A suspected gas explosion in a pizzeria in northern Rio de Janeiro damaged 40 buildings early on Monday (19 October) and injured eight people, including one child, the Brazilian government said.

According to witnesses, the explosion took place at the Dell'Arco pizzeria. Several other commercial establishments in the area were completely destroyed. Windows and roofs of houses and apartment blocks were broken, and the glass windows of a bank situated 100m from the restaurant were completely shattered.

Rescue workers were busy in the area from the early hours of the morning, searching for any further victims amid the rubble where smoke continued to escape at noon. The fire service said it was unlikely more victims would be found, but that the rescue mission would last two to three days.

Seven people, including a nine-year-old girl, were taken to a local public hospital, and one other victim was treated at the scene of the accident. Amid the losses, local residents celebrated the fact that no lives had been taken.

"It is very painful because a lot of friends have lost everything, absolutely everything. Thank God no one was killed, some people were taken to hospital but they are ok, we have to be grateful for that, at least nobody died," said local resident, Maria de Conceicao.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere remained tense. "I heard a bang and I thought it was thunder, I thought: 'Oh, heavens a storm is coming.' I was very scared. Then I went to the door and I heard about this tragedy that just happened, and I was terrified, as is everyone," said another resident, Elianete Barbosa.

Investigations are under way into the cause of the explosion, which is suspected to have resulted from a gas leak from canisters stored in the back of the restaurant.

A New Jersey man could spend up to 18 months behind bars for doing what others are too shy to do when receiving a ticket. Joseph Greenwood is facing a felony rap for wiping "between his butt cheeks" with a police summons - and then throwing it at a cop.

The 45-year-old man is charged with deliberately subjecting a police officer, Lieutenant John Insabella, to "contact with a bodily fluid," The Smoking Gun reported.

The incident took place in June in Readington township, some 50 miles (80 km) from New York City. Greenwood was issued a summons by Insabella following his release from police custody. He had been cited for threatening assault.

Things went awry when Greenwood allegedly grabbed the document, placed it "between his butt cheeks" and started "wiping the paper in an upward and downward motion." After Greenwood was done, he threw the summons "in the direction" of Insabella, court records state. Apparently, the soiled indictment has been seized as evidence.

The charge carries a maximum 18-month jail sentence.

Two days after a deadly shooting at Florida's Zombicon, police released the first description of the suspect and videos of the attack. The shooter is a white or Hispanic male in his late teens or early 20s, who fired a semi-automatic handgun into the packed crowds at Zombicon, killing one person and wounding five, Fort Myers police said Monday. Authorities have not named the suspect.

The shooting, which erupted at an annual charity event expecting about 20,000 people, sent hundreds fleeing through the downtown streets. Videos posted on social media show hordes of costumed patrons, most of them dressed as the undead, running for their lives. The crime scene was a "nightmare" for the first police officers to the shooting due to the chaotic mass of costumed people toting fake weapons.

"At that point you had 15,000 to 20,000 suspects. Because no one knew much of anything," Fort Myers interim police Chief Dennis Eads said at a news

A man wielding a machete and yelling at drivers in Oakland ended up being struck by two separate vehicles in apparent hit-and-runs.

The incidents happened at 37th and International Boulevard in around 3 a.m., and police were called to the scene.

An eyewitness recorded video of the incidents and posted it to YouTube Monday.

"Can I get a second unit for cover, 37th-International. This call is advising a male Hispanic armed with a machete, someone is trying to run him over, and the subject with the machete is hitting the vehicle with it," police dispatchers said.

Video shows the machete wielding man being struck by a red vehicle backing into the man. Another car, which appears to be a white sedan, plowed into the man moments later.

"Units, be advised that the subject in the vehicle just hit the other subject with the machete with the vehicle," the dispatcher said.

The man with the machete was able to get up after being hit, and was arrested when police arrived.

The Oakland Police Department has not commented about the incident, what the man has been charged with, and whether the drivers of the two vehicles have been caught.

A Brazilian passenger who died after 'running amok' and biting another passenger on a flight from Lisbon to Dublin on Sunday was alleged to have been carrying 800 grams of cocaine in his stomach, with a street value of $63,000.

The man, named as John Kennedy Santos Gurjao by the Irish Times, is believed to have swallowed 80 pellets containing a substance suspected as cocaine. It is understood that one pellet burst in his stomach, causing him to suffer a violent seizure.

The 24 year-old became severely agitated half way through the two hour journey from Lisbon to the Irish capital, which was carrying 168 passengers and six crew members.

All of a sudden, he "ran amok" across the cabin and bit a fellow passenger. He was eventually restrained by the cabin crew. Gurjao became unconscious and a doctor and two nurses who were amongst the passengers rushed to help him.

Haftom Zarhum shot by security guard then attacked by mob in Beersheba after another man attacked bus in latest outbreak of violence

Israeli police are hunting members of a group of Israelis who killed an Eritrean migrant after mistakenly identifying him as a terrorist involved in an attack at a bus station.


Haftom Zarhum was shot repeatedly by a security guard then kicked and spat at by a mob after going to the southern Israeli city of Beersheba to pick up his renewed work visa. He was walking past the central bus station with a group of friends when an Israeli Bedouin armed with a gun and knife attacked a bus,killing an Israeli soldier and injuring 10 others.

In the panic surrounding the attack, Zarhum was identified as a suspected accomplice, apparently based on his appearance. The Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth was among several media organisations that left no ambiguity as to why it believed he had been shot. Monday's headline read: "Just because of his skin colour."

