A ship carrying radioactive materials is drifting in North Sea after a fire broke out in one of its engines and as a result a nearby oil platform has been evacuated, BBC news.

The ship, named the Parida, was carrying highly radioactive concrete waste from Scrabster to Antwerp when a large fire broke out in one of her funnels. The ship lost power and is now drifting towards the Beatrice oil platform, reports the Scottish Daily record.

As a precautionary measure, 52 people have been evacuated from the oil platform by the RAF and the Coast Gaurd. 15 people are still on board the ship.

One of the UK's most prestigious universities has installed cages over warm air vents, as a way to ward off the city's homeless sleeping on them.

The cages, which have been placed around the universities campus, completely cover the area surrounding the warm air vents near the college buildings.

Students say they are "disgusted"by the cages, saying that the move shows a lack of love and compassion for the less fortunate.

@cardiffuni how can this be acceptable in this day age. Despicable. I am ashamed. http://t.co/98pdm42uJ8
- Katharina Riekemann (@KatRiekemann) October 8, 2014

"A cold, ugly barred cage had been fixed to one of vents" Cardiff student Lewis Hopkins wrote on his blog.

"I had noticed the winter before that these vents bellowed a comforting pocket of warm air, which from time to time was occupied by the homeless. They never caused any trouble, never littered nor gathered in groups. They were just content with finding a warm place to sleep at night"

A well-known Israeli settler rabbi recently called for Israel to "cleanse" the territories it occupies of all Palestinians, according to the news website The Times of Israel.

During a visit to Israeli settlers on 30 September in the occupied West Bank, Rabbi Dov Lior said that Israel "must strive to cleanse the entire country" of Palestinians, ostensibly referring to present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

Lior, who is the chief rabbi for Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron and in theKiryat Arba settlement, was speaking at an event at Givat Oz Vgaon, an "outpost" colony recently established in the Etzion bloc of settlements in the central West Bank.

From the time it occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) in 1967, Israel has recognized 125 Jewish-only settlements that today harbor a population of an estimated 550,000 Israeli Jews, according to the human rights group B'Tselem.

Givat Oz Vgaon is one of more than one hundred smaller colonies known as "outposts" that also dot the map of the territory. Though outposts are considered illegal even under Israeli law, they are often provided with state resources, including funding, and are protected by the Israeli military.

"There was no peace and there will never be peace, not because we do not want [peace], but because there is no one to make peace with," Lior said, as reported by The Times of Israel.

Using even more racist and orientalist language, he added: "This is their character, they are for war, and the traits of a nation do not change."

He also said the Israeli government ought to force Palestinians to "return" to Saudi Arabia, employing old Israeli tropes that claim Palestinians are not indigenous to historic Palestine.

Video has surfaced appearing to show a New York City police officer taking $1,300 from a man who says he was robbed and then pepper-sprayed by the cop during a stop-and-frisk last month that ended without arrest.

The New York Daily News published exclusive video of the September 16 incident on Wednesday this week and reported that the Brooklyn district attorney's office is now investigation allegations of wrongdoing concerning the action exhibited in the clip.

Attorneys for Lamard Joye, the man who is seen on film being frisked, robbed and assaulted by the cop, told the Daily News that the footage demonstrates disturbing conduct not just on the part of the one officer, who has yet to be named by the New York Police Department, but his fellow colleagues as well amidst a series of scandals that has surrounded the agency for ages.


"One of the most disturbing things about the video is the other cops standing around watching and doing nothing to stop the wrongdoing," lawyer Robert Marinelli told the paper.

According to the NYPD, the incident started to unfold on Sept. 16 when police were dispatched to respond to a call concerning a man with a gun.

"When officers arrived at the scene, they encountered numerous people at the location. As a result of the allegations, the matter is under investigation by the Internal Affairs Bureau and CCRB," or Civilian Complaint Review Board, the NYPD told the New York Times.

As President Petro Poroshenko signed the lustration law, the trash dumping of lawmakers in Ukraine is gaining momentum. The General Prosecutor warned that there is a thin line between the so-called 'trash lustration' and lynching.

Poroshenko signed the law that establishes the legal framework for checking government officials linked to the rule of ousted President Yanukovich. The law is aimed at restoring "trust in the authorities and creating conditions for building a new system of power bodies in line with European standards," his press-service said.

Meanwhile, mob rule has gained wide popularity among Ukrainian radicals, who attack officials on the streets, beat them and throw them into rubbish cans.

The violence has sprung up due to the passiveness of law enforcement, while the increase of such incidents can lead to serious consequences, wrote Ukraine's General Prosecutor Vitaly Yaryoma in an article published by LB.UA on Thursday.

"Silent, observant position of law enforcement provokes the so-called 'trash lustrators' to further lawlessness, as it is well known, appetite comes with eating" he wrote. "However the line between 'lynching' and 'trash lustration' is very thin."

