Workers at the World Trade Center got a scare Thursday when a crane cable snapped - and thousands of pounds of steel fell 40 stories down on a flatbed truck.

The metal beams demolished the vehicle and just missed crushing the crane operator, who was rattled by his near-death experience but otherwise unhurt.

"It's a miracle" nobody was killed, said steamfitter Mark Sherank, 45, who was in the middle of a safety meeting in nearby Building 4 when the steel fell.

"I looked outside I saw the truck t's a pancake now," he said. "A noise like that, you know something's wrong."

Another steamfitter, 43-year-old Erid Redd, said "the whole building shook."

The impact sent up a cloud of dust and "the scene was chaos," added an ironworker in Building 4.

France was proclaimed "world champion of misery" by its own press this week after a report published in the US rated the French as most likely to suffer from clinical depression. The statistics are there, but is the reality?

A World Health Organisation (WHO) report published in the US last week signalled French people as the most likely to suffer from a "major depressive episode" in their lifetimes, provoking sensational headlines among the more neurotically-inclined members of the Gallic press.

The study, which was conducted by researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook as part of the WHO's World Mental Health Survey Initiative, was published on July 26 by esteemed American journal BMC Medicine. Some 90,000 people were probed on their mental health histories in 18 low- and high-income countries. It has been touted as the first international survey of its kind.

The results are impressive - while participants from low-income countries appeared less likely to suffer from depression at some point in their life, those from high-income nations seemed far more likely to suffer. France topped the list by one percentage point.

Ten Palestinian children were killed and at least 20 were wounded on Thursday morning after an Israeli truck carrying a fuel tank crashed into the school bus transporting the kindergarten children near the Qalandia checkpoint in Ramallah.

Israelis on Facebook were celebrating the deaths of the Palestinian children, writing derogatory statements on a wall of a news post regarding the accidentThe bus carrying the children collided with the truck at an intersection in Jaba'a, overturned, and caught on fire.

Ten children immediately died, while a further eight remain in a critical condition, according to medical officials with the Palestinian Red Cross.

In modern China, few television tropes have been as popular as dramas featuring time travel to ancient dynasties and simpler days - cultivating legions of naive escapist youth longing to live out the fantasy they witness on screen. Unfortunately for one young teen, the pursuit of her fantasy led her directly into the clutches of scammers.

This particular teen, Xiao Dan, was especially enthralled with traveling back to the Qing and Tang Dynasties and was therefore quite pleased with herself when she managed to make contact with an "Immortal Sister" on the internet who claimed she could help. Over a few days of chatting online, Xiao Dan discovered that this Immortal Sister happened to know an "expert" in time travel and would be willing to help Xiao Dan realize her dreams - for a nominal fee, of course.

Later, the two met in person, and discussed the matter of paying for the time travel "technology." Xiao Dan only had 1,800RMB but Immortal Sister claimed it would be enough for one trip, and eagerly arranged the "departure" date.

A quarter of young children around the world are not getting enough nutrients to grow properly, and 300 die of malnutrition every hour, according to a new report that lays bare the effects of the global food crisis.

There are 170 million children aged under five whose development has been stunted by malnutrition because of lack of food for them and their breastfeeding mothers, and the situation is getting significantly worse, according to research by the charity Save the Children.

In Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Peru and Nigeria - countries which are the home of half of the world's stunted children - recent rises in global food prices are forcing the parents of malnourished children to cut back on food and pull children out of school to work.

According to the report, 'A Life Free from Hunger: Tackling Child Malnutrition,' a third of parents surveyed said their children routinely complain they do not have enough to eat. One in six parents can never afford to buy meat, milk or vegetables. It suggests that six out of 10 children in Afghanistan are not getting enough nutrients to avoid stunted growth.

Saudi-backed security forces in Bahrain have detained more than 100 protesters during anti-regime demonstrations across the country over the past two days.

Activists said on Thursday the Bahraini regime forces rounded up at least 100 peaceful protesters on February 14 and 15.

Some of the detainees are said to be women and that there are wounded people among those arrested.

Manama has stepped up its violent crackdown on protesters who have been calling for the downfall of the Bahraini monarchy since the start of the revolution in the Persian Gulf nation in early 2011.

In the city of Sitra, regime forces clashed with young protesters and launched night raids on homes.

Attackers stormed a federal prison in Nigeria with heavy gunfire and explosives, killing one guard and freeing 119 inmates in a new assault demonstrating the continued instability in the nation, an official said Thursday.

"The invaders came at about 7.15 p.m. (1:30 p.m. ET) yesterday and we suspected they used explosives to bring down the gate of the prison and the roof of the gate and thereafter set free 119 inmates," prison authorities spokesman Hadiza Aminu told Reuters.

The government said an investigation had begun into the attack in Koton-Karifi, a town in Kogi state just south of Nigeria's capital of Abuja.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the prison attack, nor did authorities say they had any suspects immediately in mind.

If you're in Starbucks and notice a nondescript individual paying for their coffee with cash - watch out.

According to the FBI you might have found evidence of a terrorist plot.

A series of fliers distributed to companies around the United States by the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Assistance appear to give workers and business owners exactly this advice.

The fliers, as highlighted by the miscellania blog BoingBoing, are intended to help various businesses from hobby shop owners to car rental services identify suspicious people who might be involved in terrorist activity.

This video sheds light into the nature of love, relationships, the "New Age" movement, reality-creation, quantum physics, objectivity vs. subjectivity and how it all relates to the topics of "conspiracy theories", psychopathy, and the importance of esoteric self-work.

Big rigs with bombs are secretly cruising the interstate near you. But how safe are they from terrorists or accidents?

"Is that it?" My wife leans forward in the passenger seat of our sensible hatchback and points ahead to an 18-wheeler that's hauling ass toward us on a low-country stretch of South Carolina's Highway 125. We've been heading west from I-95 toward the Savannah River Site nuclear facility on the Georgia-South Carolina border, in search of nuke truckers. At first the mysterious big rig resembles a commercial gas tanker, but the cab is pristine-looking and there's a simple blue-on-white license plate: US GOVERNMENT. It blows by too quickly to determine whether it's part of the little-known US fleet tasked with transporting some of the most sensitive cargo in existence.

As you weave through interstate traffic, you're unlikely to notice another plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer rolling along in the right-hand lane. The government plates and array of antennas jutting from the cab's roof would hardly register. You'd have no idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead with enough destructive power to level downtown San Francisco.

That's the way the Office of Secure Transportation (OST) wants it. At a cost of $250 million a year, nearly 600 couriers employed by this secretive agency within the US Department of Energy use some of the nation's busiest roads to move America's radioactive material wherever it needs to go - from a variety of labs, reactors and military bases, to the nation's Pantex bomb-assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, to the Savannah River facility. Most of the shipments are bombs or weapon components; some are radioactive metals for research or fuel for Navy ships and submarines. The shipments are on the move about once a week.