In events that some Israeli media called a lynching, Zarhum was shot and wounded before being shot several more times by a security guard at the bus station as he crawled along the floor. Still alive, he was then surrounded by people who cursed and spat at him, kicked him in the head and tried to hit him with a chair.

As paramedics tried to rescue him, the crowd chanted "Death to Arabs", "Arabs out!" and "Am Israel Hai" ("The people of Israel still live") and tried to stop them. "It's terrible," said a foreign ministry spokesman, Emmanuel Nahshon, one of a number of officials to comment on the killing. "It shows you what a terrible situation we are in."

When the global economy is doing well, the amount of stuff that is imported and exported around the world goes up, and when the global economy is in recession, the amount of stuff that is imported and exported around the world goes down. It is just basic economics. Governments around the world have become very adept at manipulating other measures of economic activity such as GDP, but the trade numbers are more difficult to fudge. Today, China accounts for more global trade than anyone else on the entire planet, and we have just learned that Chinese exports and Chinese imports are both collapsing right now. But this is just part of a larger trend. As I discussed the other day, British banking giant HSBC has reported that total global trade is down 8.4 percent so far in 2015, and global GDP expressed in U.S. dollars is down 3.4 percent. The only other times global trade has plummeted this much has been during other global recessions, and it appears that this new downturn is only just beginning.

For many years, China has been leading the revolution in global trade. But now we are witnessing something that is almost unprecedented. Chinese exports are falling, and Chinese imports are absolutely imploding...

Growth of exports from China has been dropping relentlessly, for years. Now this "growth" has actually turned negative. In September, exports were down 3.7% from a year earlier, the "inevitable fallout from China's unsustainable and poorly executed credit splurge," as Thomson Reuters' Alpha Now puts it. Most of these exports are manufactured goods that are shipped by container to the rest of the world.

And imports into China - a mix of bulk and containerized freight - have been plunging: down 20.4% in September from a year earlier, after at a 13.8% drop in August.

This week it was announced that Chinese GDP growth had fallen to the lowest level since the last recession, and that makes sense. Global economic activity is really slowing down, and this is deeply affecting China.

There is growing discontent in Germany over the fact that the country's government policy is dictated by the US. Germans oppose the biased attitude towards Russia and want Germany to pursue a more balanced and independent policy, German writer Christoph Herstel said.

Long-term US strategy in Europe is aimed at creating conditions for provoking conflict with Russia. In this regard, Washington is doing everything to embroil Berlin and Moscow, according to a German writer and government consultant Christoph Herstel.

However, many Germans view this course as harmful and think that it may damage German and European interests. Forty thousand German citizens have signed a petition to the federal government against the deployment of British and American bases in Germany.

"The fear among Germans is increasing every day because people are closely watching the US policy. And what do they see? Support for ISIL and the desire to start a conflict with Russia. But no one here wants this conflict, everyone wants friendly relations. This is why I developed this petition and call for the withdrawal of US and British troops from Germany on my Facebook page," Christophe Herstel told Radio Sputnik.

Alcohol destroys more lives than all other drugs combined. Why aren't policy makers wringing their hands over that?
While our current political conversations often involve concerned discussions about marijuana's imagined dangers or potential benefits (recall that the most recent Republican and Democratic debates both dedicated time to the question of pot legalization), our most problematic relationship actually seems to be with alcohol. America, it seems, has a drinking problem—and studies indicate it is only getting worse. There are real reasons, in addition to the pressing issue of mass incarceration and the failure of the drug war, for us to start thinking seriously about the cost of our increasing reliance on alcohol when we consider the ravages of drug use. Particularly since the toll of alcohol, though often left out of that conversation, actually outpaces those of every other legal and illicit drug combined.

Drinking is on the rise in the U.S. Precipitously. A study released this year from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation finds that heavy drinking among Americans rose 17.2 percent between 2005 and 2012. Not only are Americans drinking more, but in an increasing number of cases, they're consuming those drinks in rapid succession. The same study found that binge drinking increased 8.9 percent nationally during the same time frame. In 2012, 8.2 percent of Americans were heavy drinkers, meaning they had one drink per day on average over the course of a month. An additional 18.3 percent of Americans that year fit the description of binge drinkers, defined by the CDC as men who have five or more drinks and women who have four or more drinks in a single drinking session.

It's women, by the way, who have largely driven these increases. In the years between 2005 and 2012, binge drinking increased just 4.9 percent among men, but jumped 17.5 percent among women. The reason for such a significant rise is likely due to changing social mores, according to Tom Greenfield, scientific director at the Alcohol Research Group, who spoke withKaiser Health News. Men still drink more than women do, but women have narrowed the gap in recent years.

Binge drinking, always a favorite sport on college campuses, has also become more prevalent. A 2013 study from the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital found that women in college binge-drink more often than male students. "It's not that the percentage of young people is increasing alcohol use," George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol, told NBC News. "It's that bingeing is more intense."

Seven percent of slaves live in North America or the EU, but the problem is global. We must invest in protocols that work to fight trafficking and exploitation.

As a child growing up in one of Brazil's poorest regions, I was used to seeing well-off families take in girls from poorer ones to come live in their homes and be brought up as one of their own. This was seen as an act of kindness. It was only much later that I came to see it for what it really was: these young girls, who would do all the domestic chores all day long in return only for food and a roof over their heads, were in fact modern slaves.