A University of California student spent five days forgotten in a windowless jail cell without food and water, and was forced to drink his own urine to survive. Now, the US government is voluntarily paying the young man $4.1 million to avoid a lawsuit.

Daniel Chong, a 25-year-old economics student at UC San Diego, was one of nine people taken into custody during a drug raid in April 2012. Chong was at a friend's house when officers discovered 18,000 ecstasy pills at the home. He was locked in a Drug Enforcement Administration jail cell, but after questioning the young man, a police officer authorized to perform DEA work told the student that he would not be charged.

"Hang tight, we'll come get you in a minute," the officer told Chong, according to Attorney Eugene Iredale.

But the officer never returned, and Chong spent five dismal days in the 5 by 10 ft. windowless cell. The student, who was still handcuffed, had no food, water, or access to a toilet, and barely survived his living nightmare.

"It sounded like it was an accident - a really, really bad, horrible accident," he said at a news conference this week, in which he described how close he came to death.

After three days in the cell, the famished young man said he began to hallucinate. He imagined that DEA agents were trying to poison him with gases that entered his cell through the vents. Deprived of food and water, he started to accept the idea that he would not survive. He bit into his glasses to break them, and used a shard of glass to carve a farewell message to his mom on his arm.

"Sorry Mom," he tried to carve into his bleeding skin, but he only managed to write the "S".

In a last-ditch attempt to stay alive, he urinated on the metal bench in his cell and then drank his own urine.

To try to capture the attention of the guards, he then stacked a blanket and his clothing on the bench to try to reach an overhead fire sprinkler. Chong desperately tried to set it off by hitting it with his handcuffed hands. He failed.

On the fifth day, Chong screamed at the top of his voice, trying to get the attention of the agents outside.

"I didn't just sit there quietly. I was kicking the door yelling," he said.

He slid a shoelace under the door, hoping to garner the attention of the guards. He succeeded, and "five or six people" came to the cell and found him starved and lying in his own feces. Chong had lost 15 pounds, and was immediately hospitalized for five days.

When the Occupiers took an interest in moving San Francisco's money into a city-owned bank in 2011, it was chiefly on principle, in sympathy with the nationwide Move Your Money campaign. But recent scandals have transformed the move from a political statement into a matter of protecting the city's deposits and reducing its debt burden. The chief roadblock to forming a municipal bank has been the concern that it was not allowed under state law, but a legal opinion issued by Deputy City Attorney Thomas J. Owen has now overcome that obstacle.

Establishing a city-owned San Francisco Bank is not a new idea. According to City Supervisor John Avalos, speaking at the Public Banking Institute conference in San Rafael in June, it has been on the table forover a decade. Recent interest was spurred by the Occupy movement, which adopted the proposal after Avalos presented it to an enthusiastic group of over 1000 protesters outside the Bank of America building in late 2011. David Weidner, writing in the Wall Street Journal in December of that year, called it "the boldest institutional stroke yet against banks targeted by the Occupy movement." But Weidner conceded that:

Creating a municipal bank won't be easy. California law forbids using taxpayer money to make private loans. That would have to be changed. Critics also argue that San Francisco could be putting taxpayer money at risk.

Spanish transport minister Mr Rafael Catala has confirmed in a radio broadcast that excessive speed is believed to be a factor in the derailment of a Madrid - Ferrol service 4km south of Santiago de Compostela on July 24, which killed 78 people.

Police are waiting to question the hospitalised driver, who is under formal investigation, and the train event recorder has now been recovered from the wreckage for analysis.

The accident occurred in the transition section between ETCS Level 1, which is used on the 87km Ourense - Santiago high-speed line over which the train had travelled, and the standard Spanish Asfa system used on the conventional network. Santiago is one of dozens of ETCS-Asfa transition points on the Spanish network.

IRJ has learned from a senior source at Renfe that while ETCS is operable on the Ourense - Santiago high-speed line, class 730 sets of the type involved in the derailment operate exclusively on Asfa on this route despite the fact that they are equipped with ETCS. All other passenger trains operating on this line, including the fleet of class 121 Avant emus, operate on ETCS. The reasons for this have not yet been firmly established.

Lon Snowden says his son will be 'treated horribly' if he returns to US and in his place he would stay in Russia

The father of the whistleblower Edward Snowden has said the FBI tried to persuade him to fly to Moscow so that he could encourage his son to return to the United States.

"I said: 'I want to be able to speak with my son ... Can you set up communications?' and it was 'Well, we are not sure,'" Lon Snowden told the Washington Post. "I said: 'Wait a minute, folks, I'm not going to sit on the tarmac to be an emotional tool for you.'"

Snowden's father, who is retired from the US Coast Guard, also said he preferred Edward to remain in Russia, where he is stuck in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport while Russia considers his request for temporary asylum.

"If he comes back to the United States, he is going to be treated horribly. He is going to be thrown into a hole. He is not going to be allowed to speak." The 52-year-old said he had been as "surprised as the rest of America" when his son, who worked for a contractor, was revealed as the source of the leaks about surveillance by the National Security Agency to the Guardian. "As a father it pains me what he did," Snowden said. "I wish my son could simply have sat in Hawaii and taken the big paycheck, lived with his beautiful girlfriend and enjoyed paradise. But as an American citizen, I am absolutely thankful for what he did."