On Wednesday Odessa activists targeted the General Prosecutor himself. They set up a garbage can in front of his office in Kiev with a sign "For Yaryoma" and "lustrator."

The methods used by the US military to feed inmates in Guantánamo Bay against their will presents a long-term risk to their health, a federal court heard on Tuesday.

Steven Miles, a doctor and professor of medical ethics at the University of Minnesota, told a courtroom that lubricating the feeding tubes at Guantánamo, used on hunger-striking detainees, can cause a form of chronic inflammatory pneumonia, and questioned whether the force feeding was medically necessary.

The condition, resulting from olive oil reaching the lungs due to misplaced insertions, would be hard to detect by physicians for released or transferred detainees, as it might look on x-rays like tuberculosis or lung cancer, Miles testified, calling the olive oil lubrication "astonishing to me".

A self-described "sovereign citizen" was sentenced to four consecutive life terms in prison for raping a child.

Chadrus Brown was convicted of rape, aggravated sodomy, and child molestation in the sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl in December 2012.

A woman missing for more than two weeks in a rugged Australian rainforest has stumbled out alive after surviving a chase by a crocodile and eating small fish, officials and reports said Thursday.

Shannon Fraser, 30, went missing on September 21 near the remote Josephine Falls in Queensland state after becoming disorientated, wearing just leggings, a shirt and flip flops.

"This is a dangerous situation for our city," local alderman says
An off-duty St. Louis police officer shot and killed an 18-year-old African American man on Wednesday, prompting overnight protests in the streets of south St. Louis, just a few miles from Ferguson, where unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer in August.

Details of the shooting remained unclear on Thursday. In a briefing early Thursday morning, Police Chief Sam Dotson said the man fired three shots at the officer first. The white officer, a six-year veteran of the department who was unharmed in the incident, fired his gun 17 times.

But relatives of the man, who identified him as Vonderrit Myers Jr., said he didn't have a weapon.

"He was unarmed," Teyonna Myers, Vonderrit's cousin, told the St. Louis Dispatch. "He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It's like Michael Brown all over again."

Jackie Williams, his uncle, called his nephew's death "outright murder."

The Justice for Mike Brown Coalition held a mid-morning press conference on Thursday, in which State Senator Jamilah Nasheed reportedly said the shooting was "racial profiling gone bad" and that Myers was shot in the back of the head.

The Washington Post reports:

According to police, the officer was working for a private security company at the time, patrolling a specific neighborhood, but was in a St. Louis police uniform when he encountered three men he thought were acting suspiciously about 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. When they saw the officer make a U-turn, they fled.

...[The officer] drove through the streets after them and then left his car and chased them on foot. One of the men then turned toward the officer and approached him "in an aggressive manner," Dotson said. The suspect and the officer got into a physical altercation.

Dotson said the man then ran up a hill and fired three times at the officer before the officer returned fire. Investigators recovered a 9mm Ruger at the scene, which Dotson said was used by the 18-year-old, whom he described as "no stranger to law enforcement."

According to the St. Louis Dispatch: "Myers was scheduled to stand trial in November for unlawful use of a weapon and resisting arrest."

There are some who believe that the next great financial crash will not begin in the United States. Instead, they are convinced that a financial crisis that begins in Europe or in Japan (or both) will end up spreading across the globe and take down the U.S. too. Time will tell if they are ultimately correct, but even now there are signs that financial trouble is already starting to erupt in both Germany and Japan. German stocks have declined 10 percent since July, and that puts them in "correction" territory. In Japan, the economy is a total mess right now. According to figures that were just released, Japanese GDP contracted at a 7.1 percent annualized rate during the second quarter and private consumption contracted at a 19 percent annualized rate. Could a financial collapse in either of those nations be the catalyst that sets off financial dominoes all over the planet?

This week, the worst German industrial production figure since 2009 rattled global financial markets. Germany is supposed to be the economic "rock" of Europe, but at this point that "rock" is starting to show cracks.

And certainly the civil war in Ukraine and the growing Ebola crisis are not helping things either. German investors are becoming increasingly jittery, and as I mentioned above the German stock market has already declined 10 percent since July...

German stocks, weighed down by the economic fallout spawned by the Ukraine-Russia crisis and the eurzone's weak economy, are now down more than 10% from their July peak and officially in correction territory.

The DAX, Germany's benchmark stock index, has succumbed to recent data points that show the German economy has ground to a halt, hurt in large part by the economic sanctions levied at its major trading partner, Russia, by the U.S. and European Union as a way to get Moscow to butt out of Ukraine's affairs. The economic slowdown in the rest of the debt-hobbled eurozone has also hurt the German economy, considered the economic locomotive of Europe.

In trading today, the DAX fell as low as 8960.43, which put it down 10.7% from its July 3 closing high of 10,029.43 and off nearly 11% from its June 20 intraday peak of 10,050.98.

And when you look at some of the biggest corporate names in Germany, things look even more dramatic.