades after a US reporter was humiliated for connecting the CIA to a drug-trafficking trade that funded the Nicaraguan Contras, important players in the scandal - which led to the journalist's suicide - are coming forward to back his claims.

Back in 1996, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News broke a story stating not only that the Nicaraguan Contras - supported by the United States in a rebellion against their left-leaning government - were involved in the US crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, but also that the CIA knew and turned a blind eye to the operation.

As a result, Webb concluded, the CIA was complicit in a drug trade that was wreaking havoc on African American communities in Los Angeles.

The US and UK will stage a comprehensive simulation next week check whether the countries' financial and banking sectors are still vulnerable to the problem of the 'too big to fail' institutions and coordinate their actions in case of such collapse.

Government financial leaders from Britain and US will simulate a failure of a large banking institution on Monday in Washington, DC, to test the effectiveness of each county's banking regulations.

They hope the simulation - which will not mimic the collapse of any particular 'too big to fail' institution - will demonstrate what the officials have learned from the financial crisis about their respective roles, and how new practices should shield taxpayers from further bailouts. The simulation will run through procedures if a large UK bank with US operations failed, and those for a US bank with a British presence.

"We are going to make sure we can handle an institution that was previously regarded as too big to fail," said UK chancellor, John Osborne, speaking to journalists at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington on Friday. "This demonstrates the distance we have come over the last few years to build resilience and learn the lessons of the financial crisis."

Carlos III hospital treating virus-hit nurse Teresa Romero Ramos suffers staff shortage amid concerns over training and safety

Concerns about a lack of training and safety standards have left some staff refusing to attend to possible Ebola cases at Madrid's Carlos III hospital, where the first known person to contract the disease outside west Africa is being treated.

Fourteen people are in quarantine at the hospital, including four health workers who treated Teresa Romero Ramos, the Spanish nurse who contracted the virus after treating an Ebola patient repatriated from Sierra Leone.

Seven people, including two hairdressers who had given Romero a beauty treatment before she was diagnosed, entered the isolation unit on Thursday. None has tested positive for the disease except Romero, whose condition was described by the hospital as serious but stable. Her treatment has included injections with antibodies extracted from the blood of Ebola survivors.

A woman who spent 17 years in prison after being convicted of murder in the death of a homeless man was exonerated Friday by a Los Angeles County judge who said she should not spend another minute behind bars.

The courtroom burst into applause after superior court judge Mark Arnold overturned the conviction of Susan Mellen, who was to be processed for release from the courthouse.

Mellen had entered the courtroom in tears, and her children also wept.

The judge said that in Mellen's case the justice system failed and she had inadequate representation by her attorney at trial.

"I believe that not only is Ms Mellen not guilty, based on what I have read I believe she is innocent," Arnold said. "For that reason I believe in this case the justice system failed."