Authorities have dropped charges against a New York pair who spent nearly a month in jail after tests confirmed two kilograms of cocaine were, in fact, soap.

A state trooper pulled the couple over Nov. 13 on Interstate 78 in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, for driving 5 mph over the speed limit and hugging the side of the lane.

The trooper said he smelled marijuana, and the driver, 26-year-old Annadel Cruz, admitted that she'd smoked pot before leaving New York City.

Cruz consented to a search of the new Mercedes-Benz, and the trooper found two brick-size packages covered in clear plastic wrap and red tape in a bag stowed in the trunk.

The driver said the packages contained soap she'd made herself, but the trooper performed a field test that showed the presence of cocaine and arrested Cruz and her passenger, 30-year-old Alexander Bernstein.

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The campus policeman who shot dead a straight A student at the University of the Incarnate Word in Texas has been pictured for the first time.

Cpl. Chris Carter, an officer with the San Antonio university's 17-strong police force, shot dead Robert Cameron Redus early Friday following a traffic stop outside the student's apartment.

The news comes as one of Redus' neighbors, Mohammad Haidarasl, 22, described hearing the 23-year-old's last words before his life was tragically cut short.

'I heard (a man) say, "Oh, you're gonna shoot me?'" in a surprised voice,' Haidarasl said. Les than a minute later he said he heard four to six gunshots.

Carter was grabbing a burger for himself and his colleague when he spotted Redus' car speeding and then hit a curb, police said.

He sounded his siren and pulled the vehicle over as it drove into The Treehouse Apartments where Redus lived. Redus got out of the car and went to walk into his home.

Carter, who had nine law enforcement jobs within seven years, responded with his firearm after Redus apparently grabbed his baton and used it to strike him in the head and arm.

According to the Express-News, people who know the officer described him as 'mean.'

'He was mean,' Hugo Bustillos, a former neighbor, said. Bustillos lived above Carter's apartment for about a year. He said Carter also had run-ins with at least one other tenant over his dog before he moved away last year.

Kate Logan, the director of "Kidnapped for Christ" a documentary exposé about a brutal offshore Christian reform school, said that she lost her Christian faith in the course of making the film.

In an interview with Raw Story, Logan opened up about how her initial intent was to make a documentary praising the school, but that the façade the Escuela Caribe presented to the world quickly crumbled when she began to interact with the students. She first became interested in the school and New Horizons Youth Ministries at the age of 18 in 2004. "I was a missionary working in the area," she said. Escuela Caribe is located in the Dominican Republic, one of the most impoverished areas of the world. "And I found out about the school because you tend to notice other Americans there."

When she first heard of the program, it sounded great. "They told me the school was a place for kids that would either end up in jail, on the streets or dead, kids that were really in trouble," Logan said, "And I thought to myself, what a great program, where kids can learn about another culture and get away from bad influences back home."

A few years later, Logan was in film school and thought, "Hey, that would be a good project, to go down and make a short, kind of heartwarming documentary about these rough-and-tumble kids learning about Dominican culture together and getting therapy." "I had no idea what the school was really like or what their history was," she said.

• Police are investigating unconfirmed reports of explosives at Harvard

• Students have been urged to evacuate the Science Center, Sever Hall, Emerson Hall and Thayer Hall, which are all on the main campus

• Final exams have begun and some have now been canceled

Students at Harvard University are evacuating four campus buildings after police received unconfirmed reports of explosives on Monday morning.

Authorities urged students at the Ivy League college in Cambridge, Masachusetts to leave the Science Center and three other buildings - Sever Hall, which contains classrooms for the humanities, Emerson Hall, the philosophy building, and a freshman dorm, Thayer Hall.

Harvard issued the emergency alert for students shortly after 9am on Monday. Its Twitter account noted that there have not been any reports of explosions.

Chilling CCTV footage of the moment a six-year-old girl was led away by the hand to be raped and violently murdered has been released in Thailand.

The grainy clip, which echoes that of British toddler James Bulger being walked to his death in 1993, shows the girl, nicknamed 'Nong Cartoon', strolling with a stranger through the lobby of Bearing skytrain station in Bangkok ten days ago.

Her disappearance sparked a massive police hunt that ended yesterday with the discovery of her strangled and decomposing body in a deserted area near the city's Suklhumvit Soi 501 motorway in a case that has shaken the nation.

