From Twitter and Facebook to Amazon and Google, the biggest names of the Internet are blasting a federal judge's decision in a defamation lawsuit by a former Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader convicted of having sex with her former high school student.

The Internet giants recently filed briefs in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.

The briefs are part of a lawsuit involving ex-Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones against an Arizona-based website thedirty.com.

A jury found in July that posts on the site about Jones were substantially false and awarded her $338,000. The companies say that if upheld, the northern Kentucky judge's ruling in favor of the former cheerleader has the potential to "significantly chill online speech" and undermine a 1996 federal law that provides broad immunity to websites.

Seattle -- Bertha, Seattle's tunnel-boring machine, is officially stuck.

According to a spokesperson with the Washington Department of Transportation, the giant drill hit some kind of obstruction and can't move through it or past it.

WSDOT says the trouble started Friday when Bertha's five-story tall cutter head felt some resistance, then stopped. WSDOT says engineers with Seattle Tunnel Partners, the company in charge of building the viaduct replacement tunnel, have been consulting with other experts to identify the obstruction - whether it's natural or manmade.

They say Bertha wasn't damaged in any way. They're keeping her idle until they decide whether crews need to dig the obstruction out from above or if Bertha can charge through it.Bertha has dug 1,000 feet of tunnel since July. She's sitting 60-feet underground between South Jackson Street and South Main Street among a mix of native dirt and fill tossed into place from as early as the 1800s.

She has just 450 more feet to travel before leaving that fill behind. It will also mark the end of phase one in the $4 billion tunnel project that will stretch 1.7 miles from adjacent to Safeco Field to Battery Street.

WSDOT doesn't know how long Bertha will remain stuck, but they say it's too early to say whether the delay will affect the project's bottom line or it's scheduled opening in late 2015.

Officials and campaigners fear explosion in child prostitution amid rising demand from football fans

A tiny figure in minuscule white shorts and a pink strapless top leans against a metal fence outside a school in Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará state, north-east Brazil.

She has gloss-coated lips, and her yellow headband, holding back long hair, glows in the lamplight along Juscelino Kubitschek Avenue, which connects the city to the Castelão arena, one of the venues for the 2014 World Cup. A car pulls up. The girl climbs in.

This is a common scene around the stadium in Fortaleza, considered Brazil's child prostitution capital and a magnet for sex tourism, according to local authorities.

Transvestites also work the dusty pavements of this newly renovated thoroughfare but young girls are in higher demand. "As soon as they hit the avenue they're picked up," says Antônia Lima Sousa, a state prosecutor who works on children's rights in Fortaleza. "It's really a matter of minutes. You'll find them around town during the day too."

Despite more than a decade of government pledges to eradicate child prostitution, the number of child sex workers in Brazil stood at about half a million in 2012, according to the National Forum for the Prevention of Child Labor, a non-governmental organisation.

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract

America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.

There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.

I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.

I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

Robert Cameron Redus, 23, was unarmed when he was stopped for driving erratically.

Tiny Elytte Barbour and his petite wife, Miranda, celebrated their three-week wedding anniversary by executing a dream they'd shared: To murder someone together, city police said Friday night.

There could be other victims.

Miranda Barbour, who operated a business in which she was paid up to $850 to accompany males for "delightful conversation" - according to her husband - has a 1½-year-old child whose father is dead, Elytte Barbour said Wednesday.

When asked Friday night about the child's biological father, Sunbury police Chief Steve Mazzeo said his death may have circumstances that will lead the investigation of the Barbours to other states.

Mazzeo would not elaborate.

The Barbours moved to Selinsgrove in October from North Carolina.

The New Mexico State Police officer who fired shots at a minivan full of children during a chaotic October traffic stop has been fired, a spokesman with the law enforcement agency said Friday.

Lt. Emmanuel Gutierrez, a State Police spokesman, said he confirmed with State Police Chief Pete Kassetas that Officer Elias Montoya was no longer employed by the department. Montoya's termination was effective at 5 p.m. Friday.

Montoya has 30 days to appeal his firing to the Public Safety Advisory Commission, which is made up of civilians appointed by the governor. Montoya, who had been with the department for about 12 years, doesn't have a listed phone number.

The officer was placed on administrative leave with pay earlier this week following an investigation into the shooting outside the northern New Mexico tourist town of Taos. On Tuesday, he was notified that the agency proposed to fire him, and Kassetas, in consultation with Department of Public Safety Secretary Gorden Eden, made the final decision after a disciplinary hearing Thursday.

A man who was fed up with his girlfriend's incessant Christmas shopping responded to her request for one more look around a mall shoe store by leaping seven floors to his death.

The 38-year-old, identified as Tao Hsiao, had been shopping with his girlfriend at the Golden Eagle International Shopping Center in Xuzhou, China, when she asked to check out one last shoe store.

Having been inside the mall for five hours, Tao had reached his limit, and reportedly insisted that they leave immediately.

"He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes that she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying any more," an eyewitness was quoted as saying. "She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument."

On the way out of Syracuse's airport terminal, the new exits get some strange looks. Paul Trudeau thought they looked like a science fiction intergalactic time machine as he passed though on his way out.

"I was expecting to get transported somewhere like on Star Trek. I was like - Yeah! We finally got there!"

Others were wondering if it was an X-ray chamber or might fill up with dollar bills like on a on game show

"It was odd, I was like - where did they come up with this?" asked Patricia Goodrich.

Six people tested for possible radiation exposure have been released from hospital but remain under detention as suspects in the theft of a truck carrying highly radioactive cobalt-60, officials said Friday.

Of the detained men, ages 16 to 38, only the 16-year-old showed signs of radiation exposure and he was in good health, a spokeswoman for Hidalgo's Health Department said on condition of anonymity because she isn't allowed to discuss the case.

The six were detained Thursday as part of the investigation and taken to the general hospital in Pachuca for testing.

After being cleared by health authorities on Friday, the men were turned over to federal authorities in connection with the case of the cargo truck stolen Monday at gunpoint outside Mexico City. The cobalt-60 it was carrying was from obsolete radiation therapy equipment.

Officials have not said what roles the six allegedly had in the theft.