Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable British pensioners receive home state care that is so cursory and inadequate they are forced to choose between eating and being assisted to the bathroom, a Freedom of Information (FoI) request reveals.

An overwhelming 75 percent of local authorities in England offer pensioners visits that last a mere 15 minutes, the FoI request indicates. The number of councils booking care workers for these "flying care" visits has shot up 5 percent in the past year.

Britain's health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said the sobering statistics revealed a situation that was simply "unacceptable." Alluding to dangers associated with cost cutting in an era of outsourcing, Hunt said there are "too many examples of councils buying rushed care visits."

Councils warn crippling funding cuts are to blame for the situation, and have jeopardized their capacity to maintain basic services. They say they need an extra £400 million if they are to provide adequate services to those who rely on them.

Outsourced and unaccountable

In a climate of rampant privatization, UK public services are increasingly outsourced. In the case of state care, 90 percent of such services for elderly and disabled Britons are now offered by private companies or charities.

Some 110 councils across Britain are currently paying for care workers to conduct these 15-minute visits.

Severely criticized, the whistle-stop visits generally occur daily or every two days. Critics warn the rushed timespan is simply too short to allow pensioners and the disabled the time needed for adequate care.

Frustrated care workers say they don't have sufficient time to dress, feed and wash their clients and make sure they have taken any medication they depend on.

Two police officers sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn were shot at point-blank range and killed on Saturday afternoon by a man who, officials said, had traveled to the city from Baltimore vowing to kill officers. The suspect then committed suicide with the same gun, the authorities said.

The officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were in the car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the shadow of a tall housing project when the gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, walked up to the passenger-side window and assumed a firing stance, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said. Mr. Brinsley shot several rounds into the heads and upper bodies of the officers, who never drew their weapons, the authorities said.

Mr. Brinsley, 28, then fled down the street and onto the platform of a nearby subway station, where he killed himself as officers closed in. The police recovered a silver semiautomatic handgun, Mr. Bratton said.

Mr. Brinsley, who had a long rap sheet of crimes that included robbery and carrying a concealed gun, is believed to have shot his former girlfriend near Baltimore before traveling to Brooklyn, the authorities said. He made statements on social media suggesting that he planned to kill police officers and was angered about the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases.


Authorities in Baltimore sent a warning that Mr. Brinsley had made these threats, but it was received in New York at essentially the same time as the killings, officials said.

The shootings, the chase, the suicide of Mr. Brinsley and the desperate but failed bid to save the lives of the officers - their uniforms soaked in blood - turned a busy commercial intersection on the Saturday before Christmas into a scene of pandemonium.

Demonstrators gather outside Ukrainian parliament to protest government measures to arrest the country's financial crisis.

A crowd of thousands gathered on Tuesday outside the parliament building in Kiev to show their opposition to cost-cutting measures proposed by the government of Ukraine.

"First of all, they want to pass a budget, with which the majority of people gathered here today are dissatisfied, and they want to extend the powers of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine," Vitaly Yahno, the coordinator of the protest told the Ukrainian UNN news website. "And our task - is to ensure that the laws are passed, which we submitted."

"The 'Financial Maidan' is demanding the passing of legislation which has already been registered, but they [the authorities] don't want to put them on the agenda," Yahno explained.

The protest site on Tuesday stretched from the immediate boundary of the parliament building to the nearby Mariinski Park, and also blocked traffic on the road between the park and parliament building. According to a correspondent from RIA Novosti, on Tuesday afternoon around two and a half thousand protestors were assembled in largely peaceful protest, while the perimeter of the parliament building was guarded by several hundred security officers, including those of the National Guard.

The FBI division of the US city of Memphis warned on Monday that Islamic State may explode the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge in the United States through an active member operating in Tennessee.

The Islamic State (IS) extremist group may explode the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge in the United States through an active member operating in Tennessee, the FBI division of the US city of Memphis warned on Monday, citing an anonymous informant.

"According to an anonymous complainant, as of December 2014, ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, IS] instructed an ISIS [IS] member, a presumed USPER [US person] in Memphis, with a direct order to blow up the Memphis-Arkansas bridge on an unknown date, activating ISIS terror cells in the United States," the FBI warning said.

A provocative public service announcement released by a San Francisco-based production company encourages children to put themselves at risk and commit a slew of crimes by stealing their parents' guns from home and turning them in at school.

In the anti-gun ad, published Dec. 13 by Sleeper 13 Productions, a boy who appears to be in his early teens is shown walking up the stairs of his home and wandering into his mother's bedroom.

The boy is shown opening the drawer to his mother's dresser, where a handgun is hidden.