Within hours of the grim find, detectives arrested a 32-year-old music roadie, named only as 'Nui', 400 miles away in the northern city of Nong Khai, following a tip-off from a member of public.

Cartoon' vanished from her father's pick-up truck where she had been sleeping while he watched the end of a folk music concert in Thailand's capital on November 6.

© Francis Malasig/EPA
The aftermath of the bus crash in Manila.

At least 21 killed in suburban Manila as bus veers off highway in wet weather and crushes van

At least 21 people were killed and about 20 others injured when a passenger bus plunged from an elevated highway and fell onto a van in suburban Manila, police said.

Superintendent Elizabeth Velasquez said the bus veered off the highway and crashed onto a van passing below in suburban Paranaque city at dawn on Monday. Both drivers were killed.

TV footage showed a number of bodies strewn around the bus wreckage with police officers milling around.

The van was an unrecognizable pile of smashed white metal.

Tens of thousands of people from across Ukraine gathered in central Kiev for rival anti- and pro-government rallies on Sunday, continuing their demonstrations as US and EU officials increase their involvement in the political crisis.

US Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy have joined the opposition rally by addressing the crowd from a stage, declaring how the protests are inspiring the world.

"People of Ukraine, this is your moment. This is about you, no one else. This is about the future you want for your country. This is about the future you deserve," McCain said.

"We are here to support your just cause, the sovereign right of Ukraine to determine its own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe," he added. "The US is with you."

Murphy also urged protesters to continue the fight. "Ukraine's future stands with Europe, and the United States stands with Ukraine," he said.

Meanwhile, Polish MPs set up a tent on Independence Square on Sunday, UNIAN news reported. "I haven't felt as free as I do here on the Maidan for a very long time," MP Malgorzata Gosevska said, adding that Polish national dishes will be distributed to the protesters in the evening.

The Germantown apartment building where a retired Villanova University professor was found stabbed to death Monday night was not easily accessible to outsiders, one of the building's owners said Wednesday, suggesting that the woman might have known her killer.

Carol W. Ambruster, 69, a retired professor of astronomy, was found by her roommate in the kitchen of her apartment in the 5500 block of Wayne Avenue with a knife in her neck about 9 p.m., police said. She also had been stabbed in the chest.

Chief Inspector Scott Small said the scene indicated that there had been a violent struggle. Blood was spattered in several rooms of the four-bedroom, second-floor apartment, he said.

Ambruster's roommate, whom police did not identify, told investigators he found her dead when he returned home from running errands, said Capt. James Clark, commanding officer of the Homicide Unit.

The roommate - who was not romantically involved with Ambruster, Clark said, but was a friend who worked for the Philadelphia School District - said he had come home to the apartment building earlier in the night to retrieve his car, but did not go inside.

He told detectives that when he came back home, he found the apartment door unlocked, the lights off, and Ambruster dead in the kitchen. He told police he then ran to a neighbor, who called 911.

Nothing appeared to be stolen from the apartment, Clark said.

Detectives, who remained on the scene Wednesday looking for surveillance tape and interviewing neighbors, have not determined a motive for the killing, Clark said.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, battered since 2011 by a high-profile child sex abuse scandal, said on Sunday it had placed another five priests on administrative leave, including one accused of sexual abuse.

After a church investigation, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput determined that there was a substantiated case of sexual abuse of a minor against a 58-year-old priest identified as Michael A. Chapman, according to a church statement. It gave no further details on the allegation.

Chapman was not immediately available for comment.

The other four suspended priests were determined to have violated standards of behaviour and boundaries, the church said without elaborating. A church document defines one of the boundaries as pertaining to appropriate behaviour with children.

The church said it had already reported the allegations against the men to the Philadelphia district attorney's office, and an archdiocese spokesman said he was not aware of any criminal charges against the men.

Calls to the district attorney's office were not immediately returned on Sunday.

The move means the suspended priests can have no public ministry, administer sacraments, wear clerical garb or present themselves as priests. All the suspensions announced on Sunday have been in effect for some time, with four of them dating back to 2011.

The allegations against the five grew out of a 2011 Philadelphia grand jury report that ended with the jailing of Monsignor William Lynn, the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic Church official convicted in a child sex abuse scandal.

Lynn, the one-time secretary of the clergy for the archdiocese, was convicted last year of endangering the welfare of a child by reassigning a priest with a history of sexual abuse to a Philadelphia parish that was unaware of his past.