Why did Francisco José Garzón, a train driver with 30 years' experience, hit a bend at 190 kilometres per hour when the speed limit was 80 km/h? Did he ignore the automated warnings? Or did his train's alert system fail at a critical time?

An inquiry is under way into the derailing of the packed train, which killed 79 people in Santiago de Compostela, north-west Spain on 24 July. Garzón has admitted to "confusion" over the train's speed and, though freed on bail, is facing the prospect of 79 charges of negligent homicide.

One focus of the investigation will be the fact that the crash took place at a point where one safety system hands over to another - from one that controls the train's speed to one that does not. On high-speed sections, the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) intervenes wirelessly to ensure a train slows down if alerts are ignored.

Crucially, ERTMS cuts in if its alerts are ignored. It does so using GSM-R - a robust railway version of the GSM standard used by cellphones to communicate with the cell towers.

"ERTMS has all sorts of measures that prevent trains going over speed and will eventually be fitted over the whole route from Santiago to Madrid," says Roger Kemp, a safety-critical systems engineer specialising in railway technology at Lancaster University, UK. "But it is not a finished project."

This means that, 4 kilometres from Santiago de Compostela, on a slower, bendier section of track that snakes through the town, ERTMS has not yet been fitted. Instead, an older Spanish-developed system called ASFA advises the driver of the necessary safe speeds. But ASFA can only intervene if the driver does not respond.

"The driver only has to acknowledge that they have seen the speed advisory by pushing a button - otherwise the system will apply the brakes - but you don't have to comply with that speed under ASFA," says Kemp.

Spanish TV station Antena 3 says that Garzón told some witnesses immediately after the crash that he was not able to slow down to the necessary 80 km/h before the sharp curve - but it is not known why.

Telangana: new Indian state closer to reality after government approval

Ruling coalition led by Congress party votes in favour of hiving off part of Andhra Pradesh to create India's 29th state

India's ruling coalition government, led by the Congress party, has backed demands for the creation of a new state called Telangana in southern India, immediately spurring activists to repeat other long-standing demands for similar measures elsewhere in the vast country.

The new state - India's 29th - would be carved out of the existing southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Activists have long argued that the drought-prone northern area of Andhra Pradesh is underdeveloped and ignored by powerful politicians from the south.

Residents of the 10 districts that form Telangana say they are discriminated against in the allocation of state funds, water and jobs. The state is currently run from Hyderabad, a city known for its booming information technology industry.

Las Vegas - Multiple employees and managers at the Clark County family court are under investigation for allegedly covering up a sexual assault by a court marshal.

The I-Team has uncovered video showing a woman claiming a court marshal sexually assaulted her. She was later arrested by that same marshal. The marshal has since been fired.

The I-Teams investigation shows how the internal affairs investigation is revealing much larger problems at family court.

There are multiple marshals involved and allegations ranging from sexual assaults to choking a citizen in court. The investigation began with a 2011 video that shows family court marshals arresting a woman because she claimed one of them sexually assaulted her.

Saudi Arabia has granted a Spanish consortium a $7.88 billion (€5.94 billion) contract to build three metro lines in Riyadh but another key bid for a high-speed rail project in Brazil remains under threat after the recent train crash in Spain which killed at least 79 people.

The Riyadh metro contract is one of three Saudi Arabia has granted to foreign consortiums, the kingdom announced at a news conference in the capital late on Sunday.

The combined value of the contracts is $22.5 billion (16.9 billion euros) and the consortiums are led by Spanish, US and Italian firms.

The 176-kilometre (110-mile) six-line network is aimed at easing chronic traffic congestion in Riyadh, a city of six million people.

Spanish-led BTP-FCC consortium will build three of the metro lines for $7.88 billion, after it beat competition from 38 groups that were vying for the project.

It is "the biggest international contract in the history of Spanish construction", the Spanish consortium said in a statement on Monday.

Crash happened near Granges-Marnand station at 7pm local time

Police, ambulances, helicopters and firefighters are on the scene

Comes just days after 79 people were killed in derailment in Spain

The body of the train driver has been found in the wreckage following a head-on train crash in Switzerland that left at least 35 passengers injured.

The driver was pulled from the debris two trains collided on the same track after travelling towards each other near Granges-Marnand station in the west of the country.

Dozens of passengers were hurt, four of them seriously, in the crash, which happened just before 7pm local time (6pm BST).

The police department in Escambia County, Florida is under investigation after multiple officers opened fire on a 60-year-old man in his own driveway over the weekend, seemingly without explanation.

Two sheriff's deputies - Jeremiak Meeks and Matthew White - responded to a 911 call about a possible burglary at approximately 3am local time on Saturday. When they arrived, Roy Middleton was leaning into his mother's car in front of his home, looking for cigarettes.

The officers claim they called out to Middleton several times, demanding that he put up his hands before he supposedly lunged at them.

Middleton, who was unarmed except for keys and a flashlight, was shot in the leg. At least five bullets hit his mother's car and the side of her house.

"It was like a firing squad," Middleton told the Pensacola News Journal, maintaining that he backed out of the car slowly and made his hands visible before police shot him. "Bullets were flying everywhere."