The boy takes the gun from the dresser and leaves the room. The ad then flashes to his school. Sitting in a classroom, the boy ventures up to his teacher's desk after the rest of his classmates have left.

The tension building in the scene breaks, and the boy produces the gun from his backpack, slamming it on his startled teacher's desk.

From the outside America may seem to be a land of endless optimism and confidence. But could it be in danger of falling apart?

An increasing number of Americans seem to think so, and they're preparing for the end.

They call themselves preppers. Mainstream suburban Americans hoarding supplies and weapons while leading otherwise perfectly normal lives.

Video: Prepping For The End Of The World

"The Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don't have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power. Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are going to perish together as fools." - Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Christmas Eve sermon, 1967

As a child, my Christmas wish list came right out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue - toys, board games, bikes, action figures, etc. My parents, like so many in their day, belonged to the working-class poor, so while I never lacked for the necessities of life, many of the items on my wish list never came to be. Even so, I was no worse off for it.

I wish the same could be said of those still unfulfilled items on my adult Christmas wish list. Each year, I wish for the same things - an end to war, poverty, hunger, violence and disease - and each year, I find the world relatively unchanged. Millions continue to die every year, casualties of a world that places greater value on war machines and profit margins than human life.

I've seen enough of the world in my 68 years to know that wishing is not enough. We need to be doing. It's not possible to solve all of the world's problems right away. For most people, putting an end to world hunger, poverty, disease and the police state may seem too insurmountable a task to even tackle. But as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there are practical steps each of us can take to hopefully get things moving in the right direction. Here's what I would suggest for a start:

Tone down the partisan rhetoric, the "us" vs. "them" mentality. Politicians frequently perpetuate a "good" versus "evil," "us" versus "them" rhetoric which pits citizen against citizen and allows the politicians to advance their personal, political agendas. Instead of wasting time and resources on political infighting, which gets us nowhere, it's time Americans learned to work together to solve the problems before us. The best place to start is in your own communities, neighbor to neighbor. After all, at the end of the day, it makes no difference what politician you voted for - Republican, Democrat or otherwise - politics will never be the answer. Politicians have mastered the art of creating dissension, but they're all the same. Grassroots activism is the only kind of change you can count on.

Turn off the TV and tune into what's happening in your family, in your community and your world. Read your local newspaper. Attend a school board or city council meeting. Get involved with a nonprofit that works in your community. Whatever you do, reduce your intake of mindless television and entertainment news. The only reality programming worth taking notice of is the one playing in your home and community

Cunning fraudsters have conned the Ukraine Central Bank branch in Odessa into buying $300,000 worth of gold which turned out to be lead daubed with gold paint.

"A criminal case has been opened and we are now carrying out an investigation to identify those involved in the crime," a spokesman for the Odessa police force is quoted by Vesti.

The news was first reported by Odessa's State Ministry of Internal Affairs.

A preliminary investigation suggests the gang had someone working for them inside the bank that forged the necessary paperwork to allow the sale of the fake gold bullion. It's also been discovered that bank staff were not regularly checked when entering or exiting the premises.

Since the discovery, the National Bank no longer buys precious metal over the counter, as it cannot be sure of its authenticity, says the First Deputy Head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Aleksandr Pisaruk.

Police departments across big cities in the US are warning officers to take extra care after a spate of cop killings. Officers are advised to wear bulletproof vests and not make inflammatory posts on social media amid increased fears for their safety.

A message from the New York Police Department (NYPD) union told cops that they should respond to every radio call with two cars, "no matter what the opinion of the patrol supervisor," while they should not make arrests "unless absolutely necessary," AP reported.

Meanwhile, President of the Detectives Union Michael Palladino also warned of the dangers facing officers, stating, "Detectives assigned to Precinct Detective Squads and similarly-sized units should operate in teams of three when possible until we better assess the threat that exists against us," in an email sent to officers.

The 37-year-old Cairns mother accused of murdering eight children had recently turned to religion and banned technology from her home.

Raina Mersane Ina Thaiday, who remains under police guard in hospital, had taken to giving fiery sermons in the street and had cut the power to her home and threw away the television, neighbours told News Corp.

She warned locals not to use their mobile phones because they were the "work of the Devil" and posted a handwritten sign on a front window of her public housing home that read: "No alcohol, cigarette, and drunken people allowed in this area".

Others said the house, where she is accused of killing seven of her own children and a niece in a frenzied knife attack last Friday, was often the scene of wild all-night parties.

Meanwhile, preliminary autopsy reports are detailing the horrific injuries sustained by some of the eight children in the knife attack.

It is alleged some suffered multiple stab wounds, with one child sustained at least 12 knife wounds to the front and 10 more on the back, according to pathology results.