We all know the disappointment of turning up too late to grab our Egg McMuffin in the morning. However the realisation proved a little too much for a pair of women at a US chain of McDonald's.

The pair began a frenzied attack on workers, picking up tables and chairs and throwing them around the room while ranting and raving.

Baffled customers looked on as the women screamed and swore at them while hurling furniture around the restaurant.

Doctors glanced up at the monitors to call the time of death for a patient whose heart hadn't beat in 45 minutes and who hadn't breathed in three hours.

Then, they saw it: a blip on the screen.

Ruby Graupera-Cassimiro was alive.

"She spontaneously resuscitated," Boca Raton Regional Hospital spokesman Thomas Chakurda told ABC News. "We had brought the family in. We had announced to them that we had done all we could."

Graupera-Cassimiro, 40, had gone to the hospital for a cesarean section on Sept. 23. The surgery was uneventful and the baby was healthy, but Graupera-Cassimiro started to experience shortness of breath and doctors had to call a code when she stopped breathing. They tried for three hours to revive her but it was no use. She had no pulse for 45 minutes. Then, her heart started beating again on its own.

Doctors think she had a rare condition called an amniotic fluid embolism, which is what happens when the amniotic fluid leaks into the blood stream, causes blood clots and leads to cardiac arrest, according to Mayo Clinic.

"It's normally diagnosed post mortem," Chakurda said.

A West Virginia police officer reportedly was planning to resign after throwing a homeless man's backpack into the Elk River in August.

According to a criminal complaint obtained by the The Charleston Gazette, Charleston Patrolman Brian Lightner confronted 26-year-old Andrew Joel Hunt on the Spring Street bridge on Aug. 18 over an argument that several homeless people were having while standing in the road.

Hunt admitted that he had been drinking. And when he refused to leave, Lightner arrested him.

After getting out of jail, Hunt complained that Lightner had tossed his backpack off the bridge, including a laptop with the only photos he owned of his dead wife.

The Charleston Police Department eventually agreed to an undisclosed settlement with Hunt after the dive team recovered his belongings.

Brendan Doneghy, who was representing Hunt on the public intoxication and disorderly conduct charges, told The Charleston Gazette that he found it strange at the time that the police department would file a motion to drop the charges without an explanation.

"I received a dismissal out of nowhere," Doneghy recalled. "It made me suspicious the allegations [against Lightner] were true."

For his part, Lightner called dealing with homeless people a "frustrating job."

"It takes a toll on you," he said.

Charleston Police Chief Brent Webster confirmed had been suspended without pay since Sept. 9. But he would not comment on sources who said that Lightner had agreed to resign to avoid being charged with destruction of property.

The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don't bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers ("everybody's got one already"), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.

In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them "little goodies." And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man's "exotic vehicle" outside a local bar.

"A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new," he explained. "Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like 'Ahhhh.' And he gets out and he's just reeking of alcohol. And it's like, 'Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.' "

The composer of the anti-war anthem No Man's Land (Green Fields Of France) has criticised Joss Stone for recording a "sentimentalised" version of his song, which omits key verses about the horrors of war, as part of the Poppy Appeal.

Stone teamed up with guitarist Jeff Beck to record a revamped version of the song, a reflection on the grave of a young man, Willie McBride, killed in the First World War, which was written by Scottish folk musician Eric Bogle.

Chosen as the official single for the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal, Stone will perform her version in front of the Queen on Remembrance Sunday.

However Stone's soul version, sung to a gospel choir backing, removes the final two verses, which deliver a withering condemnation of the futility of the First World War.

The missing lines refer to "man's blind indifference to his fellow man. And a whole generation who were butchered and damned" and "the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame. The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain."

Bogle, 70, who wrote the much-covered song in 1976, said Stone's omissions "diminished" its intended anti-war message.

"Believe it or not I wrote the song intending for the four verses of the original song to gradually build up to what I hoped would be a climactic and strong anti-war statement," Bogle said. "Missing out two and a half verses from the original four verses very much negates that intention."

Constitutional and civil rights lawyer Marc Victor answered the question "Is America a police state?" at the recent Casey Research conference in San Antonio.

Frequently in the news while defending clients against police corruption and government abuse, Victor cut right to the chase. "Let's get this straight," he said. "We're a police state. There is just no question that we're a police state."

Victor made the case that the written constitution has been easily bypassed and ignored in a number of ways, something he knows first hand after being kicked off the bench as a judge in Arizona for publicly announcing that he believes that the War on Drugs is unconstitutional.

