A British boy is dying of a brain tumour. His distressed parents discover a life-saving treatment, available only in another country. Heartless doctors refuse to refer the child to the foreign clinic. Instead, they insist on going ahead with conventional treatment which, the parents fear, will turn him into a "vegetable". The distraught parents seize their son from the hospital and take him abroad. The UK authorities overreact wildly, issuing an international alert for the family. The parents are found in Spain and arrested, causing an outcry and interventions from leading politicians.

This sequence of events has been widely reported in the past week. It is what a great many people believe about the controversy over five-year-old Ashya King, who is currently in a hospital in Malaga. Many of them have signed internet petitions or written furious blogs, citing the case as an example of the authoritarian state or the arrogance of doctors. The problem is that the story I've outlined simply isn't true, starting with this basic fact: Ashya isn't dying. Despite headlines using the hugely emotive phrase, he isn't "terminally ill".

In fact, his chances of surviving five years are between 70 and 80 per cent, as long as he receives prompt chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy. His tumour, which is called a medulloblastoma, was removed at a major teaching hospital, Southampton General, just over six weeks ago. To maximise his chances of recovery, chemotherapy should have started within four to six weeks of surgery. It didn't, because his parents fell out with doctors in Southampton. The treatment they want is available at a private clinic in Prague, but that isn't where they headed when they left the UK. They actually returned to the south of Spain, where they have a holiday home, and where they were staying when Ashya first showed symptoms earlier in the summer.

The emergence of graphic video evidence that shows professional American Footballer Ray Rice punching his fiancée in the face and knocking her unconscious has underlined a shameful episode of domestic violence in the NFL.


Rice, a running back for NFL side Baltimore Ravens, has now been sacked by his franchise after the video was published by US website TMZ and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has also announced that Rice has been "indefinitely suspended" by the league.

But not before a long, drawn-out episode in which he appeared to get off far too lightly.

Harvey Organ has been on a personal mission to expose the "fraudulent manipulation" of the gold and silver markets since the late 1990's. Organ, who studies these markets daily, contends, "It's definitely going to happen this year." Why does Organ think this? Let's start with the gold market. Organ says, "You are seeing a huge amount of obligations per one ounce of gold that's available, and as the gold moves from West to East, and the bubble of paper obligations that's left are going to blow up. So, that is what we are basically seeing in gold. There is a massive movement basically towards three countries . . . Russia . . . China . . . and India. So, if you figure the world produces no more than 2,200 tons of gold per year, excluding China and Russia, more than 100% of that gold is going to those countries." Organ goes on to say, "I doubt very much if the United States has one ounce of gold left."

In 2011, the state of Utah passed a law banning taxes on the use of gold and silver coins as currency and permitting residents to remit state taxes in these coins. Big deal, you might say. That's already in the Constitution: "No state shall...make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts."

Oklahoma has done something similar, confirming that transactions taking place in gold and silver are free from state taxes on the exchange medium. Currently, in federal law, if you buy things with gold, for example, you have to declare as taxable the gain on any market appreciation of the gold you used to make the purchase.

A German television station Monday night showed video of Ukrainian volunteer soldiers with Nazi symbols, which are outlawed in Germany, on their helmets. One soldier was seen with a Nazi swastika on his helmet and another had the distinctive lightning bolt-like runic symbol of the SS, which carried out the Holocaust and many other atrocities under Hitler.

The soldiers depicted are reportedly part of the Azov battalion, a volunteer force with a strong nationalist base. Oysten Bogen, a correspondent for Norway's TV2, which shot the piece, said he asked a spokesman if there were any fascist elements in the volunteer forces just prior to taping the men and the spokesman replied: "Absolutely not, we are just Ukrainian nationalists."

Pro-government Russian media repeatedly have focused on Ukraine's far right nationalism as a means of discrediting President Petro Poroshenko's pro-European government and European integration supporters, known as the Euromaidan movement. Many ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine have cited what they call Kiev's Nazism as a reason to take up arms and fight to break from Ukraine.

Brant Rosen, an American rabbi who led a Jewish synagogue in the US state of Illinois, was pressured to quit for his criticism of Israeli policy and activism on behalf of the Palestinian people.

Rosen, who is also a journalist, author and blogger, resigned on Tuesday as the head of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston, Illinois, after 17 years of service.

The rabbi quit because of what he described as long-standing tensions over his solidarity with Palestinians in their conflict with Israel, though he said the synagogue board did not force him to step down.

"There are members of the congregation who are deeply pained by what I say and do," he said. "This issue is very upsetting, very personal. It's been very hard for them. That has been affecting the environment in the congregation, and it has been affecting me too."

However, he emphasized that his activism will continue. "This is a very big part of who I am, and has been for a very long time," Rosen said.

A company that makes tactical equipment for police to use in riots is manufacturing a new 'non-lethal' weapon designed to temporarily blind targets. The Z-RO non-lethal compliance weapon system will obstruct a person's vision for 10 to 15 minutes.

The product from Shield Defense Systems (SDS) made waves on Reddit this week when it was revealed along with the note: "New weapon 'Z-ro' scrambles ocular fluid and temporarily blinds victim for 10-15min. Gotta be safer than a tazer [sic] right??"

Dirty Politics, the new book from author and investigative journalist Nicky Hager, will feature leaked emails between National Party figures and right-wing bloggers.

The book, which has been released in Wellington tonight, aims to tell the story of "how attack politics is poisoning NZ's political environment".

It includes email correspondence between Whaleoil blogger Cameron Slater and Jason Ede, one of the Prime Minister John Key's press secretaries, in relation to information found on Labour's website.

Mr Hager said the Prime Minister's office had been "collaborating" with National Party "proxies" who were carrying out attacks on behalf of Mr Key while working to preserve his image.

The book shows Mr Slater and Mr Ede discussed the information and how to avoid being caught.

A Florida mom is outraged that her 15-year-old daughter was forced to wear what she called a "shame suit" at school.

On her third day of school, Miranda Larkin, a sophomore at Oakleaf High School in Orange Park, Florida, was told by a teacher that her skirt was too short.

"It was right after first period," Miranda told ABC News. "I was in the hallway and I got stopped by a teacher who told me my skirt was too short and sent me to the nurse's office. They told me I was going to have to change and put on the dress-code-violation outfit."

The school's dress-code-violation outfit consists of a neon-yellow t-shirt with "DRESS CODE VIOLATION" emblazoned on the front of it in capital letters, along with red sweatpants with the same message down the right leg.

"The school has said this is to embarrass you," said Miranda. "It's supposed to embarrass you so you don't do it again."

More people in the United States are apparently leaving wedding rings sitting in jewelry stores, as new data shows a majority of American adults are now single.

Specifically, about 50.2 percent of American adults over the age of 16 - roughly 124.6 million people - were single in August, according to a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report cited by Bloomberg. This marks the first time that single Americans make up the majority of the adult population since the government began tracking the data 38 years ago.

In 1976, single Americans made up 37.4 percent of the adult population. The number of individuals who have never been married also rose to 30.4 percent, up notably from 22.1 more than three decades ago. Divorced Americans, meanwhile, now compose 19.8 percent of the population, compared to 15.3 percent in 1976.

As these numbers continued to rise, economist Edward Yardeni said the development will have significant ripple effects for the economic, social and political scenes in the United States.