"The only thing that matters, if you're interested in a free society," is the question, "Do you have a significant percentage of the people with whom you live that have in their hearts and minds a desire for freedom?" according to Victor.

"Today, unfortunately, we have a huge, significant amount of people who are just simply for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. That's what they like. They're for big government. They don't call it tyranny, but I would call it tyranny."

Security services arrested a student in front of the main gate of Cairo University for carrying George Orwell's novel 1984, which tackles corruption and dictatorial military regimes.

According to investigations supervised by Major General Mahmoud Farouk, head of Giza investigators, student Mohamed T., 21, who resides in the neighborhood of Warraq, was arrested Sunday while in possession of two cell phones without batteries, two USB drives, a hard disk and a copy of the novel 1984 that speaks about a dictatorial ruling party that criminalizes political rebellion.

The security says they found also notes on the student referring to the Islamic caliphate and how it should be applied in a country, according to investigations.

"They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal...We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship," Orwell says in his novel.

The Unist'ot'en Camp Resistance
With a newly elected Congress gearing up to pass Keystone, the inspiring story of the Unist'ot'en Camp, an indigenous resistance community established in northwest Canada to protect sovereign Wet'suwet'en territory and blockade up to 10 additional proposed pipelines aimed at expanding Alberta Tar Sands operations. The Uni'stot'en Clan, which has families living in cabins and traditional structures in the direct pathway of the Northern Gateway and Pacific Trails fracking lines, argues that "since time immemorial" they have governed Wet'suwet'en lands, which thus remain unceded and not subject to Canadian law "or other impositions of colonial occupation" - an argument that has been sustained in court cases, and bolstered by the camp's recent peaceable ejection of a drilling crew..
Camp leaders note that delays caused by their and other grassroots blockades are said to be costing Kinder Morgan and other companies up to $88 million a month. Though the companies have filed multi-million suits against camp leaders, they argue that Wet'suwet'en law still applies to all unceded territories - where, in fact, indigenous people probably outnumber settler people" - thus requiring the consent of the traditional governments. "Our Chiefs have said no to these projects, and no means no," says Freda Huson, Unist'ot'en Clan member and camp spokesperson. "You can't continue to bulldoze over our people. Our lands. Our final say."

The cartons of Marlboros, cans of Skoal and packs of Swisher Sweets are hard to miss stacked near the entrance of Vincent's Country Store, but maybe not for much longer: All tobacco products could become contraband if local health officials get their way.

This sleepy central Massachusetts town of 7,700 has become an improbable battleground in America's tobacco wars. On Wednesday, the Board of Health will hear public comment on a proposed regulation that could make Westminster the first municipality in the United States to ban sales of all tobacco products within town lines.

"To my knowledge, it would be the first in the nation to enact a total ban," said Thomas Carr, director of national policy at the American Lung Association. "We commend the town for doing it."

Town health agent Elizabeth Swedberg said a ban seemed like a sensible solution to a vexing problem.

"The tobacco companies are really promoting products to hook young people," she said, pointing to 69-cent bubblegum-flavored cigars, electronic cigarettes and a new form of dissolvable smokeless tobacco that resembles Tic Tac candies. "The board was getting frustrated trying to keep up with this."

Citing a report from the U.S. surgeon general, Swedberg said that if tobacco use continues unabated, 5.6 million American children who are younger than 18 today will die prematurely because of smoking. Change, she said, "has to start somewhere."

Brian Vincent would rather it not start with his family-owned grocery on Main Street. Tobacco products, he said, make up more than 5 percent of sales.

A quarter of his customers purchase tobacco, Vincent said, and while they're there, they often pick up a gallon of milk or one of the fresh-baked maple-candied bacon chocolate chip cookies that are displayed by the check-out aisle.

The idea that the United States is on the brink of a horrifying economic crash is absolutely inconceivable to most Americans. After all, the economy has been relatively stable for quite a few years and the stock market continues to surge to new heights. On Friday, the Dow and the S&P 500 both closed at brand new all-time record highs. For the year, the S&P 500 is now up 9 percent and the Nasdaq is now up close to 11 percent. And American consumers are getting ready to spend more than 600 billion dollars this Christmas season. That is an amount of money that is larger than the entire economy of Sweden. So how in the world can anyone be talking about economic collapse? Yes, many will concede, we had a few bumps in the road back in 2008 but things have pretty much gotten back to normal since then. Why be concerned about economic collapse when there is so much stability all around us?